Jesse Matsuoka, who co-owns 28-year-old sushi Mecca Sen in Sag Harbor, was delighted when some longtime customers invited him to their Hamptons dinner party. After mingling on the lawn, he popped into the kitchen to chat with his hostess — but when someone opened one of her cabinets, Matsuoka’s jaw dropped.
“Over the years we carefully sourced gorgeous hand-crafted sake cups from Japan, and they were distinctive,” he explained. “When the cabinet opened, I saw years worth of multiple styles. Our entire collection on her shelves!”
Matsuoka is just one of many New York restaurateurs who have had their possessions being pilfered by patrons. From dishes and cutlery to artwork, sticky-fingered diners are brazenly claiming off-menu items as their own.
“People are particularly interested in taking things with logos on them because they become collectibles,” said John McDonald, who owns several downtown hot spots including Bowery Meat, Lure Fishbar and the new Smyth Tavern. “Our steak knives that had Bowery Meat embossed on the handle cost $50 each, so we put them on display for sale. Still, people just took them. Now, we are making them without logos.”
Pens bearing restaurants’ names are constantly taken and are generally chalked up to marketing costs. But Jin Ahn, owner/partner of East Village Hawaiian restaurant Noreetuh, was surprised to find his personal Montblanc pen — engraved with his name — missing after offering it to a table of three to sign their check.
“I explained that it was a personalized pen that I received as a gift, and at first they pretended they hadn’t seen it,” he recalled. “You want to give customers the chance to save face, but I wasn’t going to let them walk off with my pen, so I said I probably dropped it at their table. Eventually, a woman removed it from her bag and apologized, saying she mistook it for her own because she had a few glasses of wine.”
It’s gotten so bad that restaurateurs are taking steps to protect themselves from the loss.
Mathias Van Leyden, owner of Chelsea’s Loulou, said the bird-shaped glasses his bistro uses for cocktails have to be replaced weekly — so he has slightly increased the price of the drinks.
“Sometimes, customers walk out with a drink and the glass,” he said. “People will see them at someone’s house and know that’s a glass from Loulou. It’s the cost of doing business, and it happened so often that now we charge $2 extra per drink.”
The cute little bottles of hot honey at the three Manhattan locations of Zazzy’s Pizza were disappearing so rapidly that owner Richie Romero switched to large vessels that are less likely to be carried off. “We replaced them with refill bottles that are too clumsy and ugly to steal,” he said.
Most owners don’t want to confront or embarrass their customers over a few dollars. So when a waiter at T-Bar in Southampton reported that someone was pocketing the glass salt and pepper shakers purchased from Crate and Barrel, owner Tony May asked him not to mention it to the guests.
“I tell the staff to just close their eyes,’’ May said. “It’s not worth the confrontation and whenever they use it they will think of us.”
He did, however, decide to attach dispensers of soap to the bathroom walls, as the little bottles previously used were disappearing quickly.
Liz Pavlou was not as blasé about the salt containers at her chic Water Mill spot Bistro Été. After a customer slid one of the substantial, carved teak holders into his pocket, she was incensed.
“Anything little and cute, people take, but I wouldn’t have believed somebody had stolen that, until I saw it on our camera,” she said. “We had it on video, so I just added $60 to his credit card.”
And though Loulou has factored in the theft of bird glasses, when one woman put three of them into her bag, owner Van Leyden said enough is enough. “We confronted her and the gentleman who was hosting the table, and he quickly offered to pay for them,” the restaurateur said.
In a recent New York Times story about the $149 Pina Pro lamp — the trendy outdoor-dining accessory of the moment, thanks to its warm glow and unobtrusive silhouette — a staffer at celebrity-beloved Soho eatery Altro Paradiso noted how the lights had a tendency of mysteriously disappearing.
If it’s difficult to imagine how someone slides a lamp into their bag, that’s nothing compared to what used to happen at the now-closed MercBar. McDonald, who also owned that Soho spot, recalled how customers lifted costly cowhide cushions from the couch as well as an oil painting that was hanging on the back wall.
Years later, it still stings. “It was so unique; if I ever see it anywhere, I’m taking it!” he said.
At Laurent Tourondel’s Chelsea spot The Vine, a framed piece of lingerie by artist Zoë Buckman was purloined. “I’m not sure how they got out the door with it,” the chef admitted.
The iconic September 1995 inaugural cover of JFK Jr.’s magazine George — featuring Cindy Crawford dressed as George Washington — used to hang on the wall of a bathroom at American Bar. But a few months ago, two women decided to abscond with it, and were so unabashed that they later posted their haul on Instagram.
“The bartender knew who they were, so we contacted them and told them that if it wasn’t returned by the next day, we would get the police involved,” said Carolina Santos Neves, the restaurant’s consulting executive chef. “By the following morning, it was back, but now it is gone again and we don’t know who took it.”
Evil-eye sculptures from the bars of Kyma in New York and Calissa in Water Mill were also pocketed — when the manager at Calissa confronted the woman who had slid it off the bar, she claimed the bartender sold it to her, which the employee firmly denied.
And Olmsted chef Greg Baxtrom has had enough of diners marching off with the charcoal and lemongrass candles from the bathrooms of his Michelin-rated Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, restaurant.
“Shockingly, they are lit, hot and dangerous, but [customers] sneak them out and sometimes make a mess dumping out hot wax in the sink,’’ he said. “They think food is expensive now and they are some version of Robin Hood.”
Someone even appropriated a framed drawing of quail that one of his employees had created. And Baxtrom is dying to find out who it was.
“I hope I catch somebody! If you take something of mine, I have no qualms about dealing with it,” Baxtrom vowed. “The customer is not always right anymore.”