Credit score: Policia Municipal Madrid
A Chinese language restaurant in Madrid has been shut down for serving road pigeons as “roast duck”.
Police raided the Jin Gu restaurant, within the metropolis’s Usera district, late final month, discovering a pair of plucked pigeons in a cockroach-infested secret storage room alongside luggage of dubious-looking meat and sea creatures protected underneath Spanish regulation.
Officers stated they believed the birds had been grabbed from the streets and killed within the restaurant kitchen, with the proprietor, who was arrested, meaning to move them off as the standard Chinese language delicacy.
“It’s not unlawful to breed pigeons in Spain, however there was no paperwork for these birds or virtually any of the meat merchandise within the kitchen, so we’re fairly positive they had been road pigeons,” a spokesman for Madrid’s native police instructed The Telegraph.
Police stated a secret retailer contained ‘greater than a ton of foodstuff of untraceable origin’
Whereas inspecting a dirty rest room that was getting used as a storeroom, police found a wall shelf that slid to at least one aspect to disclose a hidden door.
Behind it, they discovered a cockroach-infested room wherein strips of defrosted animal flesh had been drying on a plastic garments horse.
Eight rusted freezers with out functioning thermometers had been full of luggage of meat, fish and seafood that had apparently not been bought by authorized channels, together with sea cucumbers that had been presumably of a species banned from commerce in Spain.
Sacks of bivalve molluscs had been additionally discovered, which police believed got here from Asian wetlands. On the ground had been rat traps that had been set with putrid meat.
Based on police, the key retailer contained “greater than a ton of foodstuffs of untraceable origin”.
Some on-line buyer critiques warned of unacceptably low requirements on the Jin Gu restaurant
The restaurant, which has been open for greater than a decade, has obtained lots of of on-line critiques, a few of which had been optimistic.
Nevertheless, some buyer experiences warned of unacceptably low requirements, and “strange-tasting” duck.
“Horrible meals, in a really dangerous state. The duck had a style that was, at finest, unusual, [and] the kitchen had seemingly not been cleaned for months,” learn a overview posted in January.
One other stated that a number of relations had been sick after a meal at Jin Gu and that he had contacted the restaurant to complain that it was serving “rotten meals”.
The restaurant proprietor, who has not been named, is being investigated for doable crimes towards public well being and towards wild species.
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