Diner filmed ‘pulling hair out and putting it in food to get out of paying’
Shocking footage captures the moment a diner at a Chinese restaurant pulls hair out of her head and places it in her food in an attempt to weasel out of paying the bill.
CCTV provided by the Oriental Garden in Northampton shows the woman discreetly pluck the hair and put it on her plate while dining with a male companion.
She then told staff she had ‘found a hair’ in her meal and allegedly ‘pushed past’ the servers, leaving with her male companion without picking up the £77 bill.
The incident occurred on April 28 in the wake of a string of ‘dine and dash’ incidents across the country, prompting the Oriental Garden to now ask customers it does not recognise to pay while placing their order to avoid further losses.
Speaking to the MailOnline, the restaurant owner said: ‘A member of staff came over and said they’d found a hair in their food and wanted to speak to me.
‘The hair was sitting perfectly on the top, so I said maybe it had fallen from her head.
‘It got to the point where she was bickering and shouting, then she pushed past me.’
Despite the incident, the owner said they felt ‘a lot better’ after realising the incident had been caught on camera.
‘I warned them there were cameras everywhere. Maybe they thought there was only one,’ he said.
The owner, who asked not to be named, also said they had suffered two more dine-and-dashers since the hair incident, costing the restaurant nearly £200.
‘It’s a shame because everyone is struggling in the industry at the moment,’ they said. ‘We usually only get one or two of these incidents each year.’
A worker at the nearby Mayflower Restaurant said he had also seen customers placing hair in their food before not paying.
The unnamed worker told MailOnline that it has happened ‘a couple of times in here’
He added: ‘It’s people who aren’t local, they all say they’ve come from the hotel.’
Last month, notorious dine-and-dash couple Bernard McDonagh, 41, and Ann McDonagh, 39, from Port Talbot, Wales, were charged with five counts of fraud after engaging in a series of dine-and-dash incidents over a period of nine months.
The couple skipped out on bills worth £1,168 across five restaurants, and also admitted shoplifting a total of £1,017 from Tommy Hilfiger, Sainsbury and Tesco.
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