Berkeleyside43%
Former Bobby G’s employees and contractors point to pattern of missed payments and poor communication 9%
By Sage Ríos Mace9%
7/30/2026, 2:00:00 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 26 faulty reasoning types, including Anecdotal, Availability Heuristic, and Fundamental Attribution Error, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 21.2% saturation with 358 hits. Analysis detected 1,931 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,688 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 21.3% and a BS Rank of 9% (23,248 of 25,462 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 91.30% of the article peer group.
UC Berkeley alum Calvin Miller was first drawn to Bobby G’s Pizzeria for its New York-style pizza and wide selection of draught beers.
Before long, Bobby G’s became his neighborhood haunt for Sunday night NFL games, wings, and the occasional Wednesday trivia night, which was popular among college students.
It was shortly after getting his first paycheck that the problems started.
“From that moment on, everything went downhill,” Miller said in an interview with Nosh, describing a pattern of delayed paychecks and poor communication about the late payments from restaurant owners Gurpreet Kaur and Gurmukh “Jay” Bansel Singh.
Miller is not the only former employee of Bobby G’s to allege similar experiences.
In March, the restaurant’s former social media coordinator, Jennifer Baquing, filed a lawsuit in the Alameda County Superior Court alleging wage violations, failure to reimburse business expenses and employee misclassification, among other complaints.
Shortly afterwards, in April 2026, Bobby G’s closed indefinitely.
Baquing named Game & Co, Inc – the corporate parent of Bobby G’s Pizzeria – and its shareholders, Singh and Kaur, as defendants.
According to the complaint, Kaur and Singh “systematically” underpaid and withheld wages during her time of employment before terminating her year-long employment contract in late December 2025, well ahead of its Oct. 16, 2026 expiration date — a breach of her signed contract that insured compensation for early termination without proper notice or cause.
Baquing is now seeking $180,000 in damages.
Baquing and her attorney, Alexei Kuchinsky, declined to comment at this time.
Over about 10 weeks from the end of May through July, East Bay Nosh tried to reach Kaur for comment via cellphone, the restaurant’s landline, email and a LinkedIn message, but he did not respond.
On July 23, Bansel Singh sent Nosh a text message and email asking for Nosh to contact him.
However, despite numerous follow-up attempts by us on that day, and leading up to publication of this report, including phone calls, text and email messages, Singh has not been in touch again.
East Bay Nosh spoke with former employees, contractors and vendors who worked at or with Bobby G’s while it was run by Kaur and Singh.
Similar to Baquing and Miller, they described a pattern of missed or delayed payments and erratic communication from ownership.
The restaurant at 2072 University Ave. remains dark, and a “Now Leasing” sign has been posted in the window by Raj Properties.
<strong>From small pizzeria to bustling sports bar</strong>
Bobby G’s first opened in late December 2006 as a small pizzeria owned by Berkeley native Robert Gaustad.
Prior to Bobby G’s, Gaustad had lived in over 33 cities –working across film, food, and tech – before he returned home to pursue his dream of opening a restaurant.
Gaustad and his partner, Heather Kratt, purchased the Indian-pizza fusion restaurant for sale on 2072 University Ave. in October 2006 and quickly got to work to bring their vision to life.
“For me, if I was going to be in a restaurant that I own and work seven days a week in, for up to 12 hours a day, I wanted it to have the things that I like: sports, beer, and music,” said Gaustad who is also a blues harmonica player.
With time, the result was a bustling sports bar that sold 13 beers on tap and pizza made from Bay Area-sourced ingredients like Giusto’s flour.
“It was Berkeley’s living room,” Berkeley photojournalist Aaron Rosenblatt told East Bay Nosh while scrolling through the photos he took of Bobby G’s throughout the last decade.
“Anyone could sit as long as they didn’t cause trouble.”
As shown by Rosenblatt’s photos, the restaurant went on to see Bogart, the neighborhood husky, regularly beg at the bar for chicken scraps, a crowd of locals raise a glass to chef McNabb — called “the greatest guy and punkrocker” by Gaustad after he passed away from cancer in 2017 — and the construction of an outdoors seating parklet, at no cost, by the Bobby G’s regular Tibor Lageman in 2020.
Across those years, Bobby G’s weekly bluegrass jams and trivia nights continued to attract large crowds, as did the annual release of the limited-edition Pliny the Younger beer from the Russian Brewing Company.
On the Pliny release day at Bobby G’s, a heavily congested line would form down University Avenue and around Citibank, with people hailing from across the East Bay.
During one year’s release, recalled by Gaustad, the keg ran dry in only 47 minutes.
“I did the 10-ounce pours, lined them up, over and over, and suddenly it was over,” much to the chagrin of those who remained in line for the coveted beer.
In 2016, Gaustad sold Bobby G’s to the brothers Karan and Randeep Rekhi after a dispute with the restaurant’s landlord, Raj Properties, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
While the neighborhood haunt survived multiple ownership changes and the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, trouble emerged after the 2024 handoff to Kaur and Singh, according to multiple Bobby G’s contractors and employees.
<strong>Allegations of delayed payments</strong>
In February 2025, the owner of Trivia CA, Chris O’Brien — who is also the partner of Jennifer Baquing, who filed the lawsuit — received a direct message on Instagram from the former Bobby G’s trivia hosts who warned him of delayed payments from Kaur and Singh.
O’Brien, who was considering a job offer from Bobby G’s at the time, said he raised the issue of delayed payments during his first meeting with management on March 19, 2025.
Management allegedly assured him: “There’s not going to be any problem paying you.”
For the first few months, O’Brien said that his payments arrived mostly on time.
Trivia nights boomed under O’Brien’s watch with the average number of players increasing from 40 to 80, and sometimes 120 on the most crowded nights.
Despite the buzz, O’Brien said his payments began to habitually fall behind schedule, and he regularly had to remind ownership to send him his fees.
East Bay Nosh reviewed screenshots of text messages between Singh and O’Brien, supplied to us by O’Brien, that corroborated the pattern of delayed payments and subsequent excuses from ownership.
O’Brien departed in January 2026 due to the financial strain and stress.
While he received the money owed to him in the end, others did not have the same experience.
<strong>Broken agreements and missed calls</strong>
Berkeley resident Ian Powell, a professional brewer, alleges that Kaur and Singh contracted him to design and rebuild a cold box with a direct draw system (a refrigerated cabinet for dispensing beer on tap) for the restaurant in July 2024.
According to Powell, all parties agreed that he would receive $8,000 as outlined by the estimate.
Powell described the relationship as initially positive, recalling comments from Singh like, “Man, my dude, I can’t wait to work with you.”
But the arrangement later deteriorated.
Powell said that on multiple occasions Kaur and Singh failed to show up to let him into the restaurant to continue his work, leaving him and his business partners stranded while calls went unanswered.
Powell said the final blow came when Kaur paid only $1,000 despite the completed designs and contractor coordination.
Powell was then unable to complete the job.
“They frosted me out of the place and made it clear they didn’t have the money to pay,” Powell said.
Miller, the former server, said that, in addition to consistently late payments and bounced checks, the work environment was unhealthy in other ways.
For example, employees were not given regular breaks as mandated by California Labor Law, and the owners would dodge their calls and communications regarding the payments.
Two former Bobby G’s employees who did not wish to speak on the record corroborated Miller’s account of late payments and poor communication from management.
“It got to a point where I said, I won’t come to work until I’m paid,” Miller said.
He eventually gave his final warning to ownership that he would quit if he didn't receive his next payment on time.
Miller said his next payment was delayed by a week, forcing him to borrow money from a roommate for his graduation cap and gown.
He quit in November 2025.
Baquing was hired to be the social media manager for Bobby G’s in April 2025.
The lawsuit claims that although Baquing was working as an employee, ownership misclassified her as a contractor in order to “evade their obligations under California wage-and-hour laws.”
The lawsuit also claims Baquing was routinely paid “days or weeks late,” and multiple checks issued to her were returned for insufficient funds, while also alleging Kaur and Singh improperly commingled Game & Co Inc’s funds with their own funds and diverted assets from the business to themselves.
Baquing signed a new one-year contract also signed by Kaur that was to run from Oct. 16, 2025 to Oct. 16, 2026 and included, among several provisions, stipulations on payment, pay frequency, and an early termination fee.
Then, the lawsuit claims, on Dec.
18, 2025, Kaur and Singh “unilaterally terminated [Baquing] without cause, without notice, and without paying the contractually obligated early termination compensation,” amounting to $90,600.
<strong>Bobby G’s shutters just shy of 20th anniversary</strong>
While the lawsuit filed by Baquing makes its way through court, Bobby G’s now sits empty, waiting for a new tenant.
An initial case management hearing is scheduled for Oct.
6, 2026.
The news of its closure saddened Gaustad, who called the restaurant his “baby.”
“We worked hard to build that place and clientele, and we made a lot of lifelong friends doing it,” he said.
Gaustad is now retired in Petaluma but had looked forward to visiting Bobby G’s this December for what would have been the pizzeria’s 20th anniversary.
Gaustad said that he and Singh had even texted briefly about throwing a celebration to commemorate two decades of Bobby G’s history.
“I wish it had lasted longer and I think it would have, if people had kept the quality and kept doing the right thing,” said Gaustad.
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