This Celebrity Chef Just Robbed 3 Banks In Under 24 Hours

Famous chefs are often known for bad behavior like abusing staff and customers, but robbing banks is not normally on the menu. The wild story unfolded last week in San Francisco, where a prominent chef who is well known in the city, Valentino Luchin, reportedly stole money from three different banks in the city in one day. According to ABC News, Luchin slid notes demanding money to bank tellers at locations in and around the Central District of the city on September 10, 2025. Descriptions from witnesses helped police to quickly identify Luchin, and he was arrested without incident. Investigators have not revealed how much money he stole, but bail has been set at $200,000 and Luchin is currently in police custody awaiting charges.

Amazingly, this is not the first time Luchin, who worked at some of San Francisco's best restaurants, has been arrested for robbery. Back in 2018, he was arrested for stealing $15,000 from a bank in the suburban East Bay community of Orinda. After that incident he pled guilty to second-degree robbery and was sentenced to one year in jail and three years of probation. The story that led to this downward spiral seems to have started just a few years earlier, and was tied to the closing of his restaurant Ottavio Osteria in 2016.

Luchin came to the United States in 1993 from the Veneto region around Venice in Italy, and was known for specializing in regional Italian cooking. His most prominent role was as executive chef at a restaurant called Rose Pistola, which was known as one of San Francisco's best Italian restaurants for over two decades. Rose Pistola, which won a James Beard Award for best new restaurant in 1997, closed back in 2017, but by then Luchin had left to open his own restaurant, Ottavio Osteria, in the town of Walnut Creek in 2010. It is not clear what sank Luchin's restaurant, but when it closed in 2016 he was revealed to be in quite a bit of debt. 

Luchin had defaulted on bankruptcy payments before the restaurant even closed, and court records showed that he owned $111,000 in liabilities. The next year, after his first arrest, Luchin spoke to the East Bay Times and told reporters "everything went downhill," saying he had been unable to find steady work after the closure. Luchin claimed the first robbery was an unplanned act of spontaneous desperation, and said he had used a BB gun because he didn't want to hurt anybody. In 2022, it was reported that he had joined the staff of The Old Clam House in San Francisco, one of the oldest restaurants in the U.S., but sadly it seems that wasn't enough to stave off his desperation again.