Sarma Melngailis Audiobooks

Acclaim, collapse and a prison sentence, told at last in The Girl with the Duck Tattoo

1 audiobook reviewed

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Who is Sarma Melngailis?

Sarma Melngailis, born in 1972, is an American chef, cookbook author and businesswoman whose story took a turn very few CVs survive. As owner and co-founder of Pure Food and Wine and One Lucky Duck, her vegan raw food businesses in New York, she ran a restaurant that made New York Magazine’s Top 100 and spent five consecutive years on Forbes’ list of all-star New York eateries.

Then it all collapsed. Both businesses closed in 2016 after staff walked out over unpaid wages; Melngailis fled New York with her husband Anthony Strangis and was tracked down and arrested in Tennessee that year. In 2017 she pleaded guilty to grand larceny, scheming to defraud and criminal tax fraud, admitting she had taken more than two million dollars from investors and employees, and she spent nearly four months in jail.

Sarma Melngailis in audiobooks

The Girl with the Duck Tattoo is the Melngailis title we carry, and the duck is no accident – One Lucky Duck was the name of one of her businesses. Few authors arrive with a story this extraordinary already attached: acclaim, collapse, flight, conviction and jail. This time, the telling is hers.

Stories like this hold you in audio precisely because you know they cost something real. For UK listeners who followed the saga from a distance, or who missed it entirely, it is a rise-and-fall tale from the one person who lived both halves of it – and that is a hard combination to resist.