UPDATE: Ruby Tuesday Says Man Ordered Fatal Crab Dish
Yesterday, we reported that Rodney Hawkins, who was allergic to shellfish, died after eating an entree containing crab meat which was mistakenly brought to him at a Ruby Tuesday restaurant in Lovejoy, GA.. According to AJC, Ruby Tuesday denies any wrongdoing and says that the man actually ordered the chicken and crab meat dish called the "Chicken Oscar" which triggered the fatal allergic reaction. Rodney's widow, Linda Hawkins, disagrees. Details, inside...
The article says,
[Linda Hawkins] hopes that Ruby Tuesday accepts responsibility and does whatever is necessary to see that this doesn't happen again," said Chicago attorney Joseph Leonardi, speaking on behalf of the Hawkins family.
Hawkins, 35, collapsed and went into anaphylactic shock Thursday night soon after consuming the shellfish at the Ruby Tuesday on Tara Boulevard, according to an autopsy conducted by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. The welder and aspiring rapper was rushed to Southern Regional Medical Center and pronounced dead a half hour later.
Investigators have suggested a mix-up in the dinner order, but won't file any criminal charges.
"He had ordered the Chicken Fresco and the Chicken Oscar was brought out by mistake," said GBI (Georgia Bureau of Investigation) spokesman John Bankhead.
Ruby Tuesday said its own review revealed no such error.
"Our investigation of this incident, which includes interviews with the server and manager on duty and the collection of their written notes of what occurred, clearly indicates that the guest ordered Chicken Oscar, a dish that contains crab meat," Rick Johnson, a spokesman for the company, said in a statement sent to the AJC on Tuesday.
"The server's order pad and the ticket to the kitchen also verify the accuracy of the order."
The two dishes, restaurant officials point out, differ significantly in appearance. Chicken Fresco is topped with a tomato slice and chopped green herbs, while Chicken Oscar has crab meat and asparagus spears.
"She [the server] is very clear that he repeated more than one time that Chicken Oscar was his choice," said Johnson, whose company has more than 25 metro Atlanta locations. "We don't believe there was any confusion on her part. Had he been confused . . . when the dish was brought to the table it would be been clearly visible to him that it had crab meat on it."
Virginia Hawkins said in a phone interview from her Momence, Ill., home that her brother was allergic to shellfish since childhood. She said he moved from Illinois to metro Atlanta to pursue a rap music career.
Are we to believe that this man with an acute shellfish allergy since childhood failed to read the description of the entree or simply ordered the wrong entree by mistake? And that this also slipped by his wife who was with him? Why would Rodney have repeated his order "more than once?" That implies that the order was spoken at least 3 times which seems a bit unusual. Of course, maybe the RT representative meant to say the order was said more than once, not repeated. We're not saying that Ruby Tuesday's version is impossible, just improbable. But we don't like to speculate, we leave that to the commenters.
PREVIOUSLY: Wrong Order Kills Customer At Ruby Tuesday
Wife: Man who died didn't order crab dish [AJC] (Thanks to Sunny!)
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Comments:
So they have proof that it was written down, but no proof that the waitress didn't write down the wrong thing?
Be honest people, how many of you had a waiter/waitress write down the wrong thing? This has happened to me more than once, how can you say it most certainly didn't happen in this case?
The order pad and ticket again mean nothing if the wrong thing was written down. Plus, nothing stopping them from falsifying that information later either.
I'm not feeling Ruby Tuesday's story here, but it does seem odd that he'd eat something with obvious crab meat on it. Is this some sort of elaborate new suicide technique? Just once, before I die, I'd like to taste the forbidden crustacean...
I don't believe their story. A guy who has been allergic to shellfish since childhood sees it on his plate and eats it anyway? That doesn't make any sense. I know they're trying so very hard to not get sued but they'll have to make up a better defense than that.
Sounds like a lot of people trying to cover their butt. I was a waitress for four years and there was more than one occasion when I heard what I wanted and wrote down the wrong order.
@kylo4: Are you really doubting the stupidity of people?
I am not supposed to eat shellfish b/c I have gout. If I eat a lot, I'm in pain for a long time, and pretty much disabled when I have a flare up. BUT, on holidays, I will enjoy some shellfish b/c a small amount doesn't bother me. Perhaps this gentleman had in the past had MILD reactions, but wanted to have something he hadn't had for awhile, and unfortunately, now it was an acute reaction. I did forsee this part of the article though, "said Chicago attorney Joseph Leonardi, speaking on behalf of the Hawkins family". I mean, it was only 4 days, why shouldn't they have an attorney?
Why would Rodney have repeated his order "more than once?" That implies that the order was spoken at least 3 times which seems a bit unusual. Of course, maybe the RT representative meant to say the order was said more than once, not repeated.
Wow, really nitpicking arn't ya?
Are we to believe that this man with an acute shellfish allergy since childhood failed to read the description of the entree or simply ordered the wrong entree by mistake? And that this also slipped by his wife who was with him?
Are we also to believe that a man with acute shellfish allergy since childhood failed to even look at his plate once before eating? I mean, who doesn't look at their plate atleast once to make sure it's what they ordered. Either he's stupid, or he's not, can't have it both ways.
The order pad and ticket again mean nothing if the wrong thing was written down. Plus, nothing stopping them from falsifying that information later either.
What's stopping the family of the decease of lying to get money out of this?
And given that the rest of the waitress pad would have the orders placed before or after (most likely with dates) would give reason to believe it.
Not a seafood eater here (but not allergic as far as I know) Wouldn't he have been able to smell the crab? I'm so acutely aware of the smell of some fish I can smell someone eating a tuna fish sandwich near me - does crab smell when it's on food in a portion quantity?
I'm sorry, but if you are DEATHLY allergic to shellfish, you just DON'T go into a restaurant that has it on their menu, period. Even if they got the order correctly and gave him chicken, who's to say there wasn't a spec of shellfish left in the pan used to cook the chicken or something? Restaurants should not be put in the position of having to sterilize their equipment because of one customer's medical condition.
It's kind of like going to the zoo even though you're deathly allergic to cats - yeah, you won't go near the feline enclosure, but better be safe than sorry and not go to the zoo at all.
Also, I have just recently developed an allergy to seafood, both shellfish and regular fish. I get small break out of hives. A year or two ago, I didn't have it, eating shrimp by the fist full (Hmmm, fried shrimp). Now I still eat fish and shrimp, and hope I don't get hives or just keep some benydril around me. Shrimp is now like turkey to me. Food and a nap. Yum.
@FrenchBenj: You make it seem like you can get even remotely close to the zoo cats. If you are so deathly allergic to something that you die from being ~20 feet away, God help you some cat lady crosses your path at the supermarket....
@donkeyjote: I think in this case R/T has a lot more to lose seeing as how the family has already lost.
But I'm sorry, restaurants, especially fine upstanding establishments such as R/T never make mistakes, right?
"The rest of the waitress pad" ??? Seriously?
Perhaps he wanted to get some "street cred" to improve his rap career by having a near death experience and he took it a little too far...
I am just schocked that RT uses REAL Crab meat, and not the immitation crab meat that most places use!
@benh57 - and that's why TechCrunch has been so anti-AP.
@Rachacha - I couldn't agree more - maybe he was thinking the same thing!
I think I'll wait for more information. I find it hard to believe that the guy would have deliberately ordered something he knew he was severely allergic to, but on the other hand, it sounds like the two dishes are distinctly different both in look and taste. I find it hard to believe that he didn't notice the mistake and went right ahead and ate the wrong dish.
Not enough information.
@doctor_cos: "But I'm sorry, restaurants, especially fine upstanding establishments such as R/T never make mistakes, right?"
Excellent point in a sarcastic way. Restaurants often do make mistakes.
If I hold out my hands and tell you that each hand contains one pill, a red one and a blue one. I tell you that if you take the red pill you will die. You then ask me for the blue pill which I tell you is in my right hand. Are you going to take the pill from my hand and swallow it? Or, are you going to look at it first to make sure it's blue?
I'm not blaming the victim here, I'm just saying that if I had a life threatening allergy to shell fish I would damn well be sure that I'm not eating it.
I think one of the problems here is that "fresco" and "oscar" sound too much alike, particularly if a restaurant is noisy and crowded and the orders are happening quickly. They both have the "sc" sound in the middle and the same two vowels, just transposed. I think it's entirely possible that the man said "fresco" and the waitress heard "oscar," and that the same happened in reverse if she read the order back to them. The fact that the written order says "oscar" seems to make this a bit more likely. This would make the whole thing a sad mix-up where either everyone or no one is at fault, in my mind.
@donkeyjote: DJ, that is NOT a good idea! You have no way of knowing when or if your reactions might escalate. And you should ask your doctor for a prescription for an Epi-Pen. If your throat ever begins to swell after eating shellfish, you won't be able to swallow a benadryl pill or caplet, and might not even be able to swallow a liquid benadryl dose. People with shellfish allergies also need to keep a close eye on vitamins and supplements. Calcium and chondroitin are two that come to mind as frequently containing shellfish...
What the hell? All because of insurance purposes, they tried to shy away from their wrongdoing?
Even if RT's got the order wrong and brought out crab there is no way someone deathly allergic to shellfish would "nom nom nom" it unknowingly.
I think what happened is the family planned on eating it, having an allergic reaction, then suing RT's for tons of $ but the dying part was a mistake.
Wouldn't make this the first time a customer who felt entitled tried to steal money instead of earning it. Remember the person who died on the plane and claimed they didn't get treatment or oxygen and then it turned out they knowingly endangered other passengers for boarding and DID get the treatment? I'm sure that was settled for a big $ check as well even though the company was not at fault.
@punkrawka: Exactly what I was thinking. Fresco and Oscar sound enough alike that they could easily be misheard from the other.
It does seem strange that he ate the crab though. If I thought I was getting all chicken and there was some meat in there the texture of crab, I'd at least be asking if the chicken was fully cooked.
@David M: That's pretty much what I was thinking too. There's something fishy here(no pun intended) about why this man would have eaten a meal that A)clearly wasn't his order and B)contained some kind of unknown stringy meat(assuming he didn't even know what crab looks like). This might also explain why he repeated his order to the waitress, if he did, and why he didn't use an epi-pen, as everyone I know that's severely allergic to anything carries one. The speed of lawyer acquisition is also a little suspicious to me, but RT will probably just settle out of court and move on.
I'm sorry, the best part of this article was this:
"The welder and aspiring rapper"
What an awesome combination! What was his rap moniker? MC Sparks?
Although I feel sorry for the man who died, and his family. I am glad if the man had to go, he did so at a Ruby's. I used to work at a Ruby's for almost two years. All I can say is that they have the worst management ever. We hade 4 different general managers and they would get fired every half a year if they didn't improve sales. The whole time there we had the same assistant management staff(probably responcible for poor sales). The entire magagement staff popped pain pills all the time. They didn't even try and keep it on the downlow. They would snort oxy's infront of me after closing. I guess they trusted me. I never complained or anything. I probably should have.
Long story short it was an awful place to work, and if the management sucks, the service sucks, thus the tips sucks. So I quit, I probably should have done so much sooner but I was working my way through college.
@FrenchBenj: I was on an airline flight where they didn't serve peanuts because one person was allergic.
A lot of valid points on both sides from the commenters,
but something is "fishey" (pun intended) that this guy couldn't smell, see or taste what he was eating.
Me thinks someone is lying. They've now turned an honest mistake into an ugly "he said/she said" dispute. Shame on you Ruby Tuesday.
There should be no doubt that they cooked what the server noted to cook on their pad, etc. However, did the server note the right dish? Probably not. I've been to restaurants tons of times where they tried to be slick and remember what I ordered, only to enter it wrong in the computer. That's why at restaurants where they don't want to screw up, they use a pad and take it down at the table. It doesn't impress anyone to not use a pad if you screw up the order... especially if it then kills the customer.
If his allergy was this severe he would not be able to eat anything prepared on the same surface that shellfish had been prepared (ie on the same grill). My Mother in law is very allergic to shellfish and anytime we eat out she tells the waitstaff about her allergy. Most times the manager comes out and handles her order personally.
If you're talking (mumbling a little, maybe, or not looking up from your menu to speak toward the server?) in a noisy, busy restaurant, the words "fresco" and "Oscar" could sound similar. They both have the distinctive "essk" consonant combination (sc) in the middle. And if the speaker tends to drop the final "r" consonant and say "ahh" instead (it's not just a New England thing), that would compound the potential for confusion.
I'm not trying to make lame excuses for the wait person, but I could honestly see how this might happen. She thought she heard one thing and wrote it down that way. Maybe Ruby's should change the names of the two dishes so they sound very dissimilar.
@benh57: Some of us prefer having all of these details/the extended version. If you didn't want to read this much, why didn't you just click 'back'?
I have a question.....in any of the articles does it say he told the waitress he had an allergy?
I think the error is on both sides, first with the menus of Ruby Tuesdays, second with the unfortunate victim of his own choice.
The thing that gets me is that assuming the victim even knew of his seafood allergy, he decided to move to Atlanta, Georgia, near the ocean where stores would be more apt to serve seafood. He also was starting a rap music career... which not only I believe is already saturated with all types of "musicians," but I doubt is even music to begin with and gets badly played as ringtones.
I'm going to stop there. There's too little information to razz both sides now.
I like the blaming of the dearly departed for not recognizing that he might have been served the wrong dish. Unless he has seen both dishes before, how would he have known from looking that it wasn't the right dish? Most dishes don't look like what they show on the menu (assuming it even has pictures).
I don't know if the names of the dishes are some kind of industry standard, but just hearing the name of the dish wouldn't immediately signal to me that I ordered the wrong thing. All the dish names end up sounding alike...Fresco, Frisco, Oscar...
RT isn't going to win this one, even if the stiff was an absolute idiot.
Now, obviously, I don't know what happened, but I can understand eating crab if you really, really think you're eating something else. The brain is a powerful thing. I've been vegetarian for 15 years, and there was a restaurant where my husband and I went for lunch once a week. They were changing brands of veggie burger, which was fine, until the week where they brought me a TURKEY burger instead. I figured it was just a new type of soyburger, just one that tasted astonishingly meaty. It wasn't until they brought the check and tried to charge an extra dollar for the turkeyburger that I realized what had happened, and when they brought me the pad as "proof" that I had ordered a turkey burger and had to pay the dollar, I may have gone just a wee bit ballistic. (They wound up giving me the entire meal for free, which is more than I asked for, but I thought was awfully nice. A couple of hours later when I started being sick for the next 12 hours, I thought the free meal was the LEAST they could have done.)
Anyway, point is - if you think you're eating chicken, it's gonna taste like chicken, even if it is crabmeat.
I'm not buying RT's story that this guy intentionally ordered and ate this. I can see how he might not have seen the crab in the sauce. It was a cream sauce and many places use the small pieces of lump crabmeat because it is cheaper. It could be mixed into a cream sauce and not noticed until you ate some of it.
Wait staff screw up orders all the time too.
@Git Em SteveDave has a new Lego set: I'm sure the family had to turn off the phone from all the lawyers that started chasing their ambulance the moment this story hit the wires...a case like this is a liability lawyer's wet dream.
@STrRedWolf: I think it might be a little extreme to blame to victim for choosing to live in Atlanta. Allergies are often something that can be worked around; they don't necessarily dictate your life like that.
According to Ruby Tuesday, the conversation went down something like this:
Server: And what would you like today sir?
Hawkins: Let me have the Chicken Oscar.
Server: The Chicken Oscar. Very Good.
Hawkins: Can you repeat that for me?
Server: Of course. That was one Chicken Oscar.
Hawkins: And that has chicken AND crab in it right?
Server: Yes, that is the Chicken Oscar. Are you allergic to chicken, or crab?
Hawkins: No, and if I were, I completely absolve Ruby Tuesday of any responsibility, legal or otherwise.
Server: So thats one Chicken Oscar with disclaimer, correct sir?
Hawkins: Yes.
Server: I will now confirm again that you indeed want the Chicken Oscar. Remember this is the Chicken OSCAR, and our restraunt has other chicken dishes.
Hawkins: Yes, the Chicken Oscar. O-S-C-A-R
Server: Very good sir. Please sign here to be eligible to receive the Chicken Oscar.
Even if RT got the order wrong, I think the customer also should have paid more attention. If I had a deadly food allergy, if I get anything other than what I ordered, I'm not touching it.
I'd also make a point of telling the wait staff that I have the deadly allergy!
@Pyro979: My boyfriend has had chicken oscar at Ruby Tuesday before, and it honestly didn't look like that.
The sauce was thicker, and the crab meat was... smaller and more sparse. I had a hard time telling there was crab meat on it myself.
@STrRedWolf: Dude, we're like four hours away from the coast in Atlanta. Seafood is no more prevalent here than any other inland city.
There is a large sign, though, when entering city limits from the south on 75 that Atlanta is home to So-So-Def recordings. So rap, yeah. Crab, not so much.
@STrRedWolf: seafood can be avoided...Atlanta is a big hotspot for rap "musicians"...just because you don't like it, and probably haven't heard anything beyond what ringtones you hear in public settings, doesn't mean its not music...pull your head out of the sand and possibly add something relevant to this unfortunate situation or keep your stereotypes to yourself...the man had a dream and made an effort to make it a reality, probably more than you can say for yourself
Me thinks someone is lying. They've now turned an honest mistake into an ugly "he said/she said" dispute. Shame on you Ruby Tuesday.
So I guess whether they believe the mistake was theirs or the customer's, they're just supposed to roll over and take it in the ass because it's "mean" to say you didn't fucking kill someone.
Every restaurant should have the touch menu order screens you see at some sandwhich places where you can choose your own ingredients or "Extras" and then they make it for you. You can even put in disclaimer screens in the beginning (which no one will read). That way, you'll have an electronic record of what was ordered, entered by the customer personally.
Eventually, that's what it's going to come to.
@theysaidwhat: I rather enjoy life (and the occasional shrimp is part of the enjoyment). Thanks for the concern though.
@veverkap: DJ Forge? MC Blacksmith?
@Magnakai Haaskivi: They're freaking awesome! You order like a 6 inch sub as a "base" and the the menu cycles through all the ingredients you can put on it. they have standards like "italian" or "american" or "turkey" but you can choose any combination of meats/cheeses/toppings/sauces. Then when you're done ordering you hit enter, get a receipt and go pay when they call your number. I don't see why it wouldn't work in other restaurants.
A little OT, but that's robably a bit more than fair use quoting there, Jay.. I think a paragraph or two max is about it.
(AP even gave drudge a takedown over 39-79 word quotes, but then backed off)
[www.nytimes.com]