There was some news lately of restaurant staff having to compensate their employers for customers they had served who after eating and drinking generously, they sneakily decided to do a runner and make off without paying. It is not a very common practice to be fair as the vast majority of diners would never even consider such a dishonest act. You really have to be a certain type of bad rotten apple to break the trust that is agreed upon when you sit down at a restaurant table. To be asked for upfront payment after ordering your food really does take from the essence of the occasion of eating out but you cannot blame places now for taking deposits.
I only had a couple of incidents when it happened where one of the diners went to the loo then straight to their vehicle in the car park afterwards when no was looking and waited for the other with the engine presumably running. The other one then politely asked for the bill and then told the server would they wait a few minutes while they went to fetch their wallet in their car and that was the last we saw of them after eating a fine dining meal for two. I have heard of couples trying to get all fourteen lunches and dinner free on a holiday like a competition by not just doing runners but by bringing in spiders, bits of hair and glass for example to slip under a salad leaf so they could make a serious complaint and get the bill cancelled.
The one other time it was genuinely by mistake and the regular client called up apologizing profusely and paid over the phone. Of course it is illegal for employers to make a server pay up for these crimes which is what they are. Some operators just take all the tips from that day in lieu of the lost sales revenue. It is the same as not paying for petrol or a customer going into a shop and walking out with goods not paid for so it’s actually a police matter that should be reported.
These days with cameras and card details taken it’s not so easy to avoid being tracked but in my case in the nineties it was a walk in couple and cameras were rare. One recent case in London had the lone rogue diners face all over social media but never tracked him down. It might happen more often in the big cities and at the high end especially if you look and sound the part of a big spender. The sad reality is that this food scam business works both ways and customers are often fleeced by the restaurants and I am not just talking about high prices.
In certain Mediterranean tourist hotspots your beautiful veal schnitzel will be actually half the price pork inside that breadcrumbed coating. Your delicious gratin of lobster will be chopped up monkfish coated in a rich sauce served in a lobster shell but the same shell has been used ten times in a service being washed out each time and refilled with quarter the price monkfish giving a juicy profit for the owners over unsuspecting diners.
It’s not just the food either that get the scam treatment, you might think you have ordered a nice expensive wine as a treat but some places will hold on to the empty bottles of their finer wines and then refill them with a freshly opened bottle of something similar but half the price or maybe five years younger from the same vineyard.
They then still charge you the superior vintage rate and you are thinking that it was not such a good year after all for that wine. Even if you ask for the wine to be opened in front of you the sleight of hand of a well seasoned conman sommelier will have you fooled especially when the dried out cork has been dipped in the new wine.
There is now an even more modern version where food manufacturers of retail products are actually listing allergen ingredients on labels that are not even used in the recipes in order to avoid all the otherwise more costly production. Indeed the food fraud black market business is a huge industry across the world so the one time the customers actually hit back at the deep rooted corruption among its few dodgy operators taking you for a ride, then it’s really only a drop in this murky ocean.
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