Twitch streamer Lacy was midway through a meal in Japan when restaurant staff began bringing him more food. Food that he says he didn’t order.
During an Oct. 28 livestream, the content creator, whose real name is Nicholas “Nick” Fosco, was dining with his girlfriend, TikTok influencer Darla Claire, when he accidentally exposed the restaurant’s QR code ordering system to the thousands of people watching him.
The restaurant’s menu has customers order their food by scanning a QR code associated with their table. Some of his 3.5 million followers apparently saw this as an opportunity for a very expensive prank, because when Lacy accidentally showed his code to the camera, viewers were able to access the menu remotely and started ordering food on his behalf. A lot of food.
In footage from the livestream, a server is seen approaching the table and asking questions about additional orders.
Lacy appears confused, insisting the table hadn’t ordered more food, but quickly caught on to what was happening. “Ohh, they might’ve saw the QR,” he says, pointing directly at the camera.
Lacy then tries to stop additional orders, but the damage may already have been done. Later in the stream, Lacy addresses his followers directly, claiming that the prank left him with a $12,000 restaurant bill “because you guys thought it would be funny.”
Despite his plea that the charges weren’t his fault, the restaurant went on to present him with a receipt totaling 500,000 Japanese yen (around $3,167 USD), which can be seen during the stream.
According to the streamer, the restaurant then hit him with two more receipts, for a combined total of around 1.6 million yen. “And then they come out with 15 plates of food that just had to go to waste, so that poor restaurant just had to cook 1.5 million yen worth of food,” he says.
Lacy’s frustration is not just due to his enormous bill, but also to the predicament the massive order may have created for the restaurant employee. He says he told the server: “I’ll pay for it, sorry about that, you can hand out the food to all the families here.”
“So they just started handing out all the food to families, and I paid 12 grand USD for food that you guys thought it would be funny to order,” he says.
Viewers might’ve thought it was funny, but the streamer did not. “I’ve never seen anything like that,” he says. “That was, like, weird, chat. I’m really upset right now.”
However, there is some uncertainty surrounding Lacy’s claim that he paid for the extra food ordered by viewers. After clips of the incident began circulating online, an X user shared Instagram screenshots of what appeared to be a statement from the restaurant, Zauo Shibuya, disputing Lacy’s account and claiming the streamer was charged only for the food he actually consumed.
Spilled also reports that restaurant staff “claim the kitchen never cooked the extra food and that staff gave him the receipt and asked him to mark what he actually ordered.”
In the post, the restaurant noted that it had received 1.96 million yen worth of prank orders (a number that differs from Lacy’s estimate of around 1.6 million). “We carefully reviewed each order with the customer and charged them only for the items they actually consumed,” the restaurant explained in Japanese, according to a translation of the purported statement.
Note: BuzzFeed has not been able to independently verify the restaurant’s statement.
According to the screenshots, Zauo Shibuya disputed Lacy’s account of what happened with the unwanted food, saying they “discarded some items.” The restaurant also added that it hoped people would understand what actually happened, noting the “criticisms” it has been receiving based on “misunderstanding.” Indeed, dozens of comments on TMZ’s repost of Lacy’s clip on Instagram accused the restaurant of “scamming.”
However, there were also plenty of comments accusing Lacy of staging the scenario, with many folks questioning how or why a restaurant would fulfill $12,000 worth of orders without verifying with the group, as well as why there’s no footage of all that extra food arriving at Lacy’s table.
Others wondered how many of Lacy’s stream viewers are actual fans, with one X user writing, “this is what it looks like in real time to realize you hate the very people that you make all of your money off of.”
Regardless of the details of the final bill, the incident clearly left restaurant employees facing the consequences of a prank they had no part in, which is not okay. Would you ever pull a prank like this?
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