Moped-Riding Thieves Frighten Diners at Upscale N.Y.C. Restaurants

Not 10 minutes into date night, Gabe Thomas and his girlfriend, Shirley Yu, found themselves crouched under their table at Birds of a Feather, a sleek Chinese restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where a plate of pea shoots costs $21.

Just 20 feet away, a man wearing a mask brandished a gun in the crowded dining room and with a henchman grabbed two phones and a watch from three men at a table near the front door.

Diners dashed into the kitchen. Chairs toppled. Glasses shattered. A cacophony of screams filled the room.

The perpetrators quick-walked out and fled on a moped, leaving behind a half-empty dining room where a handful of unfired bullets had fallen to the floor. The stickup took less than 40 seconds.

The robbery in the heart of Williamsburg — a once-bohemian enclave in North Brooklyn now home to designer clothing stores and glassy towers — alarmed and unsettled both foodies and residents. And it was just one in a string of similar robberies in and around some of Brooklyn’s and Lower Manhattan’s most in-vogue establishments in the past month. In each case, the perpetrators have swiped luxury watches from diners, according to the police, including, in one episode, a timepiece worth $100,000.

Such crimes are unusual in the affluent neighborhoods that have been targeted, rare incursions of the city’s troubles into its glittering play spots. And they have lit up message boards, receiving the kind of outsize attention — and outrage — that everyday crimes in New York’s poorer neighborhoods often do not. The thefts have propelled persistent grousing that the city is slipping into lawlessness, a perception that no recitation of contrary statistics has dispelled.