BUGGIN’ TAKE OUT
Woman claims to find roach in takeout meal at Ewing Chinese restaurant >>
EWING » A customer of a local Chinese restaurant received a little more protein than she bargained for.
Monica Diaz, an employee at Capital Health Regional Medical Center in Trenton, said she found a dead roach on her takeout meal from No. 1 China restaurant in Ewing on Tuesday.
Diaz ordered Hunan beef, shrimp and chicken with vegetables for lunch and when she halfway through eating the meal, she realized the lifeless critter.
“I happened to look down and I was like, ‘Oh my God. This is disgusting,’” Diaz said Tuesday. “I almost ate it.”
Diaz took pictures of the black insect and notified the township health department.
A health inspector was sent to the restaurant at 1429 Parkside Avenue on Wednesday and Thursday, Ewing Business Administrator Jim McManimon said in a phone interview.
“The health inspector didn’t see anything,” McManimon said Thursday. “She didn’t see any reason to shut them down.”
The township administrator said the health inspector reviewed pest control treatment records.
“The owner had a company out there on Monday coincidentally for treatment,” McManimon said. “The restaurant is treated monthly on a regular basis.”
The pest control company will retreat the restaurant again on Saturday, McManimon said, and the health inspector will check to make sure it is done.
Diaz said she called No. 1 China after she was horrified at what she saw.
“They offered to make me another one,” she said. “I don’t want to eat there.”
Prior to the incident, Diaz said she and other hospital workers “ordered from them all the time.” “I’ve never had issues,” she said. “But now, we’re all disgusted.”
The owner of No. 1 China did not return a message seeking comment.
Diaz said she went public with the matter “so this does not happen to anyone else.” Ewing has experienced a rash of gross food episodes recently.
Last month, a customer of the new Wawa in Ewing claimed there were maggots in his buffalo chicken cheesesteak hoagie. His mother created a video that captured two maggots, which are the larva of a fly, slithering on the wrapper near the hoagie cut in half.
“My sauce started going up on my paper wrapper,” the customer previously told The Trentonian. “Sauce isn’t supposed to do that. So I flipped my light back on and I saw two maggots just moving around my sandwich.”
McManimon said the customer was captured on surveillance footage returning the hoagie to the store at 1300 Silvia St. The township administrator said Wawa
employees then threw out all the items used to make the sandwich. There have been no more complaints since the incident in late September, McManimon said.
In a statement at the time, a Wawa spokeswoman said the company inspects its stores “on a daily basis and have rigorous processes in place to prevent incidents of this type from ever occurring.”
“While we never speculate on an unverified video, we do have an extremely detailed process to authenticate and assess complaints surrounding anything that would take away from the best and most positive Wawa experience possible,” Wawa spokeswoman Lori Bruce said in an email. “We hold ourselves to the highest standard of quality in the food that we serve and the conditions in which we serve it.”
Wawa never returned any follow-up questions from The Trentonian about their investigation into the incident.
McManimon said all of the township’s restaurants are inspected annually.
“If there’s any complaints that come in from anyone that uses a restaurant, then we go out and inspect it as soon as we get the complaint,” the township official said. “The faster we can get out there, if there is food contaminated in any way, we can get rid of it.”
McManimon said if a customer thinks something is wrong with their food from an establishment, the patron should complain to the restaurant and immediately call the health department of the town where the establishment is located.
Ewing residents can call the township’s health office for complaints at 609-8832900 ext. 7619.