Santa Clara County's top lawyer has sued a Cupertino restaurant called Liang's Village, alleging its owners spent more than a decade dodging court-ordered wage judgments owed to their own employees — and now the county wants to make them pay up to $800,000 for it.
The lawsuit, filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court, accuses Liang's Village and its owners of owing more than $200,000 in unpaid wages, according to The Mercury News. County lawyers say the trouble traces back to 2013, when the California Labor Commission cited the restaurant for failing to pay overtime and minimum wage and for not providing itemized wage statements, leading a Santa Clara County Superior Court judge to impose judgments totaling nearly $93,000 that year. Liang's Village simply ignored them, per the same report.
That original $90,000 judgment has since grown with interest to more than $200,000, the newspaper reports. Under the lawsuit, tripled penalties on that debt could total $600,000, which would be split between seven impacted employees and the state labor commissioner's office — pushing the owners' total potential liability to roughly $800,000.
A Pattern of Dissolving and Reincorporating
The county's case leans heavily on what it describes as a corporate shell game. After the labor commission issued a stop-work order to Liang's Village in 2019, the owners closed Liang's Kitchen Cupertino, Inc. less than two weeks later, the outlet notes. They then registered a new entity, Jaje Foods, Inc., which continued operating the same restaurant at the same location under the same Liang's Village name.
According to the lawsuit, the successor corporation listed several of the same family members as managers in the same roles and used the same menu in its county food facility permit application. County lawyers argue Jaje Foods is liable for the outstanding judgments as the previous corporation's legal successor, and that the switch violated unfair competition laws.
Santa Clara County Counsel Tony Lopresti said workers whose wages were stolen over a decade ago still have not been made whole. “As civil prosecutors, we’re going to go after businesses in court if they engage in that kind of fraudulent activity to avoid paying workers,” Lopresti said, according to the newspaper's report, adding that he hopes the lawsuit will discourage local businesses from failing to pay unpaid-wage judgments.
The lawsuit names as defendants Ivan Cheng-Chi Liang, Austin Liang, Jessica Liang, Erica Liang, and Janine Lee, along with Mama Liang's Prepared Food Service. It seeks an injunction stopping the business from continuing to violate labor law, along with civil penalties, attorneys fees, and other penalties. Liang's Village did not respond to a request for comment, per the same account.
Why the Penalties Suddenly Got So Much Bigger
The scale of the potential payout stems from Senate Bill 261, signed into law in October 2025 and effective January 1, 2026, which allows California courts and prosecutors to impose civil penalties equal to up to three times an outstanding unpaid wage judgment if an employer fails to satisfy it within 180 days, according to Fisher Phillips. The Santa Clara County Counsel's Office says its case against Liang's Kitchen Cupertino represents one of the first enforcement actions in California brought under the new treble-penalty law, according to the Santa Clara County Counsel's Office.
The county's ability to bring this case directly, rather than waiting on state officials, comes from Assembly Bill 594, which took effect January 1, 2024, and gave local public prosecutors — including county counsels and district attorneys — independent statutory authority to prosecute civil or criminal Labor Code violations and enforce unpaid wage judgments, per Holland & Knight. That authority got a financial boost in July 2025, when the California Labor Commissioner's Office awarded a $750,000 Workers' Rights Enforcement grant to the Santa Clara County Counsel's Office, funding dedicated legal personnel and audit resources for local wage theft prosecutions, according to the California Department of Industrial Relations.
A Decade of Delay Is Common, Not Rare
Ruth Silver Taube, who works at Santa Clara University's Katharine & George Alexander Community Law Center, said dissolving and reincorporating is a common tactic used by unscrupulous employers to dodge wage debts. That pattern helps explain why so many wage judgments across California go unpaid for years.
State enforcement data analyzed by the California State Auditor found that only about 14 percent of employers who received formal court judgments in wage claim cases in 2017 had paid their workers in full five years later, according to CalMatters. A separate May 2024 audit found the California Labor Commissioner's Office faced a backlog of 47,000 unresolved wage claims and took a median of 854 days — more than six times longer than the 135-day statutory limit — to issue decisions, according to the California State Auditor.
Wage theft in the local restaurant industry appears widespread beyond this single case. A September 2025 joint study by UC Berkeley's Labor Occupational Health Program and the Santa Clara County Office of Labor Standards Enforcement found that 60 percent of surveyed restaurant workers in the county had experienced at least one form of wage theft on the job. The county opened that labor standards office in September 2019, after research revealed Santa Clara County had the highest per-capita rate of wage theft claims in California, according to San Jose Spotlight.
The financial toll extends well beyond any single restaurant. A May 2024 study by Rutgers University's School of Management and Labor Relations, analyzing Census Bureau data, estimated that minimum wage violations across four major California metro areas — including San Jose and San Francisco — cost workers between $2.3 billion and $4.6 billion annually from 2014 to 2023.
Liang's Village previously operated at 19772 Stevens Creek Boulevard before relocating and making way for a ramen chain to move into that space. Whether Santa Clara County can successfully enforce personal liability or seize assets across the named family members and successor entities remains to be seen as the case moves through the courts.
