Elite restaurant in New York turned out to be a hoax (6 photos + 1 video)

Pranksters opened a fake steakhouse for one day, where visitors had been waiting for the opportunity to eat for several years.





A guy from New York named Mehran Jalali would gather friends and neighbors at his Upper East Side home for a steak dinner every two weeks. Jalali's evenings became a tradition, and his friends jokingly marked the 21-year-old New Yorker's home as a steakhouse on Google Maps and showered him with enthusiastic comments. Soon the joke got out of control, and strangers became interested in the “establishment”, curious to try the mysterious steaks. This is how the idea was born to create the non-existent restaurant Mehran’s Steakhouse.

Mehran created a website for a fake steakhouse. On the portal, Jalali promised gourmets and lovers of haute cuisine a “revolutionary steak” made in a restaurant with a hundred-year history. The mysterious establishment attracted so much interest from strangers that the waiting list was replenished by 2,600 people back in 2022.

To finally get into the “famous” steakhouse, visitors had to wait two years. On a September weekend, Mehran and his friends still held a dinner party with steaks for 140 people, a correspondent for the New York Post reports.

The Pranksters rented a former public bathhouse now used for events, hired volunteers and obtained a one-day liquor and food processing license.



The room was furnished with tables covered with a white tablecloth. Waiters walked around the hall and offered milk to visitors.





Hints that the establishment was not real were everywhere. Starting from the interior of the “restaurant” and ending with photoshopped photographs of celebrities on the walls. In the photo, Mehran, as a chef, poses next to Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein and President Kennedy, for whom the young chef allegedly cooked. Also on the walls were “archival” advertising posters, one of which was dedicated to bone marrow ice cream.



Dinner at the fictional restaurant cost visitors $114. Guests were served steak with a side dish of potatoes and herbs and milk in elegant glasses.



The evening was not without entertainment. Visitors were treated to covers of pop hits performed on the violin. And the main event was the marriage proposal (it was also fake).



Many guests had no idea that they had become part of a comedy performance. Although some visitors noticed the operators scurrying back and forth and even snuck into the kitchen to find out what was happening, the staff did not confess. It was only towards the end of the evening—and the existence of the “hundred-year-old steakhouse”—that the patrons realized that no restaurant existed. Some guests were unhappy with this turn of events and doubted the legality of the prank, others took it lightly and thanked him for the entertainment.