It’s a nightmare situation for any consumer: You’ve just finished your expensive meal and suddenly realize you can’t pay because you don’t have your wallet. How do you convince the restaurant manager to cut you some slack? What if they won’t?

This is how an Italian lawyer visiting New York City ended up spending the night in jail earlier this week, reports the NY Daily News.

The attorney had just received the $208 bill for his dinner at well-known steakhouse Smith & Wollensky when he finally noticed that he was without his wallet.

He says he tried to plead with the staff to let him go back to his hotel to get it so he could pay what he owed.

“I was going to leave my iPhone,” he recalls to the Daily News. “I suggested they bring a bus boy with me… It would have been an easy trip.”

Instead, the manager contacted the police, who the man says refused to take him up on his suggestion to escort him to his hotel and back.

“They replied that they were not a taxi service,” he says. “The next thing I know, I was put in handcuffs.”

The owner of another famed NY steakhouse, Bobby Van’s, explains that “There are more cons than ever in this economy we’re in… It’s just a sign of the times. Maybe [Smith & Wollensky] just put their foot down.”

After spending his night in jail, which the attorney says “like a movie,” a judge dismissed the charges against him under the agreement that he would return to the court to pay the money he owes the restaurant.

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