A late-summer evening at Patois restaurant, with the final patrons chatting with the doors open — what should have been about as close to a perfect night in New Orleans as possible — instead turned into one of Uptown’s most brazen robberies in recent memory Thursday night when three men carrying guns barged in and took valuables from the nearly 20 people inside.

Almost simultaneously, police were pursuing suspects in a series of three carjacking incidents across the Uptown area, ultimately leading to several arrests.

At Patois, in the 6000 block of Laurel Street, the last few customers were still at their tables around 11 p.m. when three men walked in one after the other, each carrying a gun, said owner Leon Touzet. All three wore hoodies, and the first man through the door wore a skull-type mask over the bottom half of his face, creating such a surreal visage that Touzet and several patrons said they didn’t immediately realize he had a gun in his hand.

The men forced everyone in the restaurant to lie on the floor — pressing their guns to the heads of many of the 15 and 20 people there, counting Touzet and his employees — then took everyone’s individual purses and wallets as well as the money in the cash register.

No one was harmed, Touzet said, and the entire incident was over in around five minutes. Never, Touzet said, has anything similar happened at Patois since it opened in 2007.

Patrons said they were alarmed by how long it took for police to respond to their 911 calls. One man said that he finished a 20-minute phone call with his credit card company before he saw any officers.

“Thank God they weren’t in the mood to execute anyone,” said the man, a visitor from out of state. “Because they had us all on the ground, praying.”

Witnesses noted the deliberate, seemingly coordinated nature of the gunman’s attack on the restaurant.

“It was well planned,” the man said. “It didn’t have the feeling of, ‘We’re going to try this.’ It wasn’t scatterbrained — it was methodical.”

“It wasn’t like it was three in the morning,” Touzet said. “These guys had cased it out.”

The restaurant said Friday morning that it would open for lunch as usual at 11:30 a.m., according to its Facebook page.

“We are O.K. Thanks so much to everyone for their concern!” Patois wrote in a Facebook post. “We aren’t letting criminals beat us down.”

At the exactly the same time, however, Second and Sixth District police officers were already involved in the investigation of a series of three carjacking incidents. The first — an unsuccessful carjacking attempt — took place in the 2700 block of Palmer, followed closely by a second incident in the 900 block of Cadiz.

In that second case, the victim said she was at her car, a small Hyundai, around 10:35 p.m. when she saw two young teens running toward her and demanding her keys. She tried to run away from them, but they caught up, grabbed her hair, threw her to the ground, kicked her legs and took her purse, she said.

“By the time I looked up, they were in my car, speeding off,” she said.

She called police, and detectives arrived immediately, she said. While she was conferring with them, another robbery was reported at Prytania and St. Andrew streets, where two people in their late 20s were robbed at gunpoint by suspects in a silver vehicle.

Sixth District NOPD officers quickly spotted the Cadiz Street victim’s vehicle, and after a brief pursuit, they located it and several suspects on Carondelet Street near Sixth Street.

“Within 15 minutes they had located my car. Within 20 minutes, they had my purse,” the woman said. “It was incredible how fast they were.”

Two teens, both 16, were arrested in the carjackings, but their names were not released because of their ages, according to NOPD reports. A third suspect managed to elude police, the reports state.

The carjacking spree is believed to be a completely separate incident from the Patois robbery, police sources said, but detectives had already made strong investigative leads by midnight related to some of the property taken in the Patois case.