A Fedora-Wearing Dine-and-Dasher Wrote Reviews for the Restaurants He Scammed

Last month, a TripAdvisor reviewer using the name EventsByThirteen shared his thoughts on more than a dozen Baltimore restaurants, bars, and coffee shops. He called the Golden West Cafe “A TREAT!!!!!,” praised the “simply luscious” tacos and trout at Points South, and said that he “never regrets” the drinks and food at Todd Conner’s. What he somehow failed to mention in those glowing five-star reviews is that he skipped out of all three of those restaurants without paying his bill.

According to the Baltimore Sun, Alex Todd McKay—the man behind that TripAdvisor account—has allegedly spent the past month dining-and-dashing at some of the city’s best eateries, and has found a way to ditch the check so often that restaurant workers started a Facebook group so they could track him around the city.

What made the 54-year-old McKay stand out was that he looks less like a scam artist and more like somebody’s well-dressed, if slightly douchey, stepdad. He has been spotted wearing madras shirts, blazers, and an ever-present fedora. (It’s been three years since the Entourage movie; we can be forgiven if we all briefly forgot that fedoras are like cake toppers for terrible people). He is always charming, engaging, and chatty with the waitstaff, and often drops names of fashion designers he knows or references to his upscale event-planning business.

Again, some of the things he forgets to mention in this casual conversations are his conviction for bank fraud for $65,000 in worthless checks he used at high-dollar galleries, shops, and hotels in Savannah, Georgia, or the two years he spent in federal prison after he skipped out on a $1,030 bill at the Tabard Inn in Washington, DC. (That violated the terms of his release after his first conviction, the Sun says).

After four days in May when he escaped from three different restaurants without settling up, restaurant workers were on high alert. McKay was eating at Joe Benny’s in Baltimore’s Little Italy neighborhood when a neighbor warned owner Joe Gardella about his increasingly notorious customer. Gardella stopped a police officer, who questioned McKay; the man said that he was terribly sorry, but he’d left his wallet at Johns Hopkins hospital after having a medical procedure done.

“I would have come right back and paid him, but he was such an [expletive],” McKay told the Sun. “It doesn’t make it right. I’m going to pay him when the shit stops. They’re making it a drama.” (Perhaps unsurprisingly, he didn’t write a review for Joe Benny’s).

He says that his unpaid bills are all mistakes or misunderstandings, due to both circumstances—sometimes he’s the last person at the table when the party ends—or as a side effect from an antibiotic he’s taking after drinking “parasitic water” in New York City.

He has been charged with theft over an unpaid bill of $237 at the Sagamore Pendry. (“The champagne was flowing!” he wrote on TripAdvisor). His trial date has been set for June 25. We look forward to reading his review of the courthouse.