Rat-in-soup furor sparks fightback from restaurateur
‘Impossible’ for staff not to have detected rodent
VANCOUVER• The owner of a Gastown restaurant where a customer was filmed spooning a rat from her bowl of chowder said it would have been “impossible” for the rodent to get into the food undetected by staff.
Contessa Choe’s friend posted the unappealing image to Instagram social media last week, and it went viral, causing the Crab Park Chowdery to lose 75 per cent of its customers overnight. People since have been discussing whether or not it was a hoax by the two women or a hygiene breach at the restaurant.
Choe dismissed suggestions they staged the video.
“Why would I do that?” She said. “Why would I bring a rat into the restaurant. Where would I even get a rat from? Why would I get a rat and bring it into the restaurant and put it in the soup. That’s f---ing ridiculous.”
She immediately apologized for swearing, but said she’s been frustrated by online comments impugning her intentions and even calling her a racially charged name.
“I didn’t even want to post it,” she said, adding it was posted by her friend, who moved to Vancouver recently from Ukraine and is in the habit of documenting everything she experiences and posting it.
“This is exactly the backlash I didn’t want,” said Choe.
Her friend, called Adele or Adelaine, didn’t return a message posted to her Instagram account.
Owner Ashton Phillips said he thoroughly investigated the women’s claim by going to great lengths to replicate the production of soup under similar circumstances, including using a dead rat.
“We went and got a rat because we wanted to be as authentic as possible,” he said.
He said they repeated the process of stirring and filling bread bowls and weren’t able to fill a bowl without noticing the rodent in the steel vat, eight-ounce ladle or bowl with a diameter of about four inches.
“We’re baffled,” he said. “We soaked it (the rat) for four hours to see if it would float or sink. You could clearly see the rat there. It was buoyant and it was impossible not to see it. We couldn’t dispense of it without part of the rat sticking out. When we were filling the bowl, this large chunk fell into the bowl.”
He said the 50-gallon steam kettle the soup was cooked in was lidded and it was impossible for any pests to enter, and the other 20-litre containers are placed on brackets 3.5 feet above the floor.
While Phillips said he didn’t want to unduly criticize the women, he said there were a number of factors that made him question the veracity of the short video.
“There’s not much of a reaction,” he said. “If I found a rat in my soup, I think I would be a little freaked out. They were pretty nonchalant.”
He also said the women took some photos before complaining to the server. And he questioned why Choe’s friend posted the photo to an Instagram account with 33 followers, one she hadn’t used in a year, instead of the more popular account where she was posting other photos.
He also questioned why Choe accepted a $100 gift certificate to the same restaurant at which she had been served a rat.
Choe said all she wanted was a refund for the soup and said she has no intentions of using the gift certificate and has thrown it out.
Choe, 24 and a post-secondary student at a school and program she didn’t want to name, said she was tired of the attention the posting has brought her. She said “I hope not” when asked if she thought she might face a lawsuit.
The soup was produced in the rented basement of Mamie Taylor’s restaurant, a business arrangement that has since ended, at the request of Mamie’s owner, said Phillips.
Phillips said the fallout from the viral posting caused him at least $2,000 in lost inventory after Vancouver city health inspectors ordered stock destroyed, up to 75 per cent of daily income — $600 to 700 a day from $2,000 to $2,500 before the incident — and a blow to the restaurant’s reputation.
But he said he has no intention of suing Choe.
He said the city gave him the OK to continue running the restaurant, but he has to find a new production kitchen.
“They (inspectors) gave us a clean bill of health” and added his kitchens always pass the city’s routine inspections.
He said inspectors once found “a small portion of rodent activity. But it could have been an ant. Nothing that was critical. It was a small infraction.”
Vancouver’s searchable inspection records show Crab Park Chowdery with a small number of critical and non-critical infractions over recent years, but that is also common for other restaurants listed, from high end to fast food.
Vancouver Coastal Health has investigated the Crab Park Chowdery and temporarily shut down Mamie Taylor’s. The restaurant was allowed to reopen, but the separate basement facility where there was “evidence of rodent activity” was closed.