A Chinese restaurant in Madrid was shut down by the police after it turned out that their 'roasted duck' meat had actually come from pigeons they'd caught on the streets of the Spanish capital.
The Jin Gu restaurant in Madrid's Usera district got raided by police last month as officers found bowls full of pigeons that had been plucked and roasted.
They also found strips of meat hanging from clothes horses and found stockpiles of unlabelled meat and fish kept in freezers, with no thermometers in its storage areas to measure and monitor the temperature, despite it being a legal requirement in Spain.
To make matters worse, the restaurant kitchen was strewn with rat traps and police recovered several illegal items, including sea cucumbers.
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Restaurant staff were storing ingredients in the toilet and a shelf was being used to hide a room infested with cockroaches.
All in all, it's not the sort of place you'd want to be ordering food from, especially the 'roasted duck'.
A police officer who took part in the raid of the restaurant said that 'everything smelled of rotten seafood' and the stench was 'almost unbearable'.
About a tonne of kitchen supplies were found to have been stored with no thought given to keeping them at any sort of temperature or regard to health guidelines.
Fortunately for people in the area, they've been saying that they didn't actually eat there for a particular reason, as the Times reported that the grotesque stench kept them away.
Local residents who lived in the same building as the Chinese restaurant explained why none of them ever ate there.
It turns out pilfering pigeons and passing them off as poultry produces a powerfully pungent pong.
"None of us ate there. It smelled bad, and we saw food brought in on a cart and left at the door in broad daylight," they told local media as they explained why they stayed as far away as possible.
While it's not illegal to breed pigeons in Spain, police found absolutely no paperwork in the restaurant for ordering pigeon meat to pass off as duck which led them to the conclusion that they had most likely been picked off the streets.
Oddly enough, the Jin Gu restaurant has got a fairly impressive 4.2 rating on Google, though some recent reviews describe a fairly catastrophic dining experience including one which said 'everyone vomited the next day' after eating there.
The reviewer said they got a look at the kitchen and described it as 'like seeing a landfill' in there.
All in all the food seems to be more 'yuck' than 'duck'.
Topics: Crime, Food And Drink, World News
Joe Harker