N.J. restaurant staff celebrates ‘winning’ Powerball with wrong ticket
For 20 minutes, employees at Grissini in Englewood Cliffs thought they had won
Like plenty of other American co-workers, the staff at an Italian restaurant in northern New Jersey went in on tickets for last weekend’s $900 million Powerball drawing. And for about 20 minutes on Saturday night, they say they thought they had won.
“We were laughing. We were crying,” Charlie Poveromo, a bartender at Grissini Ristorante in Englewood Cliffs, told CNN on Wednesday. “It was a beautiful thing.”
According to Poveromo, all 42 employees at the restaurant chipped in to purchase 200 tickets. And those who were working Saturday gathered by the bar shortly after the numbers were drawn.
“I got a text about 10 minutes after 11 with the numbers that a friend of mine took off the Powerball website,” Poveromo explained. “When I called them [out], you saw what happened — it was pandemonium.”
The restaurant posted cellphone and surveillance footage showing staffers and patrons celebrating their would-be near-billion-dollar bounty.
“It was a feeling of excitement, glory, the adrenaline — it was just an amazing feeling,” server Jimmy Torba told CBS New York. “Maybe we can buy, open a business. We can donate some money, change our lives. Be happy.”
Poveromo, who has worked at the restaurant for more than 12 years, said a dishwasher quit on the spot. “He took his apron off, threw it to the floor and said, ‘I’m never washing another dish in my life,’” he recalled.
A valet apparently stopped working. Like, immediately.
“One of the customers asked for his car, and he said, ‘Go get it yourself,’” Poveromo said.
Poveromo says he retreated to the bathroom to make a phone call.
“I called my wife, and she was like, ‘Please, just check the numbers again to be sure,’” he said. “And, sure enough, when I went back to the website and refreshed, there were a whole new set of numbers there.”
The winning numbers Poveromo’s friend had texted were from the Jan. 6 drawing. (Grissini posted a photo of a ticket bearing those numbers to its Facebook page in an attempt to quell online skeptics who believe the videos were part of a PR stunt to promote the restaurant.)
The bartender relayed the news to the restaurant’s host, Claudio Campos, and the pair began the grim task of informing everyone that, in fact, they were not going to be multimillionaires.
“I didn’t want to believe that,” Campos told WPIX-TV. “I said, ‘Oh my God!’ And I’m looking around, and the guys behind me were still jumping around.”
“It was tough,” Poveromo said.
But there’s always hope for the next one. Since there were no winners in Saturday’s Powerball drawing, Wednesday’s jackpot has ballooned to over $1.5 billion. And Poveromo says the staff at Grissini plans to play again.
“We’re in,” he said. “All 42 of us.”
Meanwhile, the restaurant is certainly enjoying the media attention. It is hosting a Powerball watch party on Wednesday night, and, according to its Facebook page, they’ll also be on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”
Related:
