Someone Stole Bar Agricole's 500-Pound Concrete Patio Bar, Then Abandoned It

Everyone wishes they could have a Bar Agricole mixologist whipping up cocktails in their backyard, but someone (or multiple someones) apparently took the wish literally on Sunday night, swiping the James Beard Award-nominated cocktail den's patio bar for their own nefarious purposes. When he went in on Monday morning, owner Thad Vogler didn't even notice at first that it had vanished. "Something seemed different, and my partner Eric [Johnson] realized it was that the bar was gone," he says. "It felt like when a rival high school steals your mascot."

Luckily for Bar Agricole, the bar thieves didn't get very far with their prize: at 500+ pounds of poured concrete, it apparently inspired surrender only a block and a half from Bar Agricole, at 10th and Folsom. The restaurant doesn't have security cameras, but Vogler speculates that the perp(s) somehow managed to climb Bar Agricole's 10-foot tall exterior fence, unlock the door from the inside, and then laboriously push the bar (which he says is on "casters that barely roll") down 11th. By the time Vogler and team found it the next morning, "a homeless person had moved his stuff in there," including a set of Magic: The Gathering cards. Vogler and two other staffers spent more than half an hour moving the bar the block and a half to home base, where it's now back to work serving up cocktails. In the wake of the incident, the restaurant's landlords are now installing security cameras, though the good news is that the weight of the bar appears to have been a deterrent all by itself.

Here's Vogler and crew pushing the bar back home:

My #mcm are these two guys who pushed our patio bar back after someone stole it and left it on the corner of 10th & Folsom. (These "guys" are Thad and Jai...) #baragricole

A photo posted by Bar Agricole (@baragricole) on Apr 6, 2015 at 4:36pm PDT