If the punishment fits their crime, a gang of 120 food-loving criminals in Spain could spend the rest of their lives washing up, after running up a restaurant bill of £1,700 then running away. It is reported that the outrageous group claimed to be celebrating a baptism, and put down a £770 deposit at the El Carmen restaurant in Bembibre, in northern Spain. Then, before dessert could be served, the huge group got up to conga – and danced away to their cars without paying.
Extraordinarily, it may not be the first time the gang have been out lunch-rustling – a nearby restaurant also fell foul of the dine-and-dash collective. A party who claimed to be celebrating a wedding and paid a €1,000 (£870) as a deposit for a basic menu, scoffed €10,000 (£8,700) worth of food and drink. The group was supposed to be 100 people-strong, but restaurant staff said closer to 200 turned up and, before coffee was to be served, they left.
Compared with the UK, the scale may be breathtaking but the crime is nothing new – in 2010, one man admitted he had run out without paying from nine expensive restaurants. The 27-year-old filmmaker tried to blame his “high maintenance” girlfriend for the £5,800 bills he had racked up in London’s fine-dining restaurants but was forced to pay the money back and was banned from six London postcodes. But it is rare: in London, 330 people were reported for skipping out on their bills in 2010, compared with 249 in 2009.
Chef and restaurant owner José Pizarro, says he has only been the victim of dine and dash (known as simpa in Spain) twice – but cannot help but be surprised at the Spanish gang’s trick of organising such a large group of people to leave under the eyes of their waiters, and in the space of a few minutes.
His own brush with unethical diners was when a party of two well-dressed couples came into his Broadgate restaurant in the City of London. They “had a lovely meal, a fantastic time and spent £350 – then they disappeared. The girls went first, then the boys just ran. One ran one way, and the other went the other way. Everyone was shocked – no one was expecting it.”
Pizarro says he thinks the party did it for “fun – to be proud of themselves,” but says “it’s a horrible thing to do”. Especially because such scams could have serious consequences for restaurants and their staff. “We wouldn’t charge the staff but, if it kept happening, the staff would be made responsible. At other places, they might charge the staff for it.”
A similar incident occurred at Pizarro’s José Tapas bar, he says. “There was nothing to suggest they wouldn’t pay, but they just left.” But he has also had customers sheepishly return the next day saying they had forgotten to pay when there were drunk.
And not all eat-and-flee stories are quite so slick. Two friends – businessman Frederick Gross, 47, and George Hammond, 70, were caught after eating in four restaurants in Knightsbridge and Mayfair without paying their bills, which cost a total of £765. The pair were only caught after Hammond left his spectacles – complete with his DNA – at the London Hilton in Park Lane.
