A Chinese restaurant in Queens was vandalized Saturday afternoon by a regular customer who had been kicked out of the establishment earlier in the day for not wearing pants, the owner said.
The disgruntled man returned to 4 Choices & A Soup on Roosevelt Avenue in Flushing with a hammer at 4:40 p.m., smashing doors, windows and the glass surrounding the food bar, according to the owner and security footage.
‘”He went to our store many times already today. I already asked my worker. My workers [said he had] been there before without any pants,” Jenny Xie, 48, told The Post in a phone interview.
“Just disgusting. So we told him to go out.”
“He had no underwear,” the restaurateur added.
It wasn’t the first the suspect had caused a commotion at the eatery, the owner said.
“He pees in front of store. One day, he had no [clothes] on.”
The suspect was caught on camera wearing a red T-shirt, swinging his hammer with reckless abandon, leaving widespread destruction and piles of shattered glass in his wake.
The man visits sometimes visits the eatery multiple times a day, speaking to himself about his family in Chinese, the owner claimed.
“Everybody knows that he has a mental problem, so most of the time we … serve him right away,” Xie said. “We don’t wait too long to get him his food.”
The unidentified suspect was quickly arrested and charges against him were pending, the NYPD said.
Despite his destructive rampage, Xie said she suspected the man was off his meds and hoped he got psychiatric help.
“We think if he takes his medicine he is very normal. He comes in and says ‘hello’ to us,” she said.
“We don’t want him to go to jail if he has mental problems because sometimes [mental patients] couldn’t control themselves.”
The disturbing incident came a day after a man was arrested for murdering a Queens Chinese food deliveryman over an argument about duck sauce, and amid a steep uptick in hate crimes against people of Asian descent in the US.
Xie said she has worried about the safety of her all-female staff during the pandemic and even began closing 4 Choices & A Soup earlier, as more and more homeless and unstable people congregated on Roosevelt Avenue in recent years.
“Our restaurant is opened 18 years. We have never had this kind of situation. I’m so surprised he is Chinese and he is [an] old man,” she said of the suspect, estimating that he is older than 50.
