London is experiencing a pint-, plate- and saucer-sized crimewave. While the items smuggled into clutch bags or totes are usually rather insignificant individually – cutlery, cruets, ramekins, mills, saucers or even mugs – the theft of tableware from restaurants and cafés is becoming increasingly common. A recent survey by a UK catering firm found that just under a third of British adults (some 17 million people) have helped themselves to tableware from a bar or restaurant. In 2023 it cost the industry €220m in glassware alone.

While it might sound trivial, this banal brand of knife crime isn’t experienced equally: it’s usually the small, interesting independent restaurants that feel the cut most deeply. “Sadly, the losers are the people who need to replace what has been taken when times are tough and margins are small,” says restaurant-and-bar consultant Adam Hyman, the founder of London-based Code Hospitality. 

The practice hit home recently when a few too many sticky-fingered customers relieved the Monocle Café on London’s Chiltern Street of enough Japanese-made Hasami mug and saucer sets to make continuing to stock them silly. In fairness, they’re fetching and available online for £60 (€71). Some customers might not have noticed our smart ceramic switcheroo to a super alternative by German firm Schönwald but it’s a shame when the actions of a small, grabby group affect the experience of the many.

In the abstract, most people accept that theft is wrong – and, of course, not everyone leaves with the cup that their coffee came in. But there’s an allure to holding on to a natty dachshund-shaped Quail salt shaker from a great meal or that Marimekko espresso set from your Finnair flight. Some restaurants might also be complicit in causing confusion. “In the world of social media and ‘shareable experiences’, online souvenirs can be clever marketing tools if they are intended to be taken in the first place,” says Hyman. He also cites a recent story about a Gordon Ramsay restaurant from which almost 500 waving-cat figurines costing a total of about £2,000 (€2,366) were stolen in a single working week. “Some operators with deeper pockets deliberately encourage people to take certain items,” he adds. “A well-known Mayfair sushi restaurant has ‘stolen from’ printed on the base of its chopstick holder.” 

Now for a confession: perhaps I have been part of the problem. It’s hardly a bank heist (your honour) but I can certainly identify an ashtray at home that I liberated from a rather nice restaurant in my younger, sillier days. In my defence, it happened in the heady, hazy times when you could smoke inside – and I’m not proud. Today, needless to say, I would investigate the make and source my own if such an urge ever struck. 

“The rule is not to steal,” says Hyman with a moral clarity that might have served my younger self well. “Ask your server whether the restaurant sells them and if you can buy the item that you’ve eyed up.” Fair enough. I have seen this course of action end well with gifts exchanged and all parties leaving pleased (yes, the waiter gifted my friend that doggy-shaped shaker that her heart desired). 

Nabbing a restaurant napkin as a keepsake isn’t the biggest or most pressing problem that you’ll read about today but, in a small way, it matters and means something. The selfish things that we do in everyday life can make all the difference to businesses on a knife edge, which are left to pick up the no-longer-matching-pieces. Losses for a nice neighbourhood restaurant shouldn’t be a fork-gone conclusion.

Josh Fehnert is Monocle’s editor. For more from the worlds of everything from design to diplomacy, subscribe to Monocle today.