We were walking down Valencia this past Saturday evening when someone passed us from the other direction carrying a fairly standard ordinary metal chair. Not too odd, until someone further behind yelled “CHAIR!!!” quite loudly, which caused the first to drop the chair and hurriedly walk away.
The voice turned out to belong to a waiter from Grub down the street who collected the chair and started walking back to the restaurant. When asked what had caused the commotion, he explained that someone had simply grabbed the seat from an outdoor table as they were strolling by and tried to walk away with it. They had gotten about a block and a half away before getting spooked by the pursuing waiter and dropping the loot.
Does this sort of thing happen often? I also remember sitting in the Gracias Madre front patio area eating an overpriced but delicious nopales taco when a person who looked like late ’80s/early ’90s Robert Smith passed by on the sidewalk, then doubled back and into the patio to nab a few of the decorative blankets piled before the front windows. All I did was chuckle that time, and the waitstaff didn’t seem to notice.
A blanket I can understand given San Francisco’s schizophrenic weather, but this begs the question: Who steals a chair?
