‘Bad Vegan’ Sarma Melngailis claims her ex ruined her life

The recognizable duck portraits that once hung in the dining room of Pure Food and Wine now live in an apartment a block and a half away, with the shuttered Gramercy restaurant’s co-owner, Sarma Melngailis. 

“When the restaurant was opening, it started with those photographs. Those are two of the three. I got two of them back,” Melngailis, 52, told The Post.

“I didn’t want to put vegetables on the wall,” she said — despite the fact that the eatery, which was popular with A-listers like Alec Baldwin, Gisele Bündchen, Bill Clinton and Woody Harrelson, was focused on “raw vegan” dishes.

Melngailis has a thing for ducks: There’s one tattooed on her arm, and she named her mail-order food business (which, according to its website is, “re-hatching soon”) One Lucky Duck.

But she claims her own luck ran out when she fell for Anthony Strangis, her now ex-husband and the man with whom she was arrested in Tennessee, near the Dollywood theme park, in 2016.

The story of her downfall, conviction on charges of grand larceny, and subsequent prison time were detailed in the buzzy Netflix docu-series “Bad Vegan.”

Now, Melngailis is telling her side of the story in a new memoir, “The Girl With The Duck Tattoo,” and an exclusive interview with The Post.

“That guy took control of me and my mind, for the most part. He dragged me into a delusion,” she said of Strangis. “[People like that] put you in a state of fear and you end up trapped. It puts you in a situation where you don’t see your way out.” 

She claims he is to blame for driving her restaurant into the ground after promising he could help her expand the business — and make her beloved dog, Leon, live forever.

The Post has reached out to Strangis for comment.

Melngailis, who grew up in Massachusetts, was a Manhattan culinary darling before her arrest.

She gave up a career in finance to pursue a degree from the French Culinary Institute — a gamble that paid off when she and then-boyfriend Matthew Kenney, a star chef in the city’s vegan world opened their first restaurant, Commissary, in 2001, followed by Pure Food and Wine in 2004.

The couple split a year later and Melngailis bought out Kenney’s stake, throwing herself completely into the restaurant. As former employee Benito Borjas-Fitzpatrick told The Post in 2016, “She was obsessed. She worked constantly. Sometimes she would even sleep at the restaurant.”

It was a celebrity hotspot just as veganism was becoming super trendy. And it brought Melngailis her own fans, including Alec Baldwin — with whom, she claims in her memoir, she had an emotional affair. Baldwin even met his future wife, Hilaria, at Pure.

Melngailis writes in her memoir that Strangis, who also went by the name Shane Fox, came into her life through Baldwin, after the two men had a Twitter exchange in 2011.

“Then [Strangis] followed me, and I followed him back. He started commenting on my posts, and soon, our own back-and-forth ensued. It quickly moved to direct messages,” Melngailis writes. “He said his name was Shane Fox. I still didn’t know much else about him, but since Alec followed him, I assumed they were friends, or at least acquaintances.”

Melngailis and “Fox” exchanged texts, then phone calls, for two months before meeting.

“It wasn’t even that we had an emotional connection. It was that he knew how to hook me.” Melngailis told The Post.

She only found out later that he had lied about his real name — and been convicted nearly a decade before of grand theft and impersonating a police officer.

“There were so many red flags.” But, she added, “when you meet somebody in person, you’re able to sense how you feel around them. You don’t get that online.

“What I did by communicating with him so much online is, I let him get into my head before I even met him — and that was dangerous.”

She hired him as a manager at the restaurant and, employees told The Post in 2016, they saw a change in her. The staff was also wary of Strangis.

“He had an air of an Italian-style gangster . . . walking with a big gait and speaking in a cryptic fashion about money,” said former longtime bartender Daniel Schubmehl.

Suddenly, employees claimed in “Bad Vegan,” their once-dedicated boss was rarely around.

Despite the duo’s high living — spending around $2 million at casinos and on luxury travel and jewelry, according to the Brooklyn DA’s office — Melngailis failed to make payroll five times in 2014. According to an indictment, she transferred nearly $1.6 million from her businesses to her personal bank account.

When she went AWOL in early 2015, Pure, along with a One Lucky Duck juice bar she had opened next door, shuttered.

It reopened a few months later, thanks to funding from wealthy patrons — only for the staff to walk out after not being paid again.

Melngailis told employees the issue was due to her having changed banks; in a media interview, she chalked it up to slim margins and expensive ingredients.

Accused of owing nearly $2 million to investors, employees and the IRS, Melngailis and Strangis disappeared — and she was dubbed the “vegan Bernie Madoff.”

But Melngailis, who writes in her memoir that she and Strangis were “jointly liable” for the financial damages, claims she didn’t want to run.

“He [Strangis] took me away. I was screaming my head off in the car,” she told The Post. “I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t run. I wasn’t aware that we were fugitives on the run. He just took me away.”

In the memoir, she details psychological and sexual abuse by Strangis.

The couple weren’t seen for nearly 10 months, sparking a manhunt.

In May 2016, they were arrested at a $99-a-night Fairfield Inn & Suites in Sevierville, Tenn. — tracked down by police after ordering a Domino’s pizza.

“I never thought I was doing anything wrong. That’s why it’s been really painful… ” Melngailis told The Post. “I did bad things but I paid my debt to society. At no point in time did I really — I never had the intention of doing anything bad. The last thing I would have ever wanted to do is not pay my employees.”

She pleaded guilty to tax fraud, grand larceny and conspiracy to defraud in May 2017 and served four months behind bars. Strangis pleaded guilty to four counts of grand larceny and served a year and three days in lock-up.

“It was very surreal. Wherever you are, you just adapt,” Melngailis told The Post of her time at Rikers Island. “I could see Manhattan from the dorm I was in. It’s very strange to be locked up and have a view across the way of Manhattan.

“It’s still on me to figure out how to address everything. I’m not going to lie, it’s been hard when people are kind of yelling at me based on this false narrative of what happened and calling me a criminal,” she said. “Someone will slide in [my DMs] and call me a grifter based on that narrative for which they [Netflix] profited. It’s frustrating.”

She’s referring to the Netflix docu-series “Bad Vegan,” in which she was interviewed — and which, she claims, did her dirty.

“It’s been really painful because with what the director and producers made from selling the show to Netflix — all [my] debt could have been paid. I got $75,000, which I used to pay back the employees, so they were covered early on,” Melngailis told The Post. “But beyond that I didn’t get anything for my participation. But they profited a lot.”

In January 2024, New York Magazine’s Grub Street reported that Melngailis was set to participate in a second documentary — documenting the reopening of Pure Food and wine in its old location — with “Bad Vegan” producer and former customer Mark Emms, as well as the former restaurant’s landlord Jeffrey Chodorow.

Melgnilis claims she was promised her current one-bedroom apartment and an $8,000-per-month salary to be a partner in the reopening, but that the deal fell apart.

“I moved back here to reopen,” Melngailis told The Post of returning to NYC from Somerville, Massachusetts, where she was working as an executive assistant.

Her would-be partners, she alleged, “were not honest. I was brought back here and then wasn’t paid. That put me in an increasingly vulnerable situation. They were not remotely honest about what their plan was.” 

She claimed that she and Chodorow, himself a longtime restaurateur, could not agree on money.

“I did my best to try and help her resurrect the restaurant in its original location. I wish her nothing but the best, but it just couldn’t get done,” Chodorow told The Post. “Obviously, we both have a perspective on why, but I’m not going to demean the process we went through in any way. I only know I tried. And she tried as well. It’s a shame.”

For now, Melngailis — who said she is paying her own rent on the apartment — said, “Everything is in limbo.

“I feel like that restaurant is meant to be there,” she said of the old location. “That restaurant — everybody wants it back. That place is so special. There’s a reason why people used to describe it as special. It needs to come back in the right way, with the right energy behind it.”