I am not a gourmet. I am not a foodie. I have little interest in food other than to sustain life. While I can tell when food tastes awful, I cannot distinguish between good food and really good food the way that connoisseurs can. Hence I do not seek out eating ‘experiences’, going to fancy restaurants to try out their wares. However, I can understand people who do if they can afford to eat at such expensive places.
What I find hard to understand is people willing to risk going to prison for the sake of eating a fancy meal, the way that this 34-year old ‘influencer’ (seems like pretty much everyone is an influencer these days), who has come to be known as the ‘dine and dash diva’, did.
A would-be food influencer known online as the “dine-and-dash diva” has been jailed in Brooklyn, New York, after multiple previous arrests for allegedly skipping out on the bill at high-end restaurants.
Pei Chung, 34, is said to have developed a habit of going to fancy restaurants around New York City, ordering extensively off the menu – and then trying to get out of paying.
Chung has been banned from at least seven restaurants, according to the establishments, and police have said they keep arresting her for her refusal to pay restaurant bills. Chung allegedly skipped out on paying at Williamsburg restaurants at least six times – including one Michelin-starred brasserie, Francie, twice.
At one sitting in October, she reportedly ordered $15 foie gras, $32 carpaccio, $28 bucatini, $52 lamb and $19 hot chocolate mousse – before skipping out on the check.
The Instagram influencer also visited Peter Luger steakhouse where she ordered nearly $150 worth of steak, sides and dessert for herself, posted pictures of her meal and offered a glowing review.
But employees at the famous steak joint told NBC News it was odd that Chung stayed for hours. And when she was given the check, she allegedly told employees that she couldn’t pay and offered items, including kitchen scissors, from her handbag in exchange.
On Friday, Chung went to Mole in Brooklyn, and her alleged dine-and-dash run came to an end. The owner said that when the Prada-, Louis Vuitton- and Hermes-wearing influencer showed up for a third go at the menu, they wised up.
She does not seem to have been very good at running this scam, given her repeated arrests and bans from restaurants, and even returning to the same places. In her case, the attraction of doing this may have been more than just the satisfaction of having an expensive meal. She was clearly using the occasions to create content for her site.
Chung had been known to bring her own lighting equipment and camera to record herself trying out the dishes, the Post reported.
Why would she do this, so obviously risking arrest? She is described as a ‘wannabe’ influencer, suggesting that she had not been able to make it into the big leagues. The world of influencers is a competitive and crowded one, with people trying to make a good living promoting places and things to their followers. It helps to draw an audience if you are young and good-looking. In other articles you can see photographs of the heavily made-up, well-coiffed Chung.
Maybe she wanted to be arrested and get into the news so that she would be famous so that when she is released, she would be able to have a following large enough that she does not have to scam restaurants. So this post is a small contribution towards making her dream come true and avoiding prison in the future..
Or maybe she is just foolish and/or disturbed.
Option 2 seems to be the more plausible.
Could have been a thrill-seeker? Which is not mutually exclusive with foolish and/or disturbed.
As someone who does gourmet cooking as a hobby, I now know not to invite Mano over for dinner. 😜
People do weird things for clicks. Filming your crime is one of them.
My idea of a great restaurant -- and check this out if you are ever in the Seattle area -- is Scott’s Dairy Freeze in North Bend. It is about a block from the diner used in the ‘Twin Peaks’ TV series. Scott’s has great hot dogs and hamburgers as well as highly tasty grilled cheese. Good fries and onion rings as well. I hear the ice cream is excellent. And easy on the wallet.
It is a place to stop while driving home from a hike in the nearby mountains.
You pay before you get your food.
I would not be surprised at all if her social media follow /viewer count rose markedly after this news, many people have made hay out of worse offences. I had a quick look myself, so there’s one visit generated purely from this news.
Ugh, that alone should have merited removal from any self-respecting restaurant.
My wife and I are not “foodies”, but we do enjoy our food and enjoy it more when it’s prepared well. None of this, “The phone eats first”, nonsense; we are there to enjoy ourselves. So we do, on rare occasions, try some of the more expensive restaurants just to see if their food measures up to their reputation.
We do have a few rules about our trials. We try to figure out which dishes are those which the chef prides themselves on, and we make no substitutions. If you go to a steakhouse and order the steak well-done, expect to eat shoe-leather. If you order a beef stroganoff and want it without mushrooms, you might as well choose a different meal.
What strikes me about the OP is not that someone would want to eat at restaurants with a reputation of preparing excellent food, but at how low the amount of money she is willing to risk jail time for. Sure, a $200 meal is very expensive. My wife and I might go someplace like that once a year simply because of the expense. But we pay more than that for our internet/television service every month. We wouldn’t risk being banned, or jail time, for that little amount of money.
To be clear, my wife and I are not rich. We live within our means, but our means allows us to enjoy an occasional luxury. My car is 17 years old, our main form of entertainment is watching old movies on cable (my wife), and reading used books (me). Our lives are not extravagant, and we enjoy good food. There is a lot of good food at cheaper places, like #4, joelgrant mentioned. One of the best burgers I’ve ever had was at a small pool-hall in Elmore, Ohio (about 15 miles SE of Toledo near the Blair Museum of Lithophanes). Our experiences with the more expensive places has largely been positive, but on occasion we have decided that a restaurant was more interested in show than cooking, and never go back. On average the more expensive places tend to have better food, but they can also afford high quality ingredients. A great chef working in a Waffle-House can only do so much.
Back to the OP, I would be interested to know if she expected to get free meals because she was giving the restaurant publicity. I can imagine that thought running through someone’s head. Or if the entire bit was to get arrested for the publicity, like Holms suggested. And, of course, I agree with Holms about bringing in lighting equipment and cameras. If any of that was obvious enough to distract other diners from enjoying their meals, it should have been quashed before such equipment was set up.
flex thank you for mentioning the Blair Museum of Lithophanes, I had not come across lithophanes before.
@larpar
There was a recent faff here in Australia about foolish kids filming crimes and publishing them on the internet. Lead to some probably unnecessary laws
Some people get some weird ideas
@larpar, dangerousbeans:
Lawyer and YouTuber Legal Eagle literally has a video entitled ‘Don’t Film Your Crimes and Upload Them to YouTube’ with a few examples of idiots doing just that.