On February 10, Sophon—one of Seattle’s hottest, hippest restaurants—announced on its Instagram stories that it would be canceling its dinner service that night. It stayed closed through Valentine’s Day weekend, one of the industry’s busiest stretches, because of financial difficulties and tensions between Sophon’s staff and owner, Karuna Long, that were spilling into public for the first time.
Employees were refusing to come to work because they hadn’t been paid. Long put up, and then deleted, an Instagram post admitting he owed money to staff and vendors. “I have no idea what I’m doing and cannot seem to figure what’s up and what’s down,” he wrote. Days later, in a series of Instagram posts, general manager Moni Mitchell announced that the staff had resigned and accused Long of “documented financial mismanagement.”
This is a shocking turn of events for anyone who knows Sophon’s reputation. One of the only Khmer restaurants in Seattle, it is the kind of place that gets included on every “best of” list, renowned for its Cambodian-influenced cocktails and dedication to uplifting Khmer culture. But court documents, and interviews with Long and six of his former employees, show that behind the scenes, both Sophon and Long’s nearby, now closed bar Oliver’s Twist struggled financially for years, resulting in bounced paychecks, late payments to vendors, unpaid rent, and lawsuits. The former employees quoted in this article all asked to remain anonymous because of worries about professional repercussions.
Before Sophon, Long made a name for himself in the bar scene with Oliver’s Twist, a Phinney Ridge bar that he bought in 2017. During the COVID pandemic, he experimented with serving food influenced by his Khmer heritage. When that food was a hit, he announced Sophon, his dream project, which has been a pillar of the Seattle dining scene since it opened in 2024.
Long’s compelling vision for a restaurant drew the exceptional people to staff it, and soon his vision became a reality. He struck many of them initially as charismatic, funny, and progressive, former staff said. “He came off very kind and warm,” says one former employee. “A lot of us were really excited about Sophon’s story.”
But Long also had a way of “sugarcoating” things, as one former employee put it. Multiple employees say that he would often make excuses for missing scheduled meetings or why payments were late or why the refrigerators went out.
They were picking up on a pattern that Long himself was aware of. In an email to The Stranger, Long said that he’s dealt with “a personal internal battle for 30 years having to do with my clinical depression and ideations of suicide. When I’m overwhelmed, I unfortunately tuck my head in the sand and have avoided issues.”
Long’s financial troubles started before Sophon. In 2021, Long brought in two business partners, Joel Robinson and Waylon Puckett, who invested tens of thousands of dollars into the newly reopened Oliver’s Twist and the opening of Sophon.
Last year, Robinson and Puckett sued Long for breach of contract and fraud. They allege that Long forged Robinson’s signature on contracts with restaurant vendors, failed to contribute promised money to the business (where Long was the majority owner), and used the business bank account to pay for his personal life, which, the suit alleges, “included withdrawals to pay for online gambling as well as paying his personal utilities.”
Long says he wasn’t taking any salary when Sophon opened and was in the habit of using Oliver’s Twist money to pay his expenses when he owned the bar by himself. He says he “failed to remember that I now have partners, therefore, any cost of living/personal utilities should go through proper processes.” Long also admitted to forging Robinson’s signature on contracts with vendors, however, writing in an email that “I made a lapse in judgment in doing so because my partners were unavailable.” But he denies lying to his partners or not contributing funds to the partnership. (Robinson and Puckett declined to comment on the contents of the suit.)
The suit also claims Long hid his debts from his partners. Attached to the lawsuit is a 2024 letter from a debt collection agency saying that the business owed $1.1 million as a result of an unpaid $879,000 COVID Economic Injury Disaster Loan that had accrued interest and fees. Among the other debts incurred by the business was the approximately $30,000 it owed to a financial services company after selling a portion of its future receipts; that company sued Oliver’s Twist for missed payments and won the case in 2023. In May 2024, according to the lawsuit, the three partners met and agreed that Oliver’s Twist should enter Chapter 11 bankruptcy, but it is unclear if that ever happened. Long declined to comment on the bankruptcy.
Robinson and Puckett attempted to settle the case through arbitration, according to court records, but are now seeking a default judgement against Long because they haven’t been able to schedule an arbitration sessions, the records show. Long declined to comment about the current status of the lawsuit or whether he is being represented by an attorney.
Oliver’s Twist had also fallen behind on its rent. By May 2024, the bar owed its landlord over $120,000, according to court records, and after Long renewed the lease he missed more payments. In December, the landlord initiated eviction proceedings against Oliver’s Twist. By then, the bar had been closed for two months.
According to Long, Oliver’s Twist closed because “business was too slow and rent was too high.” (He also characterized the closure as temporary in an interview with the Seattle Times, saying the bar was “on its way to closing” permanently.)
Former employees say the bar wasn’t paying vendors on time. More than one say that it went through stretches of not serving any food beyond popcorn, which they worried was against Seattle law.
One bartender says that after multiple missed paychecks, the Oliver’s Twist team began to leave until he was the only one left. He went over a month at a time without getting any pay himself, he says. “It ended up being kind of a social experiment for myself, because I had nothing better to do, to see what it’s like to go work in the industry as a bartender without getting any compensation,” he says. “Because no more candles were being delivered, I was actually taking up candlemaking as a hobby and recycling the paraffin wax and making more candles. And I was actually having a pretty good time by myself.”
Long eventually paid him the wages he was owed, he says. Former employees say, and Long admits, that there were two cooks who had not been paid for their work as of February.
Despite Sophon’s high-profile success, it had similar problems.
In the spring of 2025, five former employees say, the restaurant switched from a direct deposit system to distributing checks every pay period. But workers soon began complaining their checks were bouncing or being placed on hold by their banks, according to screenshots of text messages and photos seen by The Stranger, and the complaints intensified into the summer.
“There was an extended period of time where by the time another two week pay period came to an end, multiple employees were still waiting for their previous paycheck to be deposited, or waiting for the hold placed on them to expire,” said one employee in a statement to The Stranger, adding that by August, workers were demanding cashier’s checks because they assumed regular checks wouldn’t clear. (Long says that the cashier’s checks were costing him $8 apiece.) Former employees also said that Long was slow to repair broken fridges—including a CO2 leak in the keg cooler, two employees say—stopped paying for the city to pick up recycling, and that W-2 tax forms for the 2024 year didn’t reflect their correct hours. In one case, an employee emailed Long to say that she only made a third of the income that was listed on the W-2.
Mitchell, the general manager, has accused Long on Instagram of allowing employees’ health insurance coverage to lapse, even though they continued to have premiums taken out of their paychecks. In one instance, according to screenshots seen by The Stranger, an employee found out about the lapse from a letter from their insurance company, after they’d already sought medical care.
Tensions came to a head when Mitchell went on a trip to Cambodia in January, leaving it up to Long to process payroll. Two staffers say they did not get paid but worked the first weekend of February anyway; one former employee says that Long told them he wouldn’t have the money to pay them unless the restaurant re-opened. “At this point, we’ve been through so many things with him,” one employee says. “We’re not feeling like we’re going to get paid, and it’s the last straw, and the communication is really bad.”
On February 10 and 11, Long decided to close Sophon, this employee says. He also told the staff that there was a hold on the business account, former employees say. When some employees tried to sign up for unemployment, they discovered that they couldn’t, because their hours had not been properly reported to the state. (Long says this resulted from a “lapse in taking care of my tasks accordingly.”)
In the midst of all of that, most of the staff went on “strike,” as they put it, demanding Long fix their paperwork so they could collect unemployment and pay employees what they were owed, including the two former cooks at Oliver’s Twist.
Long and his staff met on February 17, and he handed out about $20,000 in cash (so Long could avoid cashier’s checks fees). Long says that he has updated the paperwork with the Washington State Employment Security Department and that former employees should be able to collect unemployment. But with the cooks unpaid and Long not communicating with the employees to their satisfaction, most of the staff resigned February 20. “As far as we are concerned, the employment relationship is severed due to his breach of contract and labor laws,” Mitchell wrote in an email.
Long says that he is working on paying the Oliver’s Twist employees. He reopened Sophon last Tuesday with mostly new hires along with some employees who did not go on strike, he says. Mitchell describes the current staff as a “skeleton crew,” writing in an email that “the entire original team that built the restaurant’s reputation has walked away.”
Those who quit may not miss the chaos, but many will miss one another.
“We supported each other through a lot of hard, personal stuff,” says a former employee who began working at Sophon not long after it opened. “That’s a piece of it—this community and these beautiful relationships that I’m walking away with, which feels like the silver lining. And I think the other piece is a lot of sadness and a lot of anger and grief. I feel like we had something really special. This restaurant could have been perfect.”