The exclusive Dinner by Heston restaurant owes employees at least $4.5 million.

Crown casino, where the restaurant fronted by celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal is based,  paid $1.97 million a year in licensing fees for the restaurant's intellectual property, while consistent wage abuses were going on in the background, reports say.

The underpayment appears to have been occurring ever since the restaurant opened back in 2015.

A creditors' report allegedly shows Crown was effectively in a joint venture with the company that owned the restaurant, Tipsy Cake.

Crown set up the “blueprint” for engaging staff initially, but the casino was not involved in the ongoing payment of workers.

However, that blueprint was “applied over several years and resulted in the underpayment of employee wages”, the report says.

But still, the daily takings of the restaurant were deposited into a Crown bank account, and he casino charged Dinner by Heston rent of just $1 a year.

Crown paid the large licensing fee to Bacon and Egg Ice Cream Limited, a company related to Tipsy Cake, which is based in the tax haven of Nevis and provides no information about its ownership.

Crown Melbourne has now terminated the lease of the high-profile eatery.

Crown says Tipsy Cake “was a tenant of Crown”, and was “responsible for its own operations and employed its own staff”.

“Tipsy Cake has asked the court to appoint a liquidator, on the basis that it is insolvent. In these circumstances, Crown has taken steps to bring the tenancy to an end. As the winding-up application is now before the court, Crown will not be making any further comment concerning the liquidator’s appointment,” the spokeswoman said.

The wage underpayments were originally exposed in late 2018 by a Sunday Age investigation.

Tipsy Cake appointed provisional liquidators just days after it missed a deadline with the Fair Work Ombudsman to pay staff the millions it owed them.

Liquidators BRI Ferrier say in the creditors' report that the sum of $4.47 million owed to workers at Dinner by Heston is “in reality” understated by an “unknown factor”.

This is because the process to calculate what each worker is owed is ongoing.

The estimates so far only cover the restaurant's four years of operation, totalling at least $4.044 million in historic underpayments and $435,000 in accrued entitlements related to the closing of the business.

United Workers Union national president Jo-anne Schofield has slammed Crown for its complicity in the “shocking exploitation of workers on its premises”.

“Despite wage theft in the order of $4.5 million, Crown continued backing Dinner By Heston through a cosy joint venture that saw them pay rent of only $1 a year. Meanwhile, hospitality workers are owed up to $35,000, after working 80- to 90-hour weeks,” she said.

“We have requested that Crown repay all unpaid wages and entitlements owed to our members – and offer employment to these members, as well as sponsoring those who are on temporary visas.”

The $4.5 million owed to Dinner by Heston staff is obviously a high figure, but pales next to the $7.8 million paid back by Made Establishment, George Calomabris’ multi-venue restaurant business, and the estimated $10 million owed by the even larger Rockpool Dining Group, fronted by Neil Perry.