A cash-advance firm, Samson MCA, is suing Vine Dining Enterprises and CEO Alistair Levine over a March deal to buy $2.345 million of the restaurants' future receipts — a sale struck three months before the group closed all seven Left Bank and LB Steak rooms.

Three months before Left Bank and LB Steak went dark, the group that ran them was already borrowing against dinners it hadn't served yet.

That is the picture that emerges from a lawsuit now moving through New York's Erie County Supreme Court, first reported by SFGATE's Madeline Wells. A financing outfit called Samson MCA LLC says that on March 19 it agreed to buy $2.345 million worth of the restaurants' future sales from Vine Dining Enterprises, the parent of the Vine Hospitality group. The arrangement is a merchant cash advance: not a loan, but a sale of tomorrow's revenue at a discount. In return for an upfront payment — one the complaint never puts a number on — Vine was supposed to peel off 8% of everything the tills took in and hand it over until the full amount was covered. The skim comes off the top, full house or empty room.

By the group's own telling, the money was already tight. Chief executive Alistair Levine, in a statement carried by SFGATE, said Vine had hunted for new investors and capital to keep the doors open and come up empty, leaving too little cash to keep going. Signing away a chunk of future receipts in March reads like an earlier stop on that same road.

It didn't hold. Vine paid Samson about $469,000, the suit says, then stopped. On June 22 the group posted on social media that it was closing everything (external source, opens in a new tab): LB Steak in San Ramon and San Jose, three Left Bank Brasseries in Larkspur, Menlo Park and San Jose, and Petite Left Bank in Tiburon. Seven rooms went dark within days, and about 300 people lost their jobs at an operation that had run for 32 years (external source, opens in a new tab).

The complaint landed on July 1, naming Vine, its affiliated restaurant companies and Levine himself, according to SFGATE's account of the filing. Samson wants the unpaid balance of roughly $1.876 million, plus attorneys' fees it puts north of half a million dollars. Its central accusation is pointed: that Vine kept the money moving through its own operations even as it stopped paying the firm, all while the restaurants stayed open and rang up sales. SFGATE reported it could not reach Vine Hospitality or Samson's attorney before publishing.

Set the dates side by side and the collapse looks less like a sudden June shock and more like a slow bleed that began in the spring. For anyone still running a room in the same suburbs, the fine print is the warning: a brasserie can look busy on a Friday and still owe 8 cents of every dollar to a financier before it pays a cook or a purveyor. When the tables emptied, the obligation didn't.