Grub Street

Five Barclays food-service workers have filed a lawsuit claiming that employees at the venue's restaurants inflicted discrimination, name-calling, and other abuse, including banishing them at posh venues like the Calvin Klein Courtside Club and the Jay Z-owned 40/40 Club "to ensure that they remain out of the sight of customers." Anthony Peterkin, a cook who's blind in one eye, says two managers gave him names like "Cyclops" and "one-eyed guy," while Erick Silverman, who has both cerebral palsy and a disorder called rhinophyma, claims in the $5 million suit that a manager mocked his hand tremors and insulted him in other, even more tasteless ways.

Chika Tillman and Don Tillman say their forthcoming West Village ChikaLicious Dessert Club will open in the old Café Henri on October 1. It will be open seven days a week and have separate bakery sections and a sitdown bar, and the format will serve as the "prototype" for the "national rollout of ChikaLicious," says Don Tillman. With international stores already in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Seoul, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Jakarta, and Tokyo, Tillman says, "We started small, and now it is time to let it fly." The home of the Cronut-esque "Dough'Ssant" and Speculoos cinnamon-butter buns is also planning a Williamsburg location, set to open November 1, 2015, in an as-yet-unidentified boutique hotel. [Bedford + Bowery, Related]

Because of ongoing nastiness related to the expired meat scandal, McDonald's stores in Japan have mostly stopped serving chicken altogether, and to get customers through the doors, it's now offering four-piece packs of what it calls Tofu Shinjo Nuggets, vegetable-studded patties concocted from a mix of soybeans, onions, carrots, and shinjo, a sort of starch–fish paste concoction. The nuggets are produced in Japanese factories and come with a subtle ginger-flavored dipping sauce. "Because it isn't meat, it tastes a bit different. It's a bit softer," a spokesperson says. The Shinjo Nuggets were in the works, the company adds, long before allegations that a major fast-food supplier mixed expired meat with fresher meat, plus other unsavory things. This presumably just sped things up a bit. [WSJ, Related]

A note taped to the front window indicates it's curtains for the lone Brooklyn outpost of Florida-based chain Cheeburger Cheeburger, which opened at Seventh Avenue and Third Street in Park Slope in the pre-Fulton Mall Shake Shack days of 2011, when it was generally thought the borough's neighborhoods could sustain a burger chain on pretty much every corner. More Cheeburger Cheeburgers were promised but never arrived, and, meanwhile, the restaurant "never really developed a following among locals," Here's Park Slope notes. [HPS, Related]

Twelve-year-old Tilly Ramsay, the youngest of the Kitchen Nightmares chef's four progeny, will join the world of precocious grade-school chefs with a still-unnamed cooking show for CBBC. (That first C stands for Children's.) The newest Ramsay to wield a sauté pan is surely getting pointers from Dad, who seems to need a new hobby anyway, but one thing he absolutely won't teach her is how to craft perfect on-air profanities. He says, "I have told her that they are not clever words but sometimes they just slip out." Good news is the show isn't supposed to air for two more years, plenty of time for young Tilly to compile a master list of profanity-free ways to say "You f--king donkey." [Daily Mail UK]

Aretha Franklin, along with her entourage, was riding on the freeway that presumably goes by the Ontario side of Niagara Falls, when she asked the tour bus to pull over so she could get a Cherry Coke and a cheeseburger from Johnny Rockets. Apparently this is something the 72-year-old Queen of Soul does often, which is why she says she was all the more insulted when told she couldn't sit at a table to enjoy her meal because she hadn't been rung up as a dine-in customer, and was rudely instructed to wait "in the perimeter."

Terrance Brennan's fine-dining restaurant Picholine on the Upper West Side is closed until September 4, according to a sign posted in its front window. "Building repairs" and summer vacation are the reasons given for Picholine's most recent temporary shutter, echoing a similar turn of events in 2012, when Brennan took the opportunity to renovate the 20-year-old restaurant's dining room. A subsequent change in partners and a filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection delayed the opening at the time, but Picholine ultimately bounced back. The restaurant is already accepting OpenTable reservations for September this time out, so that's a good sign. [Eater, Related]