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Pub landlord fumes as yet another ‘dine and dash’ leaves him with unpaid bill
Whether it’s the cost of living crisis or just the recent spate of warm weather going to peoples’ heads, there seems to have been sudden epidemic of “dine and dash” incidents plaguing Britain’s pubs and restaurants in recent months,
Most recently, landlord Mark Robbie – who runs the Butchers Arms in Stoke-on-Trent – is counting the cost after three diners “did a runner” without paying for roast dinners that he had cooked “with his own fair hand”.
“They were sitting in the beer garden at the back of the pub,” Mark told Stoke-on-Trent Live. “They’d even asked where to pay. The guy with the German Shepherd left first and then the man and woman with the small dog left two to three minutes later.
READ MORE: ‘Karen’s Diner waitress told my daughter I do sex work – they crossed the line’
“It might be £35 but every penny counts in a business like this,” Mark added. “It’s theft at the end of the day. If I drove off a petrol station forecourt without paying I’m sure police would be on my doorstep.
“It is quite rare for such a thing to happen here, but since I put the Facebook post up I’ve had several people in hospitality in the Stoke-on-Trent area contact me to say this has happened to them too.”
The outrageous incident is just the latest in a flurry of people doing a runner.
The Sawadee Thai restaurant in Kemptown, Brighton posted CCTV evidence of a couple pulling the same trick last week.
“We got very upset at first, then we thought of making a video so that they can’t get away with it,” the owner explained.
That incident followed a few days after a similar lunch larceny at the Fisherman’s Arms in Cornwall, where a family ran up a bill of over £200 before “popping out for a cigarette and never returning.
Those miscreants were also seen doing the same trick in a restaurant in Essex as the diner boss said: “As soon as I saw the images, I knew that it was the same people who did a runner from my restaurant.”
Restaurant owner Karim Ullah who owns Brohmon restaurant in Stansted Mountfitchet, Essex, claims the family left him with an unpaid £182.15 bill. In that case, remarkably, the diners had an attack of conscience and returned to pay up.
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