[Disclosure: Brewery Bhavana has been a client of GBH’s brand studio, a separate team based in Chicago.]
This month, former employees of renowned Raleigh, North Carolina brewery and restaurant Brewery Bhavana, and its sister restaurant Bida Manda, have alleged a pervasive culture of racism, incidents of sexual assault, and ongoing sexual harassment within the company. On June 9, the company launched a third-party investigation led by an employment attorney.
One of the owners, Vansana Nolintha, has stepped down from his managerial role and announced June 10 he’d begin the process of divesting his ownership stake. The move comes after several former employees say Nolintha sexually abused and harassed them, and ignored misconduct by other managers. The company’s former beverage director, Jordan Hester, has also left following accusations of sexual abuse and harassment. (Hester did not respond to requests for comment.) Former employees say Bida Manda’s general manager, Kate Shields, made a racist statement in February to her subordinate employee, who is Black, by addressing him as her 'slave.' She was allowed to resign.
These stories are shocking on the face of it, and are also entirely at odds with the national reputation Brewery Bhavana and Bida Manda enjoyed. Named one of Bon Appétit’s 10 Best New Restaurants in the country in 2017, Brewery Bhavana was considered a role model for diversity, inclusion, and community-building within the beer industry. (Good Beer Hunting hosted a panel on inclusion called “Within Reach” during the 2018 Great American Beer Festival that included Nolintha.) Nolintha was also a semifinalist for a James Beard Award in 2018; James Beard Award winner and fellow Raleigh chef Ashley Christensen publicly called for him to step down from his restaurants this week. Among staff and the larger hospitality industry in Raleigh, though, the abuse was something of an open secret.
The next few weeks and months will determine whether the company, and its purported mission to offer “communal beer experiences,” are salvageable.
The allegations that became public over the first week of June describe a “toxic” company culture that encouraged employees’ emotional vulnerability and created a family-like atmosphere, then took advantage of that trust. Before temporarily closing due to COVID-19, Bida Manda and Brewery Bhavana collectively employed about 200 people between full-time and part-time staff, yet former employees say there was no formal human resources contact. Employees were expected to bring concerns to the same managers who ignored or perpetrated abuse.
Abuse is, unfortunately, common in restaurants. More than 60% of restaurant workers in the U.S. report experiencing sexual violence on the job.
“The biggest priority right away is trying to establish a communication channel for everyone to bring anything to light,” says Patrick Woodson, director of brewing operations and co-owner of Brewery Bhavana. (Woodson has no ownership in Bida Manda.) “This is about a commitment to helping our team reclaim the vision and spirit of what Bhavana is and was and all they’ve worked to achieve.”
Nolintha provided a statement via email that read: “I wholeheartedly believe both restaurants will continue to contribute to this community. To assure change, I will have no role in the companies' future. I am taking a hard look at my actions and commit to learning from my mistakes. […] I'm truly sorry for the pain I have caused.”
It’s currently unclear what the path forward is for the company. Some former employees believe the restaurants and breweries can chart a new path without Vansana Nolintha and Jordan Hester. Others say the abuse was too widespread and damaging.
Former employees began to publicly share their stories on May 31, when Brewery Bhavana posted on Instagram in support of Black voices following the murder of George Floyd. In the comments of that post—since disabled—commenters asked what the restaurant planned to do to address racism within the company.
On June 5, Bida Manda’s owners, brother and sister Vansana and Vanvisa Nolintha, posted a statement to Instagram—since deleted—acknowledging a “racist incident” in early February. (The Nolinthas are immigrants from Laos whose cultural background has been at the center of the menu and story of Brewery Bhavana and Bida Manda.) The post states the two “failed to protect our staff.” The incident in question was when Shields, a former manager, called a Black employee, her subordinate, a slave.
“You can be a well-intentioned, nice, kind person and still display racist behavior. It’s everybody’s responsibility to dig deep and dismantle their own personal racisms and bias,” Shields says. “This is the time to hold up the voices of the victims and we need to focus on the victims.”
These employees—some of whom have requested anonymity because they are still working in Raleigh’s hospitality industry—say Shields was not immediately disciplined, even after other staff raised concerns about the incident to Vansana Nolintha. For days after, the Black employee and Shields continued to work together. It was two weeks before the company held an all-staff meeting that included Shields and the employee. The employee reportedly walked out of the meeting.
“The man who was called a slave was harassed daily by that manager,” says “Alex,” a former employee who worked at Bida Manda for six years and asked that her real name not be used. “No one stepped in and intervened.”
Alex says the incident was not out of step with a company culture that outwardly promoted diversity, but failed to hire many Black people specifically. She says Nolintha generally seemed inept at handling issues of race, telling a staff retreat last year that he “didn’t see color.” Former employees say that while the accusations of sexual misconduct at Brewery Bhavana and Bida Manda have received the most attention, racism within the company was equally damaging.
“The fact that you are hearing [fewer] personal stories of racism speaks to the lack of representation of Black people at the restaurants and especially front-of-house,” former employee Patricia Heath, who worked as a bartender at Brewery Bhavana and a server at Bida Manda between 2013-2017, said via email. “It should be no surprise to you that they have not had any positions of leadership in that organization.”
Former employees also allege that Vansana Nolintha repeatedly sexually harassed and abused male and female employees.
Brandon Edwards, an employee of Bida Manda and Brewery Bhavana between 2016-2019, says Nolintha’s inappropriate contact with him began soon after he started working there. Edwards says because “the work culture was so normalized to be very affectionate and very unusual,” and because he was only 21 years old at the time, he didn’t immediately recognize Nolintha’s advances as problematic. He now characterizes them as abusive.
People employed in the restaurant industry are frequently subject to such harassment and abuse. 10% of American workers are employed in restaurants. That’s 14.7 million workers, half of whom are under the age of 28, and six million of whom are women. Two-fifths of all federal sexual harassment complaints come from the restaurant industry alone.
Edwards says that in advance of a 2016 overnight staff retreat to Ocean Isle Beach, North Carolina, employees who were attending were assigned characters from the HBO show “Game of Thrones.” Jordan Hester, the former beverage director, assigned Edwards and Nolintha the show’s two gay characters, who are in a sexual relationship in the series.
A few days later, Edwards says Nolintha sent him a text message containing a photo of the two characters about to have sex with a caption that read “What happens at Ocean Isle lol.” Edwards responded to some of the texts, in one case identifying which character he hoped to be in the scenario. Edwards says a subsequent text message from Nolintha indicated that Nolintha would be on top during sex because he was Edwards’ boss. A few days before the retreat, Edwards and Nolintha shared a consensual kiss at Nolintha’s apartment; Nolintha then grabbed Edwards’ crotch. Edwards describes himself as intoxicated at the time and says he subsequently called an Uber home. He continued to feel confused about his relationship with Nolintha during and after the retreat.
“It was attention from my boss. It felt very special,” he says.
Other former employees confirm Edwards’ account that the annual retreats included activities and discussions that encouraged crying and sharing traumatic stories, prompted by questions like: “What is something you want to be more vulnerable about?” Edwards says this emotional manipulation, combined with the uneven power dynamic between him (a staff member) and Nolintha (the owner), complicated his work. He says constantly seeking approval from Nolintha made him confused and unhappy.
“I definitely see how effective they were at creating this culture that they were able to then prey on,” he says. “I kept giving him the benefit of the doubt and thinking I was complicit. But I’m realizing it was abusive.”
Heath says it was expected that employees would socialize together, with managers, and with Nolintha outside of work.
“[At the retreats], there were jokes about consent, like, ‘Oh man, we don’t want a lawsuit,’” Heath says.
Former employees say Nolintha’s pattern of sexual advances and harassment was well known. Alex says Nolintha once non-consensually grabbed her butt in the middle of service, and was generally “touchy feely” with staff, especially after he’d been drinking. She says she saw him grab butts, crotches, and give unwanted massages. Several former employees confirmed Nolintha initiated sexual relationships with subordinates. Nolintha’s identity as a gay, non-White man contributed to some employees’ discomfort reporting harassment.
“He’s incredibly charismatic. It seems like he’s just fun and silly and all of his little quirks are charming and add to it,” says Alex, adding that to her knowledge, no one from management ever spoke to him about it. “It was like, ‘He’s an immigrant; he’s trying.’ That’s what a lot of it felt like.”
Because it was unclear whether all of his family knew about his sexuality, Alex says, staff was reluctant to out him by reporting complaints publicly.
Speaking to Raleigh news station WRAL, former Bhavana bartender Justin Moretto claims when he reported unwanted touching and harassment by Nolintha to other managers, he “was immediately rebuked saying that he as a White, straight man could not be experiencing harassment.”
In conversations with GBH, former employees unanimously agreed that other managers ignored complaints about Nolintha. If employees had complaints, they were expected to share them with Nolintha, the very person harassing them. There was no third-party option they felt they could turn to. They say this was one component of the ineffectual process by which human resources complaints were lodged.
“When all of those people are much closer and have more contact with Van, there’s no way they didn’t know,” says Sara Dye, who managed the bookstore located within and owned by Brewery Bhavana from February-December 2018. “There was a manager who made a joke to me that ‘It’s not a Saturday night if you don’t go out drinking and see Van’s dick.’”
The company’s former beverage director, Jordan Hester, has also been accused of sexually harassing and abusing employees. Former employees describe a pattern of behavior in which Hester objectified, verbally abused, and took advantage of female employees. They say he deliberately hired and trained young women, promised to help them advance their careers in exchange for sexual contact, and then threatened them to keep them from speaking out.
Other allegations of a potential rape in 2007 (unrelated to employees at Bhavana or Bida Manda) and non-consensual recording of sexual activity have also surfaced, but are uncorroborated at this time.
“[Hester’s] M.O. is that he comes across as a feminist and a sympathizer for women and our struggles. He uses that to get into your head a little bit and make you really vulnerable and prey upon you,” Alex says. “I am lucky that I was only sexually harassed and wasn’t sexually assaulted.” Alex alleges Hester made frequent sexual comments about her body while she was working, and invited her on a trip to the Tales of the Cocktail industry event in New Orleans. She declined.
“He told me I should go because if we shared a bed, I’d be able to throw him off before he sleeps with me,” she says.
A female former Bida Manda bartender, Nicole Bivins, who did attend Tales of the Cocktail with Hester, alleges he demanded she show him her breasts and sexually assaulted her while in New Orleans.
Both Alex and Patricia Heath further describe a sexual relationship between Hester and another former coworker. They say Hester bragged to them about having sex with this woman, who Alex and Heath describe as being too unwell during this period to consent. Heath says she asked Hester not to discuss the relationship with her, but he persisted over her objections.
“I felt like, ‘You’re not telling me a story of sexual conquest, you’re telling me a story of rape,’” Heath says.
Alex says, and other former employees confirm, that Hester intimidated employees to stop them from speaking out. He told them that if they complained about him publicly, he’d lose his job and not be able to support his child.
Even when employees did bring concerns about Hester to Nolintha and other managers, he wasn’t reprimanded.
“You’re told this person isn’t going anywhere so you’d better figure out a way to deal with it,” Alex says. “You get edged out. You don’t get shifts. You don’t make the money.”
Another former employee confirms that Nolintha and Bida Manda general manager Whitney Wilson were aware of complaints about Hester. Both employees say they felt Nolintha and Wilson were protecting Hester, perhaps out of friendship and a desire to defend the company’s reputation. Nolintha allegedly told employees that all complaints about Hester were to be directed to him and that speaking to other managers about it was “inappropriate” and could get them fired.
The alleged racist and harassing behavior at Brewery Bhavana and Bida Manda was compounded by what former employees describe as a lack of functional human resources. Patrick Woodson says he was told at a managers’ meeting more than a year ago that the company had hired an HR consultant. He says he only learned on June 7 that this person was never paid or officially retained.
Former employees say they were directed to discuss HR issues with their managers or Nolintha. They say this chain of command didn’t work, because those managers and Nolintha were themselves perpetrators of this behavior.
“There’s so few managers […] who weren’t problematic in one way or another,” Edwards says.
He recalls a time that he wanted to bring a complaint against a fellow employee who made an offensive joke (separate from Kate Shields' “slave” comment). The manager with whom he was supposed to lodge this complaint was dating that very employee. When Edwards complained about the joke anyway, he says the manager laughed in his face.
“That made me not want to tell my story anymore and it points to how ineffective any attempt at HR was,” Edwards says.
Sara Dye had a similarly disheartening experience when she reported to Nolintha that she was groped by another employee in July 2018. Dye says she was on her dinner break from the bookstore and was eating at Bida Manda when she helped a host escort a drunk Brewery Bhavana employee out of Bida Manda. The employee in question was not working that day.
While the host, Dye, and the employee waited for his Uber to arrive, Dye says the employee twice grabbed her breast and buttocks and tried to kiss her, despite her telling him no and pushing his hand away.
According to Dye, Nolintha was at the restaurant that night, and Dye immediately reported the employee’s behavior to him. Nolintha told Dye he would talk to the employee himself, and instructed her not to tell anyone else about the incident. In an email Nolintha sent that night to staff that included mention of the employee being escorted out of the restaurant, Dye says Nolintha asked staff to “respect the confidentiality of this email.”
The next day, Dye says the employee texted her to apologize, saying Nolintha had given him her phone number. Dye said she never gave Nolintha permission to share her number and that she felt the employee’s contact was invasive. When Dye next spoke to Nolintha, she says she expressed her frustration and mentioned the experience was triggering for her, as she’d been assaulted and raped in the past.
“I really stressed to Van: We need an HR person,” Dye says. “There needs to be a safe space for people to talk about things that isn’t you. He was very transparent about it, saying, ‘I don't know how to handle this. I’m not an HR person.’ I was like, exactly, that’s what we need—an HR person.”
Alex describes an informal employee newsletter regularly sent out by one of the head servers at Bida Manda to other staff. Just a few months ago, Alex says the newsletter had a small cartoon captioned: “Everyone say hi to our new HR representative,” below a picture of an empty chair and desk.
Because they were discouraged from critiquing management or sharing complaints with anyone besides their direct managers, employees say they didn’t expect change. Servers and bartenders at the company report they made better money at Bida Manda and Brewery Bhavana than they would have most anywhere else, so they were reluctant to quit.
Given both venues’ popularity and place of esteem in the hospitality industry, the questions looming for Bida Manda and Brewery Bhavana are complex. When asked whether the company can make amends, former employees are divided. Some say they see a future for the company without Hester and Nolintha; others say the abuse was too pervasive to make reform possible.
The overall hospitality and brewing industries, too, are asking how such conditions could exist in a company that touted its community focus and its inclusive atmosphere. How could national recognition and local esteem for the company’s leaders (Nolintha is still listed on Leadership North Carolina’s website) mask reportedly abusive and degrading conditions for employees? Alex, the former employee, says there was a disconnect between outsiders who praised the restaurants and employees who were miserable.
“It’s the exact American dream story that people want to hear, and no one wants to take that away from a gay immigrant,” Alex says. “No one wants to shatter that narrative. But people are really getting hurt and dehumanized throughout the experience.”
Both Bida Manda and Brewery Bhavana are closed to the public because of COVID-19, though the actual brewing facility—located a mile from the restaurants—did not close. Patrick Woodson stresses the independence of the brewing operations, saying that he had little to no involvement in management of the restaurant and taproom. At least one Raleigh beer shop has already announced plans to stop carrying Brewery Bhavana’s beers.
A statement issued June 9 by Woodson and Vanvisa Nolintha promises to set wrongs right: “Our commitment to our employees, guests, and the community is that we will follow the facts wherever they lead, hold the appropriate persons accountable, and take all the actions necessary to restore full confidence in our restaurants, Bida Manda and Brewery Bhavana.”
For many of the staff involved, and some of its customers, the company will need to prove unequivocally that the policies it enacts privately are the same ones it’s always committed to publicly.
Update, 7/2/20: Police arrested former Brewery Bhavana and Bida Manda beverage director Jordan Hester on July 1 on charges stemming from his alleged secret recordings of himself having sex with women, WRAL reports. The charges are felony secret peeping and installing/using a photo device in a room.
Words by Kate Bernot