Fancy French Fraud Served Hot at Clubhouse to Rich and Famous

(Bloomberg) -- An owner of La Cremaillere, a traditional French restaurant that has long catered to the wealthy and famous in one of New York’s toniest suburbs, was arrested Tuesday and charged with multiple counts of fraud.

“When Barbara Meyzen’s upscale clientele of bankers, celebrities, and other notable figures frequented her restaurant, they saw a stately French manor in a serene Westchester suburb,” Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said in a statement. “What they did not see was the alleged rampant financial fraud that was happening.”

Prosecutors claim “Bobbie” Meyzen, who has owned the restaurant with her husband, Robert Meyzen, since 1993, lied and submitted phony bank statements in applying for business loans. When one lender discovered the statements were altered, she allegedly created an email account in the name of a bank officer to say they were genuine.

Meyzen even charged more than $80,000 in food and restaurant supplies to the American Express card of a frequent patron, according to the government.

Now she has “potentially earned herself a reservation for one in federal prison,” Berman said.

Meyzen, 57, pleaded not guilty and was released on a $250,000 bond, according to her lawyer, Kerry Lawrence.

Lawrence called La Cremaillere, in Westchester County’s moneyed Bedford, “one of the more revered” restaurants in the area. Vanity Fair in a 2017 headline declared it “Home to the Finest French Country Cooking on the East Coast.”

Among its patrons, the magazine ticked through a list of boldface names, including Tommy Hilfiger, Glenn Close, Tom Brokaw, Regis Philbin, Paul Shaffer, Billy Joel, Mick Jagger and Governor Andrew Cuomo. It noted that the restaurant, which opened in 1949, had a sign on the door cautioning gentlemen not to enter wearing shorts or sandals.

The menu, with its sauteed foie gras and Maine lobster ravioli, evokes an era when continental cuisine ruled and Chilean sea bass was trendy. One customer, a hedge fund manager in his 50s, said it was the go-to romantic place for locals of a certain age. Another financial services professional, who is 46 and grew up in nearby Greenwich, Connecticut, remembered La Cremaillere as a sort of landmark.

“That is a restaurant my parents always liked to go to, and I have not heard a single person mention it in years,” she said. “I figured it was because it is an old French place.”

La Cremaillere filed for bankruptcy protection from creditors in April. A commercial real estate broker marketing the property estimated that the real estate and the business, including a 14,000-bottle wine cellar, could bring as much as $3.8 million.

--With assistance from Amanda Gordon and Kate Krader.

To contact the reporter on this story: Bob Van Voris in federal court in Manhattan at rvanvoris@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Peter Jeffrey, Derek Wallbank

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