A financial trader who griped online about the cost of the service charge and tip at a Marbella restaurant quickly found the tables were turned after he was lampooned for spending €4,000 (£3,400) on burgers, tequila shots and champagne.
“Marbella, the new Ibiza, fraudsters everywhere,” tweeted Enrique Moris, who also posted a photograph of his bill.
He claimed that after his group of eight paid a €372 service charge at the restaurant on Spain’s Costa del Sol, he was preparing to leave when an angry waiter ran over to ask if the party was going to leave a tip.
An automatic service charge is not standard in Spain, where people often leave a discretionary tip of less than 5 per cent. Moris’s morning-after-the-night-before Twitter complaint quickly racked up more than 2,800 likes.
However, the tone began to change as users started mocking his conspicuous consumption and supposedly poor taste.
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“You’ve spent ten pensions on a … dinner of hamburgers,” tweeted one user. “What do you want? Solidarity? The nouveau riche is always more stupid than people who’ve always been rich.”
Another joked that he must have been “skint” if “you’ve only spent £500 a head in Marbella”.
Moris, whose Twitter background image includes a montage of the Wall Street sign, American flags and a sports car, describes himself as “a day trader in love with the stock market”.
As well as other drinks and starters, his party had ordered 13 pints of beer at €7 each, two magnums of Dom Perignon champagne at €1,000 a bottle and Wagyu beef burgers at €28 each.
Centre-right newspaper El Mundo concluded that “Twitter is laughing at the complaints of an expert in trading over a restaurant bill”.
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After thousands commented on Moris’s post, the trader tweeted again to imply that he had planned to whip up an argument after reading a book on marketing, advising “say something to start a fight”.
Later he complained: “People are talking more than they should about a meal.”