‘You wouldn’t steal a car…’ began the early noughties anti-piracy video. ‘You wouldn’t steal a television… You wouldn’t steal a handbag.’ No, but it seems from reports from restaurants, you might slip some silverware into a handbag if you’re out for dinner.
In February, Gordon Ramsay revealed that nearly 500 cat figurines had been stolen in one week from his latest restaurant, Lucky Cat. The maneki-neko cat models – said to bring good luck – cost £4.50 each, which makes that a loss of more than £2,000 for the restaurant in just seven days.
What is it about dining out that means we think pocketing property is acceptable? People who would never dream of running out on a bill or palming something from a shop seem to have no compunction when it comes to the liminal space of restaurants.
Restaurant theft is not a new phenomenon. Quaglino’s, the fashionable Conran restaurant in St James, marked the tenth anniversary of its opening by offering free champagne to any patron who returned one of the 25,000 ‘Q’-shaped ashtrays which had been stolen during the restaurant’s first decade. Bibendum, another Conran restaurant, was once said to lose 15 of its Michelin-man butter dishes every week.
Fred Smith, head of beef (yes, really) at the steak restaurant Flat Iron, tells me that since its first restaurant opened more than a decade ago, 20,000 of the distinctive miniature cleavers it uses in place of steak knives have been ‘accidentally removed’ by diners. It’s not just the tableware, either; anything not nailed down is seemingly up for grabs, which explains why everything from hand soap to picture frames are now screwed to the wall.
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