When someone else does not eat your food

After my magic show on Friday night, I dropped by our magic bar to see how they were doing. One of our magic bars is relocating, so only one is open now. That means that there are magicians enough to cover two magic bars all working in only one place. Though it also means that all the customers going to any of the two bars end up in the same one, there were more than enough people to handle things without me.

I went to another place in the same building to have some very late (2 am) dinner. There were three other people sitting at the counter, a youngish girl (I cannot tell how old people are in Japan...) and two serious looking men (office suits) about the same age as me. There was also the owner of the place standing at the counter. I ordered their "smoky curry", Japanese curry with smoked bacon in it, which is very nice.

Apparently, the guy sitting next to me had also ordered the same just before I entered, and the girl at the end of the counter had ordered it too, and finished most of her food before I arrived. After I got my curry, she left the counter and sat at a table for awhile, checking her e-mails or something with her phone.

When she got back to her seat at the counter, she looked at her mostly empty plate for awhile, and then she said: "Who ate my curry? There is no food left here, so someone must have eaten my curry without me noticing while I was checking my e-mail!"

For the next hour and more, she kept accusing people of eating her food; "It was you, right?" or "The guy that just left, he was the one who ate my food, right?" She was quite funny to the rest of us, though she seemed to be genuinely convinced that she had not eaten the food herself. One of the other customers bought her a new plate of curry, since the food is very cheap and he makes lots of money. She ate that, and towards the end she said she had some problems eating all of the fairly small serving. We pointed out that this might indicate that indeed she had eaten quite a lot of food before starting on this plate, but she was not convinced.

Arguments like "why would anyone who has a serious job [like everyone at the counter] and earns quite a lot of money eat your food for free even given the opportunity?" did not bite. In the end she seemed convinced that it was the owner who had snuck out from behind the counter and eaten her food without her noticing it (despite her sitting about 2 meters away from the counter, facing it). The fact that he can eat all the curry he wants for free when there are no customers in the bar did not convince her.

She asked me: "You know who ate my curry, right?" To which I responded that indeed I did know. Probably everyone at the counter knows, I told her. Indeed, everyone agreed that it was she herself who ate it. It was a very interesting happening. Drunk people can be fun sometimes.

It makes you wonder what kind of people she normally hangs out with, if someone eating your 500 yen curry when you look away is a serious concern.