Fiona Govan
WAITERS at one of Marbella’s most fashionable restaurants have profited from a bizarre one-upmanship between strangers who appear to have too much money to burn.
After a recent meal, a Catalan businessman added a €4,098 tip to his bill to show his solidarity to the waiting staff after an earlier diner went viral with a complaint about service charge.
Financial trader Enrique Moris made headlines earlier this month after he complained that a service charge of 10% had been added to his bill at the Playa Padre restaurant and that a waiter had expected a tip on top.
Rather than garner sympathy over the cheek of the waiter expecting a tip on top of the automatically added service charge, a practice which is still not the norm in Spain, he was lampooned for his ‘nouveau riche’ attitude and for pairing burgers with expensive champagne.
Sharing a copy of the offending bill he tweeted: “Marbella [is] the new Ibiza, Fraudsters everywhere.”
His post went viral, but not for the reasons he hoped, as the focus became his meanness towards staff in light of the vast extravagance of the meal which included Wagyu beef burgers and tacos washed down with copious amounts of tequila shots and two €1,000 magnums of Dom Perignon.
‘You have to be tacky to spend more than €3,000 in champagne to accompany some burgers. If you go big, do it with the whole menu’, someone responded.
Another said: “What do you want? Solidarity? The nouveau riche is always more stupid than people who’ve always been rich.”
“If you order a €1,000 bottle you’re asking to be swindled,” said another.
“You’ve spent at least ten pensions on a dinner of bloody hamburgers and now you want what? Solidarity?” wrote someone else.
But that wasn’t the end of it, because last weekend a Catalan businessman went to the same restaurant and booked the same table and after racking up a similarly exorbitant bill, added an extra €4,095 tip, just to make a point.
Raul Castañeda, the CEO of Preico Jurídicos which claims ‘to lead a revolution against social injustice’ posted a copy of the bill on Instagram with a message for Moris.
“Take note @ enrique.vv that the same amount you paid for a meal, I have left as a tip to the same waiters that you pissed off (by the way, very good service),” he wrote in the instagram post.
He ended it with the label #respecttothewaiters.
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