When employees arrived Sunday at the MarketBar restaurant in the Ferry Building, they discovered someone had cut an 8-inch hole on their 1,400-pound squash.
But that's not the worst of it. The culprit also took the seeds from the giant pumpkin; seeds that could be worth thousands of dollars.
"Pure vandalism would have destroyed the pumpkin, or made a hole in the front, or taken a whack at it, or gouged it up, but this was rather carefully done. So I'm taking it as industrial espionage," said MarketBar owner Doug Biederbeck.
Luckily, the restaurant was able to rescue four seeds from the pumpkin.
The Napa Valley grower of the mutilated pumpkin also won this year's Half Moon Bay festival with a 1,700-pound giant pumpkin.
