In the mid-2000s, Pure Food and Wine was all the rage, and celebrity guests were not uncommon. Anne Hathaway, Katie Holmes, Janet Jackson, Alec Baldwin and Common have all dined at the Manhattan restaurant, which was opened in 2004 by Sarma Melngailis and her then-boyfriend and chef Matthew Kenney. Opened in year. But as recounted in the Netflix documentary Bad Vegan , the once-thriving restaurant fell into disarray after Merguelis married Anthony Strangis, aka Sean Fox decline. By July 2015, Pure Food and Wine closed permanently.
After Melngailis and Kenney split in 2005, she took over the company with the help of investor Jeffrey Chodorow. In 2010, she opened One Lucky Duck juice bar in Manhattan, and two years later established a raw food production center and online sales office in Brooklyn. In its heyday, Pure Food and Wine regularly appeared on several top restaurant lists in New York City, including Forbes and New York Magazine.
Melngailis met Strangis on Twitter in 2011 and the two married in 2012. A later investigation found that by 2013, Strangis had become "a frequent visitor to [Melngailis's] company and [began to exercise] power over the company." According to the 2016 indictment, Melngailis allegedly transferred more than $1.6 million from business accounts to her personal bank account between January 2014 and January 2015. Strangis allegedly spent much of the money at Connecticut casinos, specialty watch retailers such as Rolex and Beyer, and various other venues. Hotels in Europe and New York. Shortly after, employee wages were refunded, resulting in 98 employees being furloughed. Pure Food and Wine reportedly closed after its doors were plastered with signs protesting unpaid wages.
Thanks to a handful of investors (who were also allegedly defrauded by Strangis, who posed as a potential buyer), Pure Food & Wine and One Lucky Duck's Brooklyn locations reopened in April 2015. Within months, Melngailis allegedly again transferred large sums of money into her personal account. She and Strangis absconded, and employees' wages jumped again. According to the 24-count indictment, the pair allegedly defrauded 84 workers of up to $3,500 each, for a total of more than $40,000. That July, Pure Food and Wine closed its doors for good.
Authorities eventually located and arrested Melgelis and Strangis in May 2016 at a hotel in Tennessee. The couple faces charges of second-degree grand larceny, second-degree criminal tax fraud, first-degree scheme to defraud, labor law violations and other crimes. After his arrest, Merngelis accepted a plea deal and spent four months in jail and five years of probation. Strangis pleaded guilty to four counts of fourth-degree grand larceny and was sentenced to one year in prison and five years of probation in addition to paying $840,000 in restitution.
Although a group of former employees reportedly tried to reopen Pure Food and Wine under new ownership, they were ultimately unsuccessful. Melngelis, who divorced Strangis, told the New York Post in 2019 that she was willing to try opening the store again herself. “If there was some magical opportunity to open the same restaurant in the same place, I would do it without hesitation,” she told the newspaper after her release from Rikers Island. "I think New York will take me back."
