Passing the bok bok bok: Etobicoke restaurant accidentally serves chicken head
This is one of those stories that wouldn’t have made the news at Dundas and Spadina, but because it happened to a visitor from Ottawa at a restaurant in Etobicoke, the Sun is there. Apparently, a guest of our city got a surprise when she ordered a box of wings from a local shop:
Among the mound of wings there was allegedly a deep-fried chicken’s head—its eyes staring up at Karen Cook.
“It was absolutely disgusting,” Cook, 44, said Monday…. adding she hasn’t been able to eat wings since.
Cook tossed the wings but she saved the chicken head and brought it, beak and all, back to the restaurant the next day.
Cook returned the head to the restaurant and requested a full refund, which, reportedly, was given. Cook, undeterred, went up the food chain to the distributor and began heckling them, promising to call public health officials.
The problem is that this isn’t a public health issue. Under Ontario law, you can sell any part of a chicken, provided it’s cooked properly (any guest at a Chinese wedding banquet can attest to the safety of eating food around a chicken’s former head). Sure, the restaurant probably shouldn’t have sold her a box of wings with a head in it, but calling fowl to the media and public health officials is a bit of an overreaction.
Then again, maybe we don’t understand the pecking order for a story like this. How many calls did Cook have to make before the Sun finally bit into the story?
This is a bit of an overreaction on Karen Cook’s part. Where did you think chicken wings came from? Ya, the restaurant screwed up including the head (which should never have made it past the oven/fryer it was cooked in) but refunds are not in order here…and she certainly shouldn’t be calling the lawyers either. We live in a culture in which people buy meat already processed into it’s most specific and isolated form that we forget that, that meat used to belong to a living creature.
There’s actually restaurant butchering up whole chickens that serve wings?
How ridiculous…a chicken’s head is just another part of the chicken. A refund is understandable but there is nothing unsanitary or unhealthy about a chicken’s head. Karen should become a vegan to ensure she never cracks open an egg with two yolks which may offend her…
It may be entirely “sanitary” & everything to have a chicken head in your bucket of chicken (or whatever), but is it really desirable? Those who think the woman overreacted: would they be so nonchalant if they found a pig’s head in a package of bacon, or a cow’s head or eyeball in a hamburger?
A health violation it wasn’t, but I think a refund was certainly deserved. For one thing, the chicken head would have taken up space/mass that should have been filled with wings, which the customer paid for. If you order wings, you should get wings. Not a head, or a nugget, or a leg, or anything else. The order wasn’t for “miscellaneous chicken parts.”
I agree that a refund is fully in order – after all she ordered wings, and when you order wings you expect to get wings, not breast or thigh or…um, head. And yes, since wings are sold by weight, she also got shorted on her order by one chicken head’s worth of wings, which is additional justification for the refund.
It would be a bit of a shock to find a chicken head in my order of ANYTHING chicken-y – I don’t know of many chicken dishes that deliberately include the head, and I’ve never seen those dishes on a menu before (well, I probably have, but it was written in Chinese, or Hungarian). But that doesn’t justify Cook demanding a refund, GETTING it, and then STILL taking the issue to the distributor. There’s certainly no justification for her trying to make a public health issue of it – the head was cooked; thus, there was no risk of salmonella or other diseases. She’s treating something that was obviously a series of accidents (head mistakenly included in shipment of wings; head cooked, unnoticed, with order of wings; wings plus head served to Karen Cook) as though it was a deliberate attempt to hurt her in some way. Chill out, lady – you don’t have to eat it, you got your money back – what more do you want? The distributor to pay for therapy to help you eat wings again?!
Wildabeast is right on.
I’m wondering if K.Cook would have made all the fuss if she discovered a fried drumstick or half a breast(fried of course) mixed in with her fried wings? Maybe she would have considered it a deal and not a deal-breaker!!??
They should have charged her extra for the head!!!
I assume this is yet another example of someone so disconnected from where food comes from or how it is made that it never occurred to them that “hot wings” were once attached to a bird. This woman probably lives on Wonderbread and microwave KD when she isn’t eating out.
If more people ate real chicken, and fewer fillets, nuggets or fingers, this would be a non issue. A chicken is a bird. Birds have heads. It isn’t common in Western cusine to serve them with the head on, but I know a lot of Chinese places that do – you get a whole roasted bird, complete with head and feet.
If a restaurant serves you a a whole dressed fish, do you bring the tail, head & fins back the next day?
She got a refund, she needs to quit milking it.
Weez, trying to milk it, she is.
Failing at it, giving us some entertainment for trying and failing(miserably); price-less.