How Crawfish Cafe Scaled to 9 Locations with Toast's Hospitality-Focused Payroll & Team Platform

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Julie Nguyen and Kiet Duong own nine restaurant locations, including three that opened in 2025. They have two casual full-service concepts in Texas—Crawfish Cafe, known for Cajun classics, and Pho Prime, offering authentic Vietnamese favorites—as well as Ocean Palace, a 30,000+ square-foot Chinese restaurant with an event space. They started their first concept in 2013, and they’ve grown their business steadily ever since.

They first adopted Toast in 2020. Since then, “we’ve adopted nearly every product Toast has to offer,” Julie says. “Having everything in one place saves us so much time and makes our business so much more efficient. I know we wouldn’t have grown to the nine locations we are today without Toast in our pocket.” 

Payroll & employee onboarding for restaurants

Onboarding new employees and ensuring they have all the critical information necessary to begin working is a time-consuming and often challenging aspect of being an owner-operator. 

"Sometimes new hires don't have their Social Security card, but they're ready to start working. With Toast, I can confidently let new hires begin working immediately, because I know Toast will prompt employees to enter their information when they clock in.”

Similarly, accounting for overtime when managing tipped employees can get messy. “I had no idea we were calculating tipped overtime incorrectly until we switched to Toast’s restaurant payroll software. It’s a notoriously complex calculation due to the tip credit, and our previous payroll provider simply wasn't doing it right. Toast handled it correctly from day one,”  Julie shares. 

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Empower your employees with access to the information they need

With the MyToast app, employees can access pay stubs and tip info in the palm of their hand. 

"MyToast has become a daily routine for my team. They check it daily to verify their hours and see a detailed breakdown of their tips, even the details of how they were calculated. That level of transparency isn't something that I found with my previous payroll provider."

Tips Manager also helps Julie ensure that her team is getting the tips they deserve, aligned to the rules she sets up. Setting up Tips Manager was also super easy: “We had all of our rules in place in the restaurant for how we distribute tips, and it didn’t take me more than five or 10 minutes to set up those rules in the system. Now, I don’t have to do anything: I just send tips to payroll, and that’s it.”

Her employees can also access a portion of their tips right after their shift with Toast Pay Card & PayOut. 1, 2, 3

Reclaim your time with Toast’s POS, Payroll & Tips Manager integration

With Toast, Julie no longer needs to spend time uploading timesheets from POS to Payroll or manually adding tips to employee paychecks. 

“The integration between Toast POS and Payroll has helped me tremendously as a business owner. Before, it took me at least an hour per location to process payroll. With Toast Payroll and Tips Manager, I can get it done in about 10 minutes per location—and that’s only because I like to double-check the hours. Without that, it would take just a few minutes.” 

The time Julie saves with Toast Payroll and Tips Manager has been vital to growing her business: “It makes my day easier, and gives me more time to improve my business in other areas — optimizing my menu items and prices, marketing, and building out new locations.” 

Ultimately, Toast's integrated POS, restaurant payroll, and tips software does more than just solve individual challenges for Julie and Kiet Nguyen; it fundamentally changes how they spend their time. By automating complex payroll, streamlining onboarding, and empowering their team with self-service tools, they replace hours of administrative work with strategic oversight. That reclaimed time was a key part in their success and continued growth.  

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Toast Pay Cards are issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, pursuant to license by Mastercard®. Mastercard and the circles design are registered trademarks of Mastercard International Incorporated. Toast PayOuts are funded by a 0% line of credit issued to employers by Toast, Inc. or WebBank, as set forth in the employer's Credit Agreement. Toast and WebBank each reserve the right to change or discontinue this program at any time. Toast Pay Card and PayOut is not available in all jurisdictions and is available to Toast Payroll customers only.

1 Toast PayOuts may be limited to a portion of pay to help account for estimated taxes, withholdings, and deductions. Tip PayOuts are not available at restaurants that tip pool without using Toast Tips Manager. Employees must receive wages via the Toast Pay Card in order to access Toast PayOuts. Tips will be paid to employees on their Toast Pay Card as though they were receiving them in cash. Wages will be advanced by employers during the pay period and deducted from their total wages paid to them on payday.

2 Access is typically available instantly after the employee's shift; however, if restaurants tip pool using Toast Tips Manager, Toast PayOuts of tips are available after the tip pool is approved and sent to Toast Payroll, typically the next calendar day. 

3 Toast Pay Cards do not have any associated ATM withdrawal or other fees; however, third-party ATM operators may charge a fee unless the cardholder uses an ATM within the MoneyPass® network, and third-party financial institutions may charge a fee for over-the-counter withdrawals unless the institution is a Mastercard® member bank. MoneyPass is a registered trademark of Fiserv.