Here's the Restaurant Where Olympic Officials Allegedly Rang Up a $70,000 Tab
This receipt, with its grand total of £44,660 — about $70,000 — was posted on Reddit yesterday with the headline "My friend's a waiter and this is a receipt for an official lunch for 15 Olympic Bosses. Now we see where all the money's going..." We found the restaurant where the supposed lunch took place.
The Redditor's since deleted his account, and we weren't able to reach him for confirmation, based on the menu — which features, like the receipt, a £19,000 (35cl!) bottle of Hennessy — we concluded that it came from China Tang in London's ritzy Dorchester hotel. We called the restaurant to see if it had hosted a 15-person Olympic luncheon; the hostess told us that it "probably" had — apparently Olympic officials have been in and out of the restaurant over the last few weeks — but she couldn't specifically confirm this one.
So we don't know for sure that it was, as some Reddit commenters suggest, a group of Olympics bureaucrats spending taxpayer money on an obscenely priced bottle of Hennessy (taxpayer money doesn't directly fund the Olympics, but taxpayers are generally left to foot the bill for the large indirect costs).
But we do know that the games are basically a long con on sucker cities and that everything about the Olympics is always corrupt. So if it was an official Olympics event we'd be betting heavily on a luncheon guest list that included those badminton players, the Azerbaijani boxing contingent, and a bunch of impossibly rich, Fascist-sympathizing minor European aristocrats. Like a scene from a sports-themed Bond movie, or a dinner made up entirely of Sasha Baron-Cohen characters.
Know anything about this receipt? Shoot me an email: max@gawker.com.