Editor's Note: The owners of Patisserie Melanie have also sued their contractor, alleging that the contractor worked slowly on the restaurant project, leading to delays in opening.
One day shy of Patisserie Melanie’s first anniversary, co-owner Axel Schwarz remembers all he went through to make it here.
“I've learned that patience is not always virtue,” Schwarz said.
He and his wife signed the lease in October 2019, hoping to open the restaurant within six months to a year after San Diego Gas & Electric finished their electric and gas upgrades.
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Schwarz said that’s not what happened.
“We're now fighting a multibillion-dollar corporation,” Schwarz said.
According to their lawsuit, what should have been a simple work-order request that would take a month or two turned into a “absolute nightmare” that took almost three and a half years.
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“We kept being told that we were next on the list, that we were the priority and, ‘We'll get to you soon,' " Schwarz said. "We had no choice but to wait.”
Paying the rent and contractors working to fix the issue couldn’t wait. Axel and his wife said they were paying for a restaurant they couldn’t use.
“I'm a public-school teacher,” Schwarz said. “We don't have that kind of money. And we basically had to pour all of our savings and cash out. A lot of things that we wanted to save.”
Schwarz said all of the back and forth got so bad that for five nights while the restaurant did not have power, he slept on a foam pad on the floor to make sure nobody broke in.
Schwarz issuing SDG&E for incompetence, mismanagement and gross and reckless negligence. He also said his issue is a drop in the bucket.
“I had an electrical contractor who reached out to us and said, ‘This happens to me all the time,' 'I have a homeowner who has been waiting a year and a half for SDGE to do this,' " Schwarz said. "Everybody I talked to about SDGE says these kinds of delays are par for the course.”
NBC 7 reached out to SDG& E for a response to the lawsuit. It said:
"We have reviewed the claim received by the customer but have not yet been served with the lawsuit. It is SDG&E’s policy to not comment on pending litigation.”
Schwarz’s attorneys said SDG&E will receive the lawsuit this week.
