Many people that eat seafood might have encountered worms in their dish, especially if it was a wild fish. But to see one slithering out of your half-eaten dish is just gross. If you were at home, you’d just freak out, throw the food and eat something else without the added “protein.”
But when you eat at a decent restaurant, you have a lot more confidence that the food is of good quality and prepared by a skilled chef.
You can imagine the woman’s reaction when a worm started moving into her dish after she ate half of it!
She was with her boyfriend, Middletown resident Jim Guinee, celebrating the 80th birthday of his aunt at a New Jersey Shore restaurant. As soon as he saw the worm, he took out the phone and filmed it, posting the dish with a worm on the side on Facebook, saying:
“Not only did we sit through almost our entire dinner without drinks, but now, dinner has come to life. After eating half of your fish, that is not what you want to see.”
His video soon became viral and gathered since Saturday (28 July) over 250,000 views, more than 2,000 shares and about 1,300 comments.
How Did the Restaurant Handle the Situation?
As the news was made public, the restaurant stopped serving that dish and handled the situation quite good, stating on Facebook the following:
“One of our seafood purveyors did send us Saturday’s cod and missed the small worms that were found by two of our guests, located in the center of their piece of fish. We immediately halted serving this dish. We also compensated the family of 8 generously and expressed our sincere concern and apologies that one our guests had anything less than an amazing experience at our restaurant.”
But what was inexcusable was the fact that the restaurant then lashed out at Guinee after he posted the video. They wrote that they were “very surprised at the callousness and irresponsible reaction of an attorney of law to attempt to destroy our reputation & possible livelihoods” and that this incident could have “happened to anyone, whether cooking at home or in a restaurant.”
The problem is that yes, it could have happened to anyone in any place, but ingesting a live worm can make people sick.
Guinee explained in an interview that he indeed is an attorney, but he hasn’t taken legal action against the restaurant.
Doris’s passion for writing started to take shape in college where she was editor-in-chief of the college newspaper. Even though she ended up working in IT for more than 7 years, she’s now back to what he always enjoyed doing. With a true passion for technology, Doris mostly covers tech-related topics.