Chinese restaurant closed down after 'roasted duck' turns out to be street pigeons

Warning: This article contains content that some readers may find distressing.

A Chinese restaurant has been forced to close after an investigation found that the 'roast duck' it was serving was actually derived from dead street pigeons.

There are plenty of adventurous eaters out there who are willing to try almost anything, including the Swedish delicacy surströmming that causes a lot of people to vomit.

Sometimes, you only need to see the way something is made for it to put you off for life, and it looks like duck pancake lovers might be next on the list.

Regulars at a Chinese restaurant in Madrid may never want to eat crispy duck again after discovering what they were really eating, as part of a horrifying police investigation which has seen the eatery close down and the owners placed under investigation.

The Jin Gu restaurant, in the Usera district of the Spanish capital, was raided by police late last month and what they found was pretty disgusting.

Footage showed bowls full of plucked and cooked pigeon. While wood pigeon can be a delicacy in some upper class restaurants, you wouldn't want to have one snatched from the street and put straight on your plate.

That's something even the raw meat and milk consuming gym bros wouldn't consider. Maybe.

Inside the restaurant (Policia Muncipal de Madrid)

Officers discovered several serious health code violations (Policia Municipal de Madrid)

Footage also showed gnarled strips of meat being hung from clothes horses which simply cannot be sanitary.

Local media also reported that unlabelled and undated meat and fish were allegedly kept in freezers that did not work, while police say there were also cockroaches and rat traps strewn across the kitchen, which is perhaps worthy of a food hygiene rating in the minuses.

There were also reportedly no thermometers to measure the temperatures of storage areas, which can obviously lead to bacteria, while the cookware they used was also very rusted, according to police.

The illegal sea cucumbers (Policia Muncipal de Madrid)

Sea cucumbers, which are the forbidden by strict marine laws, were also just one of several illegal items discovered at the restaurant, and the owners are now being investigated as police look to charge them with public health crimes as well as animal cruelty and consumer violation charges.

Street pigeons can obviously carry a lot of different diseases which hopefully will have been cooked off at the restaurant, but given their alleged shortcomings in other kitchen matters, I'm not sure how confident I'd be eating that.

Jin Gu currently has a 4.2-star rating on Google, with many positive reviews.

"The duck I think is a little dry and lots of bones, not that tasty," one from five years ago reads.