"That's business," said Balek when Valleywag reached him by phone.

The reason for the closure: Google is subleasing an entire complex of offices. It has already laid off thousands of contractors, so it no longer needs the space. How sudden is this move? Basic Deli, which won raves from San Francisco Chronicle food critic Michael Bauer, had only been open a year. 5ive, the cafe where Googlers are eating in the clip above, has also proved popular.

The company already closed Off the Grid, one of the complex's three cafés which offer free food for Google workers, last October. Plymouth and Oasis, two cafés on the edge of Google's main campus, may be next, a source says.

Balek, a colorful chef who has the words "foie gras" tattooed on his knuckles, confirmed his café's closure. He's moving to another café on the Googleplex, and says that all of the kitchen staff — contract workers employed by Bon Appétit — have been placed.

That will be news to them: We hear that none of the Basic staff have yet learned whether they'll have jobs on Monday. They were promised word two days ago.

"That's a vendor issue," Balek explained before hurrying back to his kitchen.

The chef is being highly diplomatic here. Google has long sparred with Bon Appétit, squeezing the café operator to keep dishing up organic expensive fare at rock-bottom prices. The result of the infighting: Steady cutbacks on meals and hours served, culminating in this weeks' outright closure of cafés. A scandal forced out John Dickman, head of Google's food operations. (He landed briefly at Apple afterwards, but reportedly left in January.) Googlers, meanwhile, have treated the company's cooks, servers and dishwashers with the kind of dismissive disdain they usually reserve for media executives.

Under a new, well-paid CFO, Google is focusing intensely on costs. Patrick Pichette, Google's penny-pincher in chief, is preserving Google's profit margins. But at what cost to the culture? Free food is the legendary perk around which Google has built its reputation for treating employees well. You can't cut your cake and have it, too.

The poster claims Dickman then arranged to get a kickback from Bon Appétit. Google, he goes on to write, investigated Dickman and Bon Appétit, going as far as testing fruits and vegetables, presumably to see if they met Google's high standards for organic and sustainable ingredients. The implication there: Bon Appétit had been feeding Googlers slop dressed up as fancy fare. The end of the Craigslist poster's story: Dickman was brought before Google's board and fired. All juicy gossip — but there's one thing that doesn't make sense about this whole tale.

Dickman is now working at Apple, a company with close ties to Google. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on Apple's board of directors. Apple directors Bill Campbell and Al Gore are important advisors to Schmidt. If Dickman left Google in a cloud, how could he possibly land a job at Apple? Either the poster's allegations aren't true — or something darker is going on here. One possible explanation: Google's leaders might have arranged for Dickman to get a job with their friends at Apple in exchange for buying his silence on other matters.

Here are excerpts from the original post on Craigslist:

Disclaimer: I don't work at Google. I probably never will. I'm not smart enough. As far as I can tell, almost nobody is. So it goes.

From a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend, comes the following strange story ...

It seems that once upon a time, there was a guy - we'll call him Dick.

'Dick' was director of food services for a really big dot-com.

'Dick' had a wife. She was a highly placed executive at Bon Appetit....

It's not clear exactly HOW Bon Appetit came to acquire the Go^H^H big dot-com's contract. Right there, some thorny questions can be asked ... like, whether inside information influenced Bon Appetit's bid? ...

It seems that 'Dick' negotiated, it is alleged, two deals - the second deal translated into a end-of-the-year 'rebate' check being cut by B. A. and delivered to, yes, you guessed it, 'Dick'.

To make matters worse B. A., it has been said, did not deliver what they contracted to deliver, to big dot-com's cafeteria(s). Apparently there was a little watering down of quality, a little substitution here and there going on.

Big dot-com, it is said, did an audit. What sort of audit? It seems likely that there were private investigators involved ... I'd surmise a few bugs, here and there ... and maybe some chemical and DNA profiling of fruits and vegetables.

(If 'Dick' was like every other 'dick' I've ever known, he lined up every week to have his car detailed by the inhouse auto detailing service - so installing a bug in his car, as well as retrieving the audio, would have been child's play. Note to would-be 'dicks' ... don't be a dick.)

'Dick' was invited to a meeting of the BoD, I hear, and given two choices - resign, or be terminated. He's outta there, now....

Tough luck. They're not available to the public, yet. And we suspect this may be a limited edition. The introduction is written by John Dickman, Google's former director of food operations, who left the company amidst controversy in January, and now works at Apple.

The trouble started when Google hired John Dickman as its director of food operations. Dickman is married to Lisa McEuen, an executive at Bon Appétit. At the time, Bon Appétit and Google were two of the largest buyers of organic and sustainable food in the region; by picking up Google as a client, Bon Appétit gained considerable purchasing power. A source in Google's kitchens says that Dickman was "the reason Bon Appétit got the Google contract."

But in exchange, Bon Appétit, a division of Compass Group, got a very testy client. A former Google chef who had his own ideas about how to run the cafes profitably said he tried to get founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt interested, but they didn't listen "because I didn't have a Stanford degree."

Google's ethics cops have never looked askance at, say, Schmidt hiring his girlfriend for a high-profile PR gig, or Brin getting Google to invest in his wife's startup. But Dickman's marriage to a Bon Appétit executive raised eyebrows, and he left the company in January.

Two top chefs followed him out the door. Josef Desimone went to Facebook, in March. Dickman himself went to Apple, and Nate Keller, a protégé of Google's first chef, Charlie Ayers, followed him there. Both Desimone and Keller took several members of the kitchen staff with them. "All management staff has quit within the last three months," says a source at Google. That may be an exaggeration, but if so, not by much.

One issue that's been underplayed: The behavior of rank-and-file Googlers. "Pride is all cooks and dishwashers have," says a former Google chef. But Googlers, whose sense of self-aggrandized entitlement is already legendary in the Valley, have been taking out their frustrations on the people who dish out their food. Kitchen staffers are "invisible" to them, says a Google food worker — except when they somehow displease Googlers who expect free meals and servile deference, too.

Google's cafes have always been at the heart of its PR strategy, helping to portray the company as generous to employees, dedicated to doing things differently, and caring about Mother Earth. Google PR director David Krane took on the replacement of original chef Charlie Ayers as the task he worked on in the 20-percent time Google gives employees to work on side projects. I can't remember the number of times Krane cajoled me to enjoy a free meal, courtesy of Google.

He wouldn't want me there now. A Bon Appétit executive said in May that the company was planning to drop Google as a client. Arrogant, tightfisted, and argumentative, the Googlers were more trouble than the food-service contract was worth. Even so, Bon Appétit has been scrambling to patch things up.

"The two founders of Bon Appétit come on site at least once a week," says a Googler. "Other representatives from Bon Appétit headquarters are on site every day — as visitors. It's a very sticky situation. The kitchen staff isn't being told anything. When dinner is cut how many jobs will be cut, too? The thing that really gets me is that the Googlers have no clue and will be asking us questions when dinner and other programs stop. They won't know the truth either."

The company seems uninterested in letting Googlers know the truth. It's telling that Google PR won't go on the record to deny the cuts, though they're happy to persuade reporters on background that the cuts are limited. A spokeswoman, conveniently unnamed, told CNBC's Jim Goldman that the company had no idea where the rumor came from.

Here's an idea for Google PR: Go down to a kitchen, and talk to the people who actually make the food you love to eat while chatting up reporters. They seem to be better informed than you are.

(Photo by Jeromy Henry/Fortune)