💧 The Truth About the Poached Eggs Murder

[Rest in peace, Helen Menicou]
While visiting San Francisco yesterday, I stopped into an old favorite restaurant: The Pinecrest Diner. It had been over a decade since my last visit, but I found the hash browns as delicious as ever.

[Photo credit: P. Kafasis]

While there, however, I noticed something curious. No matter how much I scoured their menu, I could find no prohibition on poached eggs. That might seem an odd thing to look for, unless you know the Pinecrest’s infamous history. In 1997, it was the site of a homicide which purportedly took place over poached eggs.

When I was visiting the restaurant more regularly back in the 2000s and early-to-mid 2010s, I heard whispers of this story, but it very much had the smell of an urban legend. Still, there was no denying that poached eggs really were expressly prohibited by the menu. Here’s a picture I managed to dig up on Tripadvisor:

A previous Pinecrest menu
[Photo credit: FrancescaM]

Zooming in, it reads “We regret we cannot prepare poach or boiled eggs.”

Assuming we can trust the photo’s baked-in date, the prohibition lasted at least until 2018.

I don’t even eat eggs, but during late night visits, I felt something akin to the call of the void. I would fantasize about making a seemingly oblivious request for the forbidden dish, or endorsing the diner to others by suggesting that they “try the poached eggs!”.

After my recent meal, I decided I should learn the true story. A quick web search led to a 2021 piece Katie Dowd wrote, which provides a thorough history of this incident. She details how shift manager Helen Menicou and cook Hashem Zayed really did have a fight about a special order for poached eggs, and spells out the fatal results. It was a terrible waste of two different lives.

Despite that tragedy, the diner itself has lived on. I’m not sure what their current policies are regarding special orders of items not on the menu, but it’s probably better safe than sorry. While I can certainly recommend you visit Pinecrest if you’re in San Francisco, I cannot in good conscience recommend that you try the poached eggs.