As Senior Writer David Tamarkin reported yesterday, Wicker Park’s Mantou Noodle Bar closed abruptly, and without publicized reason. An initial call to Mantou’s PR company Blanco & Peace was particularly suspicious, as the representative wouldn’t even confirm that her boss Lissy Peace was actually a co-owner of the restaurant. When I point-blank asked “Who owns Mantou?” the response was “I don’t know.”

Turns out that Lissy Peace and David Richards (of Sweet & Savories and the defunct Barcello’s takeover where Mado now resides) are sub-leasing the space from ZKFood’s parent company Made Fresh LLC, and are in fact the owners of the restaurant. I just got off the phone with Mantou chef Rick Spiros, who had plenty to say about Peace and Richards.

“They laid out a bad deal to begin with, but I was anxious to get started with my concept so I took it,” Spiros says. “Basically their deal was that I wasn’t going to get paid outright but I was getting paid based on numbers and having my labor and food costs in line. So in order for me to even get paid at all, those numbers had to add up to 25% and I got paid the difference it was under. Meaning, if I could keep my costs down to 20%, I got paid 5% of gross sales. Basically, it wasn’t realistic.”

But Spiros went on to basically say that because he was so excited about getting this noodles and dumplings concept out there, he went with it, thinking things would work out better eventually. Soon he began to see that there was more to it. “So aside from me not making any money while I’m trying to support my wife and child, I didn’t walk away just for that, but things started to get really shady,” Spiros said. “They’re subleasing from ZKFood and weren’t holding up their end, basically not paying their rent. And so the other day David comes in here like ‘Change the locks! We’re at war!’ and I’ve already watched them weasel out of paying people. I watched guys work really hard and then they spin it so they don’t have to pay them and I don’t want any part of that. Meanwhile, Brett from ZK is like ‘if they don’t want to pay, they better get a lawyer.’”

And so they did. Five minutes ago I got a call from a representative of Blanco & Peace, informing me that any questions regarding Mantou have to be run through their lawyer, Ann Shaw. When I asked Shaw just why a restaurant would need a lawyer unless they were involved in litigation, she had this to say: “I’m helping them negotiate the purchase of assets that were there previously.” Okay, so what about Spiros’s claims that Richards and Peace aren’t paying rent and are in deep doo-doo with ZKFood? “Not true. Those allegations are completely false and it is our intention to reopen, it’s a matter of logistics.”

Final word on the saga: Since last weekend, the restaurant has been closed, but Spiros says that when he was there Sunday, Peace and Richards were making plans to revamp, holding interviews with potential new front-of-the-house staff. Adding insult to injury, Spiros’s sous chef informed him just today that he’s been made head chef and that the restaurant will reopen tomorrow with Spiros’s original menu. So what will Spiros do now? “To be honest, I’m pretty fried right now on the whole thing,” Spiros said. “It was my dream, but really, the restaurant was never mine, it was never truly done the way I would have done it, so now I know for next time.”