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Williamsburg restaurants are getting wise to glamorous serial dine-and-dasher Pei “Lu” Chung — although she still managed to run up a bill without paying Wednesday night.
Meanwhile, the 32-year-old wannabe food influencer – arrested five times for stiffing Michelin star restaurants like Francie and Peter Luger – is also more than $40,00 dollars behind on the rent on her luxury Williamsburg apartment, The Post has learned.
The Michelin-star menace was dressed in a fur jacket, white Louis Vuitton bag and a cashmere beret Wednesday when she went to Hole in the Wall, an Australian cafe and restaurant on Bedford Avenue in her local area.
She spent five hours inside and racked up a $77 tab, but amazingly didn’t eat a bite of her pan-seared salmon, bucatini carbonara and burrata salad, according to staff, who had instantly recognized her.
“She ordered three entrees. My manager knew about the scam. He went over there and told her, ‘Hey, you’re not going to keep this food unless you have a form of payment.’ She laughed at him,” Ross, a waiter at the eatery told the Post, declining to share his last name.
He added Chung was already seated by 5:30 p.m when he arrived. Video obtained by The Post shows Chung seated at a corner table in the eatery, shortly after posting pics on Instagram, before heading to the bathroom.
The restaurant said they didn’t want to call the NYPD.
“She’s a dainty girl – I’d rather not use the police,” Ross said, adding even his manager couldn’t get her to leave.
“He threatened to call the police on her and she said, ‘Yes, please do.’ Our manager gave up. The plates were full – we took away the plates of food and a cappuccino. She spent five hours scrolling on her phone.”
Chung is apparently unbothered by run-ins with the police. She was was arrested twice Saturday, at Sea Thai and Michelin-star Italian hotspot Misi, NYPD reports show, and given supervised release.
The dine-and-dasher, frequently wearing Prada, was also arrested and arraigned last week over being unable to pay at a string of other eateries.
lu.pychung/Instagram
Yet her spree continued after the weekend, with her hitting up 12 Chairs — where she left without paying her bill, management told The Post, on Tuesday.
Chung is a native of Taiwan who moved to New York around 2019 to attend Pratt University on a “full-ride merit scholarship,” per her LinkedIn profile. She studied information experience design and information technology and at worked at Chase bank as a consultant until 2023, according to the same profile.
It is unclear if she still works. However, she does owe more than $40,000 in unpaid rent on her luxury Williamsburg apartment, according to court documents seen by News 12. The food-photography loving fashionista apparently stopped paying rent in the posh pad she’s lived in since 2021 in 2023.
One of Chung’s neighbors emailed The Post Wednesday to claim she has been yelling outside her door and leaving trash, including dirty masks and a broken vacuum, in the hallway. She also allegedly vandalized his door.
“She had what seems like a personal issue with me for years,” Williams Gavilondo claiumed to The Post in an email. “She wrote my name on my door in red lipstick.”
Ross, the waiter at Hole in the Wall, told The Post he thinks Chung is capitalizing on her content.
“It’s 100% for fame and attention. The more the cops get called on her, the more famous she can get out of it. The notoriety,” Ross said.
Chung’s Instagram follower numbers have jumped from 13,000 to 22,000 in the last week. She has not responded to requests for comment from The Post.
“The cops also don’t want to put in the effort of writing the report, taking her to jail and all this other stuff – and she knows that. The more the cops come here, the more content she can create,” the waiter claimed.
“It’s Gen Z, TikTok bulls—t. She’s totally normal.”
“But the word is out – my manager is trying to spread it as much as possible now that it happened to us.”
English (US)