For the record, we went to Rona afterward and fixed their shelf for them.
Dan was horrified and didn't want to let us fix it but I figure they're busy enough serving food to worry about whether someone else might hang up a coat on the boobytrapped coat rack.
The reason it fell out in the first place (besides the 60lb parkas these guys had hanging up) was that it was missing one screw, and the remaining screw on that side was in a fairly distressed hole. I'd say it's not the first time that coat rack has fallen off.
I still cannot fathom how the dude's hat got under our table. It was a really surreal moment when we looked under the table and there was this raccoon-like thing by one of our feet (it wasn't really stepped on, I might have embellished that detail for comic effect). But still, it would have had to roll 6 feet one day, turn around a booth, then roll 6 feet the other way. Maybe he was sitting at this booth when he first got there and then when all the others showed up they moved to the bigger tables and he forgot it there.
That's my story anyhow and I'm sticking with it.
PS. He said I made a "scene"? I'm not sure I like the sound of that. A scene is someone going out of their way to be noticed, I was doing anything I could NOT to be noticed. And then a damn coat rack fell on me with their 60 lb parkas. Jeepers, what do they keep in their pockets anyhow? Lead ballast???