Once living on the streets, dog is now ‘dining’ at the best restaurants in town
Take a break from the nastiness of this election season and ponder, for a few happy minutes, the wonderful life of the beloved star of Instagram named Popeye.
Things weren’t always so posh for Popeye.
“I found him as a stray,” Ivy Diep tells Bored Panda. “He was such a mess — super skinny, heavily matted, dirty.”
Diep, a Los Angeles restaurateur, already had dogs at home. But the homeless pup fit in so well with everyone, including her husband, that the family kept him and named him after the spinach-loving cartoon character.
Ivy started taking Popeye out to eat at some of L.A.’s more dog-friendly establishments, both fancy and fast-food. He sat so well for pics that a friend suggested Popeye deserved his own Instagram account.
“Jen and I like to go on what we call ‘Instagram dates’ where we would try different restaurants and take Instagram pictures of our food,” Diep told ABC News.
“I would bring Popeye to any of the pet-friendly places, and we realized how good he was around food. He would sit still for photos.”
Popeye turned out to be a super model whose “real skill is ironclad self-control, an ability to sit motionless inches from a table of food,” marvels Grub Street.
“Pair that with Diep’s lack of impulse control when searching for ‘cute dog outfits’ on Amazon, and @popeyethefoodie was a guaranteed winner.”
Diep did confirm for ABC: “He wears clothes pretty well.”
Indeed he does.
To be clear, Popeye doesn’t eat anything that’s not doggie-friendly.
“We’ll give him nibbles of anything that’s safe for him,” Diep told ABC. “We always carry a bag of his favorite treats as well.
“He’s usually not really into the food anyway. He just likes to be out and about — people watching and to bark at any other dog that walks by.”
Oh, the irony.
“Popeye now has over 108k followers on Instagram,” notes Bored Panda. “So if you can’t get a reservation then at least you can check out his pictures to see what you’re missing.”
This story was originally published November 4, 2016 at 10:13 AM with the headline "Once living on the streets, dog is now ‘dining’ at the best restaurants in town."