One major point that workers have brought up is that there was not enough credit or compensation given to chefs of color who were responsible for some of the creations that made the restaurant famous. Ria Barbosa helped to open Sqirl in 2012 as chef de cuisine, and she stayed on at the restaurant until 2014. She had no job description — she’d answered a Craigslist ad — and hadn’t signed an NDA “or any documents saying ‘any creations were the property of Sqirl,’” she says. Yet it’s many of her house recipes, which she willingly handed over when she left the job, that are present in Koslow’s first cookbook without attribution.

In a statement to Refinery29, Koslow takes issue with the claim that she never gave proper credit to her staff. “The hype around Sqirl eventually touched everything about Sqirl. But I never wanted that spotlight all to myself. Every opportunity I got, I shared credit with the Sqirl team: in press, on social media, and by nominating cooks for awards,” she says. Javier Ramos, once chef de cuisine, for example, won a Rising Star Chef honor from Starchefs in 2017, and numerous pastry chefs had their work featured in the press.

She also notes that the hype surrounding the restaurant was to everyone’s benefit. “At the same time, that hype, with its drawbacks, served everyone at Sqirl: I had access to serious cooking talent, and those cooks got lots of eyes on their work. And they deserved it all,” she says. “But the truth is that this conversation is a trap when you start talking about 'who exactly decided on a pesto over a sauce' or 'how exactly did Sqirl's way of cooking bacon evolve over time'? Anyone who has ever worked in a collaborative kitchen knows that splitting those hairs is a bad faith exercise.”

But it was also her management Balo Orozco, who worked in catering at Sqirl starting in 2016 and took the chef de cuisine position at Onda last year, says the mold was only the tip of the iceberg — there were roaches not taken care of, and the ice machine was placed near the flour storage and would constantly grow mold itself. While these issues were repeatedly brought up to Koslow, nothing was done about them, indicating an attitude of hostile neglect which extended to how she treated staff requests for meetings.