The dinner crowd at a popular kosher cafe in Midtown was horrified early last evening when the restaurant’s young manager, bleeding profusely, staggered up from the basement after a disgruntled employee stabbed him with a wood-handled knife multiple times.

The manager of Cafe K was rushed to Bellevue Hospital and was pronounced dead at 6:31 p.m., about two hours after the stabbing.

Witnesses said the crime was precipitated by an argument after the manager fired the 19-year-old suspect, a delivery boy at the cafe, an upscale storefront at 8 E. 48th St.

Police said that multiple 911 calls came in from shocked patrons.

One witness, who works next door at the Wolf and Lamb restaurant, said the victim, an Israeli, was apparently in shock when taken out of the restaurant by stretcher.

“His eyes were rolling up in to back of his head, and he was shaking a little bit. He was covered with blood,” said the witness, who declined to give his name.

According to law enforcement sources, the victim was stabbed in the chest, stomach, and arm.

Another witness, Paul Previte, 45, said he saw the suspect, who was wearing a black T-shirt with “Cafe K” printed on the front and a baseball cap with the same emblem, run out through a service entrance, looking “panicky.” “He was running like he was running from a house on fire,” Mr. Previte said. The suspect ran west on 48th Street, toward Fifth Avenue.

He is still at large, police said. Mr. Previte, who manages a cafe next door to Cafe K, said he had seen the suspect before. “I say hello, I’m respectful to him, he’s respectful to me, but I don’t know him.”

Regulars at the Cafe K said the kosher dairy restaurant is popular among the jewelers of Manhattan’s Diamond District, only a few blocks away. Gideon Aharonoff, a 26-year-old account executive who works at a jewelry store nearby, said he goes to Cafe K for kosher food four to five times a week.

“If you’re Jewish and you work around here, this is the place to go,” he said. “It’s really shocking, because things like this don’t usually happen in the Jewish community.”

It was the second recent stabbing in the Diamond District.

Last week, at the family-owned Summit Jeweler diamond shop at 26 W. 47th St., a merchant was assaulted and stabbed in the early afternoon by a man trying to sell a counterfeit watch.