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Ladner’s Lara Cuisine Cafe Bistro vandalized Saturday night

A mess of hand sanitizer, littered pizza boxes and scratched furniture were waiting for staff the next morning

After a late night catering a wedding, the last thing Lara Cuisine staff were hoping for was an hour’s worth of clean-up waiting for them on Sunday morning.

Fatma Telli, owner and chef at Lara Cuisine Cafe Bistro & Catering in Ladner Village, says she stepped into her restaurant’s outdoor seating tent to hand sanitizer-coated tables that had been thrown around, littered empty pizza boxes and scratched leather chairs.

“I put this out for everybody to enjoy … I’m trying to keep this business running and then this happens to me – it’s frustrating,” says Telli.

After posting in the Ladner’s Landing Facebook group about what she discovered on Sunday morning, more than 200 people reacted and 45 people commented to express their support and disgust with what happened.

Among them was Delta Coun. Dylan Kruger who said how much he loves the outdoor patio at Lara Cuisine and to say he was sorry to hear that news.

“A lot of people have written back, and I’m still reading them – thank you so much. Everyone was so supportive. I knew Ladner was behind me,” she says.

But frustratingly, this is the second time this sort of situation has gone down in their tent.

“A citizen of ours was walking around one evening, and they phoned me up and said ‘hey Fatma, just wanted to let you know that we were walking by your tent, and we saw a couple of kids inside and they were peeing,’” she says.

Following that incident, her staff had to pull all the furniture out and scrub everything down, including the cement of the parking lot that the tent sits on.

Telli says it makes her very upset that people would do such things, and although she wishes she didn’t have to, she is now considering installing security cameras to hopefully ward off or catch any further vandalizing incidents.

In her Facebook post, she warned other local businesses with outside set ups to be wary of what they leave out overnight.

“I know that other places are opening up around me, and I want them to be safe, too,” she said.