The Pinecrest Diner is a popular all-night diner

Diner

A diner, also spelled dinor in western Pennsylvania is a prefabricated restaurant building characteristic of North America, especially in the Midwest, in New York City, in Pennsylvania and in New Jersey, and in other areas of the Northeastern United States, although examples can be found throughout...

-style restaurant

Restaurant

A restaurant is an establishment which prepares and serves food and drink to customers in return for money. Meals are generally served and eaten on premises, but many restaurants also offer take-out and food delivery services...

 in San Francisco, California

San Francisco, California

San Francisco , officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.15 million people which includes San Jose and Oakland...

, notorious for a murder over an order of eggs.

Infamy

On July 24, 1997 an attractive woman sat down at Pinecrest's counter

Counter

In digital logic and computing, a counter is a device which stores the number of times a particular event or process has occurred, often in relationship to a clock signal.- Electronic counters :...

 and placed an order for poached egg

Poached egg

A poached egg is an egg that has been cooked by poaching, that is, in water.-Preparation:The egg is cracked into a bowl of any size, and then gently slid into a pan of simmering water and cooked until the egg white has mostly solidified, but the yolk remains soft...

s. Chef

Chef

A chef is a person who cooks professionally for other people. Although over time the term has come to describe any person who cooks for a living, traditionally it refers to a highly skilled professional who is proficient in all aspects of food preparation.-Etymology:The word "chef" is borrowed ...

 Hashem Zayed, a Jordan

Jordan

Jordan , officially the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan , Al-Mamlaka al-Urduniyya al-Hashemiyya) is a kingdom on the East Bank of the River Jordan. The country borders Saudi Arabia to the east and south-east, Iraq to the north-east, Syria to the north and the West Bank and Israel to the west, sharing...

ian immigrant, accepted the order even though the item was not on the menu

Menu

In a restaurant, a menu is a presentation of food and beverage offerings. A menu may be a la carte – which guests use to choose from a list of options – or table d'hôte, in which case a pre-established sequence of courses is served....

. Waitress Helen Menicou, who had worked with Zayed for nearly twenty years, intervened, berating him in front of customers and other employees, and instructing him not to make the dish.

The next morning, after losing several thousand dollars in an all-night gambling

Gambling

Gambling is the wagering of money or something of material value on an event with an uncertain outcome with the primary intent of winning additional money and/or material goods...

 binge, Zayed brought a .380 semiautomatic handgun to work. He announced he would shoot Menicou, then did so five times at point-blank range. She died in the hospital half an hour later.

The murder resonated among the many people Menicou knew from her many years at Pinecrest, as well as the public. Five hundred attended her funeral, and the California State Assembly

California State Assembly

The California State Assembly is the lower house of the California State Legislature. There are 80 members in the Assembly, representing an approximately equal number of constituents, with each district having a population of at least 420,000...

 adjourned in her honor on July 28. In the years since, the incident has become part of San Francisco folklore

Folklore

Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...

. No motive was ever determined for the crime other than the order of poached eggs, which remain off the menu. Nor was the identity of the customer ever discovered. Zayed himself died of a brain tumor

Brain tumor

A brain tumor is an intracranial solid neoplasm, a tumor within the brain or the central spinal canal.Brain tumors include all tumors inside the cranium or in the central spinal canal...

just over three years later, on August 13, 2000.