FRIED RIGHTS: Beverly Taki and husband Louis Maione say they should get $27,000 for food they had to buy after their gas was shut off and they couldn’t cook. (
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Wonder if that covers the tips.
They weren’t cookin’ with gas in their pricey Park Avenue pad — so an Upper East Side couple claims they are entitled to $27,000 for all the takeout they ate.
Beverly Taki, 66, and husband Louis Maione, 68, say their lives were turned upside down when a gas problem in their building left them unable to use their commercial-size, six-burner double oven for nearly 10 months.
The accomplished cooks say the gas was shut off to all the apartments in the “B” line at 850 Park Ave. — also designer Kate Spade’s digs — back in October 2010.
The couple, who shelled out $5,700 for monthly maintenance, claims nothing was done to ameliorate the problem and is suing the co-op board and management company Gumley Haft Realty in Manhattan Supreme Court.
What they want: Payment for all the delivery they ordered and restaurants they ate at while the burners didn’t work — $2,700 a month.
“They just seemed to disregard everybody,” Maione told The Post. “We cooked all the time. We had people over for dinner all the time.
“My wife is a fabulous cook,” Maione said of Taki, a former cabaret singer. “I’d come home and my wife would have a rib roast ready or any number of desserts she was testing.”
Those days were done when the mysterious gas problem cropped up — reducing the couple to using a hot plate on the days they didn’t eat out and forcing them to forgo their monthly dinner parties and annual holiday gatherings, they said.
Instead of their annual Christmas Eve bash, for which Maione usually creates a fish dinner with lobster sauce that takes eight hours to prepare, the couple was forced to take guests to restaurants, racking up a whopping $1,700 bill instead of the usual $600, according to court papers.
It’s unclear what caused the gas to be shut off, since no one complained of a leak, the couple maintains.
When they appealed to Gumley Haft to install electric ovens until the gas could be restored, Gumley CEO Dan Wollman allegedly told them, “That’s not going to happen,” according to the lawsuit.
Taki eventually decided to sell the three-bedroom apartment, where she had lived since 1990, for $4.4 million in July 2011. But there were sacrifices along the way — such as the six-burner stove, which included a grill and salamander but didn’t fit in their new, $12,400-a-month rental digs on Central Park South, Maione said.
Wollman did not return a call for comment.