Armando Markaj has been serving customers at the First Avenue pizzeria for nine years. The walls are decorated with photos of famous guests that have dined at the restaurant. Karen Vinacour was eating with friends at the restaurant and asked Markaj why there were hardly any women in the photos.
"There's a bunch of women, and she goes 'not as much as there should be.' Well, summer is coming, probably women don't like to eat pizza as much. You know, sense of humor," he said.
Vinacour and her guests didn’t like that response and decided, "The consensus of opinion was not to give him a tip, and we wrote on the note 'women eat pizza, and by the way, have you heard that women don't leave tips?'”
As Markaj was cleaning the table, he noticed that Vinacour had left a cashier’s check for $424,000. Instead of throwing the check away, he tracked down Vinacour so she could pick up check the which was a down payment for a new home. "I'm so grateful that the insult that we gave him did not prevent him from doing the right thing," Vinacour said.
She offered Markaj money, but he wouldn’t not accept it.
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