Jim Mamary, an owner of Ox Cart Tavern, a restaurant a few blocks from Lark, was in his restaurant’s open kitchen this month when a waitress walked briskly toward him. “Someone has a gun,” she said, before locking herself in the bathroom.

Mr. Mamary saw a man standing at the bar ordering a couple to give up their wallets. A wallet fell to the floor. The robber bent down to pick it up, and when he stood up, he brandished a gun. “Don’t make me kill you,” Mr. Mamary remembered him saying. “Give me the money.” Staff members handed over about $400, he said.

At the same time, another man was robbing customers in the dining room.

“You never know how you’re going to react,” he said. “My first reaction was, ‘I need to get out of here.’ I thought of my wife and kids. Then I thought, ‘That’s not going to be good for business.’ ”

At Mimi’s Hummus, Josephine Otto-Cole was working her first shift last month. She was being trained. She recalled a man walking in wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt and a bandanna covering his face. He was carrying a plastic shopping bag.

“Can we help you?” she asked. “He says, ‘Give me all your money,’ and then he takes out his gun.”

Two waitresses, three members of the kitchen staff and a customer followed orders to put their hands up in the air. The staff told the robber that there was no money in the register. “Then he proceeds to ask for money from everybody,” she said, adding that he took $100 from one patron.