Two masked men with a shotgun stormed a popular Manhattan restaurant owned by famed chef Mario Batali looking for thousands of dollars in cash – but made off only with envelopes containing worthless paper receipts, authorities said yesterday.
Customers were long gone by the time the thieves busted into Esca, a trendy, high-end Italian restaurant at 402 W. 43rd St. last week.
According to law-enforcement sources, two men stormed a back door early Thursday and headed straight for a coat closet where up to $15,000 had been stored – the earmarks of a possible inside job.
But the crooks managed to botch the holdup and walk away with only the receipts, sources said.
It remained unclear yesterday as to whether the cash had been moved before the caper or the thieves simply missed it.
“All I can tell you is there was no money stolen,” Esca manager Simon Dean said.
A worker at the restaurant told the cops that he was preparing to lock up when he heard a knock at the back door at about 2:30 a.m.
He said he thought it was a colleague who had just taken out the garbage.
Instead, it was two masked men dressed in black, one of whom was totting a shotgun.
After pushing the worker aside, the pair went straight to the coat closet and snatched several envelopes.
Dean told the cops that he had placed the cash in the closet earlier in the week for a pickup that never came.
The police declined to say whether they thought the caper was an inside job, but one investigator called the break-in “suspicious.”
Esca – which means “bait” in Italian – opened in 2000 and is one of several New York restaurants owned or co-owned by celebrity chef Batali.
He co-owns Esca with chef-fisherman David Pasternack. The restaurant’s featured attraction is crudo, or raw fish with Italian seasonings.
Batali, a writer, TV personality and culinary-school dropout, owns 13 restaurants, including New York City’s Babbo and Del Posto.
Forbes magazine said Batali was one of America’s top-earning chefs, raking in about $3 million a year.
Batali was featured for years on the Food Network, where he was one of its “Iron Chefs.” His contract with the TV show ended in 2007.