Waiter returns lost $424,000 check to woman who stiffed him on tip

EAST HARLEM, NY (WPIX) — A pizzeria waiter tracked down the retired social worker who had stiffed him on the tip — so he could return the $424,000 cashier’s check she had lost.

Armando Markaj, a waiter for nine years at Patsy’s Pizzeria in East Harlem, was the woman’s server for lunch on May 4,  he told PIX11 News.

In the course of their interaction, she asked him why most of the photos on the restaurant’s “wall of fame” were of men. “She goes, ‘Question. Why is there not too many women on the wall?'” Markaj recalled.

Not sure how to react, Markaj said he jokingly replied, “Well, maybe women don’t eat pizza. Summer is coming.”

The customer apparently didn’t find Markaj’s response amusing. When he returned to clean the table he discovered she had stiffed him on the tip. At the bottom of her tab, she had written, “Well, women don’t tip, either.”

But she had left behind more than a rebuke: There was a bank envelope on the table — and inside, a cashier’s check for close to half a million dollars. Markaj ran outside to find her, but the customer was gone.

Markaj brought the check to the restaurant’s owner and they put it aside, assuming the woman would return quickly. When she didn’t show up after a few days, they managed to contact her on Wednesday.

“She got here within 10, 15 minutes. She was here actually crying, she was like, nervous,” the owner told PIX11.

A “relieved” Karen Vinacour said the check was proceeds from her apartment sale, earmarked for a down payment on a new home.

Vinacour acknowledged to PIX11 that she had not tipped the waiter, and said she regrets that. She tried to rectify it, he said, but Markaj graciously declined.

“She apologized. The apology was accepted,” said Markaj, who’s working his way through school. “She offered to tip me, but it was… You know what, I did it for the sake of myself, so I’m not taking the tip now.”

Vinacour said that, in a twist of fate, she thinks she’ll now be friends with the waiter for life.

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