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Angie Wong investigates Hong Kong’s dining room thieves

Every time my grandmother leaves a restaurant, I quickly try to disguise my embarrassment as she opens a purse twice her size to stuff in as many tooth picks, wet wipes, and packets of sugar as she can. I could swear I even saw her take home a restaurant’s signage once. At home, she has drawers filled with restaurant finds, enough to supply her for several lifetimes. “She just can’t help herself. She comes from another era,” my father reasons.

So, you know that ten per cent service charge you pay at the end of your meal? Well, part of that goes towards my grandmother’s toothpick collection. Indeed, the charge isn’t always for ‘service’, but for expenditures such as breakage, toilet paper, fresh flowers, linen washing, profit, and my grandmother’s pick-pocketing, too. Restaurants can lose about seven per cent of their profit each month due to breakage and loss alone.

Belgian mussel and beer hall Frites recently blanket emailed the city with a missing persons notice after a drunken patron ran off with their 200-pound statue of a Belgian monk that welcomed guests at their entrance. “How could anyone even lift it?” said Evania Meyers, marketer for Concept Creations. Since then, they’ve chalked a signage saying “Do You Know Who Stole Our Monk?” and have also crazy glued their Doberman statue securely to the bar, just in case. “People will take anything that isn’t locked down,” says Meyers.

And after the newly opened agnès b. café’s manager boasted that everything (from chairs to linens) was imported from France, they were losing an imported tile a week. “Even cleaning supplies would go missing if they were left out,” said one restaurant manager of a five star hotel eatery in Central. “It’s amazing how much one can fit into an LV bag,” she said.

Hotels are the worst hit; but they expect things to go missing, and budget for it. It used to be a pen or a copy of the bible. But they’ve seen ice buckets, chair pillows, bath fixtures, safes, ipod docks, and bedding leave with their guests. One guest, who lost tens of millions at the gambling table, ordered his staff to take every piece of furniture out of his suite upstairs and load it into the van. He was a big spender at the hotel, one of his assistants said, so the hotel didn’t charge him.

Jamie Higgins, 97 Group General Manager, said customers walked away with an entire Moroccan table once. “We were closing down the old Club 97 and I think they wanted to leave with some memorabilia. Except we still had two weeks of business left with no table.”

And when Chef Gianni Caprioli, of the IFC’s Isola restaurant, tried growing tomatoes on the roof terrace of his restaurant like he used to do as a chef in Italy, he got a bit of a surprise. “I wanted to serve fresh tomatoes from my garden,” he laughed. Nice gesture, but his customers kept picking them off. “One time I caught one of the customers with one, followed him to his table, and asked him if he was going to eat it. His reply was ‘I was going to give it to my son to play with’.”

In the kitchen, lots of chefs padlock their refrigerators at night because of their expensive commodities: steaks, truffles, wine, bottles of HP sauce, even vats of oil are swiped, presumably, by insiders. “The staff usually gets free meals,” said one former restaurant manager of Wildfire, “but stealing stuff from the kitchen is just too much. It happens all the time.” So common in fact, most new industrial refrigerators come with locks built-in.

Strangely, menus are also one of items often stolen at restaurants and bars. One restaurateur owned up to the fact he likes to take menus home so that he can gauge what other people are doing. The same goes for wine lists for sommeliers. At OVOlogue, the menu sells for $400 a copy. Sure, it’s printed on beautiful pearlised paper, and there are beads strung to the menu, but what you are paying for is the privilege to copy the poetically written names of their dishes and price point. Don’t know what I mean? “Some restaurant owners will build their menus based on other restaurants that are doing well,” said the same restaurateur who steals menus in the name of research.

The owner of Cococabana, Coco Thai and the newly opened Maison 1882 got so sick of his diners swiping his forks, knives, and plates when he was a budding restaurant owner that he stuck price tags on all of his items. “If they take it away with them, they’ll have to pay for them,” he said. “Someone stole a three-foot tall pepper mill, once. How do you hide that in your bag? People take everything home. Even the waitresses…”

Next time you see a mismatched collection of wine glasses in your friend’s cabinet, you might have a good guess why.