After a Pizza Restaurant Was Pranked, the Owner Donated Every Pie to a Hospital

What started as an expensive prank for one pizza restaurant in Wyoming ended up feeding an entire group of hospital workers.

L’Osteria Mondello in Cheyenne was left with 18 freshly made pizzas after someone placed a large fake order and never showed up.

Instead of letting hundreds of dollars worth of food go into the trash, owner Dave Agovic decided there was a much better place for it.

The trouble started on Friday, August 14, when the restaurant received a takeaway order for 18 pizzas.

It was not a small order. Altogether, the pizzas were worth roughly $300, and they came at a particularly hectic time for the kitchen.

L’Osteria Mondello already had several big orders coming in. According to Agovic, one customer had ordered around 12 or 13 pizzas, while another order included another seven or eight.

Suddenly, the pizza restaurant was trying to get more than 40 pizzas out of the kitchen at practically the same time.

“I had like over 40 pizzas at the same time,” Agovic recalled.

Anyone who has worked in a busy restaurant can probably imagine what the kitchen looked like at that point.

Orders were piling up, ovens were full, and the staff was trying to make sure every customer got the right food. Things became so hectic that L’Osteria Mondello temporarily stopped taking new orders.

People who called were reportedly warned that they could be waiting anywhere from an hour and a half to two hours.

Still, the kitchen pushed through.

Despite everything else they were preparing, employees managed to finish the mystery customer’s 18 pizzas in about 40 minutes.

Then they waited.

And waited.

Nobody came.

Eventually, the staff realized something wasn’t right. They called the phone number that had been provided with the order, expecting to find out why the customer was running late.

Instead, the person on the other end had no idea what they were talking about.

They hadn’t ordered any pizzas.

That was when the team realized the pizza restaurant had apparently been pranked.

Someone had used another person’s phone number to place an order for 18 pizzas, leaving the restaurant with roughly $300 worth of food and no customer coming to collect it.

L’Osteria Mondello later told its Facebook followers exactly what had happened.

“Someone decided to have a little fun and ordered 18 pizzas to go as a prank. We made all 18, but apparently nobody came to pick them up,” the restaurant explained.

For a small business, a prank like that isn’t exactly harmless. Ingredients cost money, employees spend time preparing the food, and in this case the fake order arrived while the kitchen was already dealing with a huge rush.

They could have stayed angry about it.

They also could have simply thrown everything away.

Instead, someone in the pizza restaurant asked a much better question: Who could actually use 18 pizzas right now?

Agovic had an idea almost immediately.

“Why don’t we deliver it to the hospital?” he remembered thinking.

And that’s exactly what they did.

Rather than watching all that freshly prepared food go to waste, L’Osteria Mondello packed up the entire order and sent it to the emergency room at Cheyenne Regional Medical Center.

All 18 pizzas went with it.

“Rather than letting all that food go to waste, we decided to turn it into something positive,” the restaurant wrote.

It was a simple decision, but one that completely changed the ending of the story.

A prank that had been designed to cost a local business hundreds of dollars suddenly became dinner for hospital workers.

The pizza restaurant later posted photos from the unexpected delivery. The pictures showed stacks of pizza boxes along with restaurant employees and hospital workers receiving the food.

“A little frustrating situation turned into a good deed, and hopefully the pizzas helped make someone’s night a little better,” L’Osteria Mondello wrote.

There was another nice coincidence that evening too.

Former employee Ryan Lemley happened to stop by the restaurant just to say hello. Lemley had previously worked at L’Osteria Mondello for more than two years.

He couldn’t have picked a more interesting night to visit.

Once he heard about the fake order and the restaurant’s plan to donate everything, Lemley offered to help get the pizzas to the hospital.

Agovic was grateful.

“He was my hero that day,” the owner said.

By then, the prank was beginning to look very different from what whoever placed the order had probably intended.

Instead of ending with wasted food and an angry business owner, it ended with 18 pizzas arriving at a local emergency room.

When the story was shared online, people loved how the pizza restaurant had handled it.

Comments began pouring in, with many people criticizing whoever had made the fake order while praising Agovic and his staff for refusing to let it ruin their night.

One hospital staff member was particularly thankful.

“We appreciate the gesture! Thank you for your generosity! Your pizza is the best in town and we were definitely spoiled with dinner tonight,” they wrote.

Another commenter summed up the strange situation by criticizing the pranksters but thanking the restaurant for donating the pizzas to emergency room workers.

Someone else put it even more simply: “That’s a great way to turn a bad prank into a blessing!”

The positive reaction was understandable.

Fake restaurant orders might seem funny to the person making them, especially when they’re sitting at home and never have to see what happens afterward. For the people working in the kitchen, however, the consequences are very real.

There is the cost of the ingredients, the boxes and the employees’ time. There is also the added pressure on the kitchen, particularly when a fake order as large as this one arrives during an already busy period.

In this case, the pizza restaurant had even stopped accepting additional orders because employees were struggling to keep up with demand.

That means the prank didn’t only result in 18 unwanted pizzas. It potentially affected other customers who genuinely wanted to order food that evening.

Agovic, however, didn’t appear interested in turning the incident into a reason to distrust everyone.

In fact, he said something like this was extremely unusual for the business.

During more than three years of running L’Osteria Mondello, he could remember only one other similar incident.

That history was also part of the reason the restaurant hadn’t asked the person placing the order to pay for all 18 pizzas in advance.

Some people might assume a pizza restaurant would automatically demand upfront payment for an order worth hundreds of dollars. L’Osteria Mondello didn’t operate that way.

Agovic explained that the business had built its relationship with customers around trust.

“We trust people,” he said.

For him, that mattered, especially in a community like Cheyenne.

“Cheyenne is a small place, and Cheyenne is a place with wonderful people,” he explained. “And we really try to make sure we have that trust with the local community.”

One bad prank wasn’t enough to erase that.

There is something refreshing about that response.

It would have been easy for the owner to focus entirely on the person who wasted his employees’ time and cost the business money. Nobody would have blamed him for being furious.

Instead, the pizza restaurant found a way to make sure the night wasn’t defined by whoever placed the fake order.

The pizzas had already been made. The money had already been spent. There was no changing that part.

What they could change was what happened next.

So 18 pizzas that were supposed to sit unclaimed on a counter ended up at a hospital, where doctors, nurses and other workers could enjoy them during their shifts.

The prankster got their joke.

The hospital got dinner.

And the restaurant ended up receiving an enormous amount of support from the community it had chosen to trust.

Sometimes, the best response to somebody trying to ruin your day isn’t getting even.

Sometimes, it’s making sure their bad decision accidentally does something good.