Don’t fork around with these New Yorkers!
Pushed-to-the-limit NYC restaurateurs are faced with another battle in the fight for their financial lives — a growing scourge of dine-and-dash incidents.
From deluded influencers to old-school scofflaws, this latest affront is just one more headache for inflation-embattled businesses to handle — and seemingly on their own, too, in an era where law enforcement, plates heaped high with meatier crimes, tend to view the Class A misdemeanor as small potatoes.
Some fed-up proprietors aren’t taking the insult lying down — instead flocking to social media to name and shame the culprits, often with the help of their followers. Throwing the perps into Instagram jail, it turns out, is a much quicker way to justice than ratting out tab-sentee customers to the cops.
Britney Cariño, owner of Talavera Cantina in The Bronx’s trendy Mott Haven neighborhood, rushed to the restaurant’s social accounts last May, after a table of customers walked out on their $112 tab.
The alleged terrible trio sauntered into the Mexican cocktail bar on Cinco de Mayo — the busiest day of the month, Cariño said. They ordered tacos, chips and guacamole and four frozen margaritas.
After enjoying themselves, they apparently slipped out the door without paying the bill — during a power outage that had torpedoed the POS system tracking their checks. While reviewing payments processed offline, Cariño spotted the outstanding balance and caught the group red-handed on security footage.
“One of the women, she takes the check tray and she actually puts it under her purse,” the second-generation business owner told The Post. “They look around again and then that’s when they leave.”
Appalled over the fryjacking — her first in three years running Talavera — Cariño said she aired the diners’ dirty laundry on Instagram with a screen grab of the footage, letting them know that if they paid up, everything would be fine.
“My first instinct wasn’t to call the police because honestly, sometimes there’s nothing that police can do,” she said.
To her surprise and delight, one of the perps’ older brothers quickly came in and covered the tab.
“Dine-and-dashes have always existed, but the fact that now we can utilize social media … you kind of bring back shame,” she declared.
John Truong of Long Island City Vietnamese restaurant Chef Papa is another New Yorker who hit back, after being left high-and-dry by a wannabe foodfluencer, who promised coverage in exchange for $200 worth of food and drinks.
Fahmida Sultana, who Truong said left his staff only $6 as a tip before sauntering out the door, welched on the supposed deal — leaving him with little recourse but to air his frustrations in Instagram.
“We trusted this person to come in to record a video and I feel like she scammed us,” Truong lamented in the clip, posted last November.
“She changed her username or deleted her account,” said one viewer, while another wrote, “Time to call out all the so-called influencers.”
It was only after his video that she finally responded — with a scathing and since-deleted review.
Truong’s $200 is nothing, however, compared to NYC’s most famous recent eat-and-run case — that of dine-and-dash diva Pei “Lu” Chung, who was arrested seven times after stiffing Michelin-starred restaurants, including Peter Luger and Francie, out of hundreds of dollars.
She was finally released over the winter after being declared psychologically unfit to stand trial.
The phenomenon has rippled beyond city limits, with restaurants around the tri-state area tackling the problem on their own. Erin ONeill’s Pub and Grill in Poughkeepsie tried the same tack recently — posting footage of a female customer sneakily removing her card from the check presenter, before walking off with both her plastic and the booklet.
“Anyone recognize our Dine & Dashers?” they inquired in the caption, later noting in an update their thanks for the help in identifying the culprits.
Then there are the Gotham grub spots that don’t even use social media — but instead lean on a good, old-fashioned Wall of Shame.
UMI Hotpot Sushi & Seafood Buffet in The Bronx got so tired of diners prancing out without paying, that it began slapping up photos and unpaid receipts.
“Stealing food without paying,” reads one of the impromptu mugshots’ captions, evoking a Chinatown store’s “pickpocketer” poster: dine-and-dash edition.
Whether intentional or the result of a misunderstanding, restaurant owners certainly have the right to call the cops — theft of service is technically punishable in NYC by up to a year in jail. But a $100 restaurant loss, experts say, tends to get buried in a system overwhelmed by serious crime.
Christopher Herrman, an associate professor in the Department of Law & Police Science at CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice (NYC), told The Post that when weighing their options, victimized restaurants have to make a “practical cost-benefit calculation.”
“If the unpaid check is $75 or $150, a manager may have to decide whether it is worth stopping restaurant operations, calling police, waiting for officers, reviewing video, providing statements and potentially having employees participate later in the criminal-justice process,” he said.
Many opt out. And restaurateurs’ reluctance to report tab-stainers means the extent to which the problem has exploded isn’t readily showing up in official crime stats, leaving much of the evidence anecdotal, Herrman explained.
When asked for dine-and-dash arrest totals over the past five years, an NYPD spokesperson told The Post that the Department doesn’t track this data to that “level of specificity.”
As hospitality lawyer Andreas Koutsoudakis put it to The Post, “Walking out on a $300 check is the same class of crime as jumping a turnstile” — a relatively minor offense.
“On paper, it carries up to a year, but in practice it’s nothing,” Koutsoudakis explained.
But even if the wheels of justice won’t turn for small businesses in peril, that doesn’t change the fact that seemingly negligible eat-and-run can be a bitter bill to swallow.
“On a five-table business, that’s going to hurt .. plus the 20 percent lost tips to the server,” said Koutsoudakis, who used to run a restaurant in Tribeca.
For instance, with independent restaurants typically clocking a pre-tax profit margin of 5%, they’d need around $2,000 in sales to generate a $112 pre-tax profit — equivalent to Talavera’s skipped check.
The best course of action for victimized vittle vendors, per Herrman, is to retain surveillance footage, preserve the receipt, record employee testimony, and make a “timely police report.”
He also stressed communicating with other businesses when there’s evidence of a repeat offender.
“When multiple restaurants report essentially the same conduct by the same individual, investigators potentially have a pattern rather than a single isolated event,” Herrman said. “
Plus, it lets “the public know this is not the community you’re going to be doing this to,” said Koutsoudakis.
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