“When people send me messages saying, ‘I miss the Mallomar so much,’ every time it’s heartwarming, and I genuinely appreciate [them] saying that, but now I’m going to go cry,” Sarma Melngailis, the former owner of the celebrity-studded Manhattan vegan restaurant Pure Food and Wine, said recently. “It’s a painful reminder.”
It has been nearly six years since Melngailis was arrested after a bizarre series of events that led to her bilking investors, stiffing employees, and moving millions out of her Gramercy temple to clean eating to Anthony Strangis, a man she met on social media and eventually married, who, she says, held a svengali-like hold on her. The story was perfect tabloid bait.
When I first wrote about Melngailis for Vanity Fair in November 2016, the broadsheets had dubbed her “the runaway vegan,” reveling in the fall of a restaurateur who counted Owen Wilson, Bill Clinton, and Anne Hathaway as customers. That Strangis, a junk-food-loving gambler she met in Alec Baldwin’s Twitter mentions, had gotten them busted on the lam in May 2016 by ordering Domino’s to their Tennessee hotel sealed her gossip-page fate. (An aggrieved investor once quipped to me that Melngailis was “guilty of conduct unbecoming a vegan.”) The story, though, was much darker, and stranger, in many ways.
Melngailis claimed that through gaslighting techniques, Strangis had her believing that if she endured a series of humiliating tests, including sending him money, she would pass into a new reality where she and her beloved pit bull Leon would be made immortal. She’d also gain vast wealth and the power to steer the world toward a vegan future.
“I’d be glad if my situation becomes a case study in all kinds of ways,” she told me in a series of phone calls and emails. “I want this stuff to be useful, not merely fodder for people’s creepy entertainment.”
About that: Melngailis and I were corresponding ahead of the debut this week of a Netflix series about her downfall, the latest entry in the ever-flowing scammer-to-docuseries pipeline. Melngailis and I both participated in the show, Bad Vegan, and when we spoke I found that it had torn thin scabs off many of her emotional wounds. (In my initial article, Strangis’s lawyer denied her version of events, and Strangis did not agree to be interviewed for the docuseries.)
Once Melngailis and Strangis were taken back to New York, they were charged with a series of felonies. A former employee in the docuseries says that Strangis, in prison stripes for his Tennessee mugshot, looked like the Hamburglar. The new series tallies up Melngailis’s losses at around $6 million—including $400,000 her mother is out. She and Strangis each pleaded guilty—Melngailis to grand larceny, criminal tax fraud, and a scheme to defraud, and Strangis to four counts of fourth-degree grand larceny—and were sentenced to jail time and restitution. Melngailis served a total of four months behind bars and Strangis one year. They were both sentenced to five years’ probation.
In the years since the article, I have stayed in touch with Melngailis and other players in the saga. The series, which mostly covers events between 2011 and 2016, features a recorded phone call between Melngailis and Strangis in which he refers to “that Vanity Fair cocksucker.” Since then, Melngailis has not exactly put her life back together. Where once she reigned over a profitable restaurant, authoring cookbooks and rubbing elbows with celebrities who drank sake-based cocktails like the Master Cleanse Tini, she’s now trying to pay debts and working as an administrative/executive assistant.
“I have moved around and have had to rely a lot on friends,” she says, “but very much want to have my own New York City home base again for just Leon and me.”
She is currently reading Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems by Alexandra Stein. Such books help her understand what she believes she went through. “Like dissociation, and the fact I can’t remember so much stuff. I feel close to former cult members because we understand one another.” She recently recorded an interview for a forthcoming episode of the podcast A Little Bit Culty, hosted by Sarah Edmondson and Anthony “Nippy” Ames, survivors of NXIVM.