It’s one thing for a restaurant to serve up a nice plate of venison that comes from a legally hunted deer that’s been dressed and butchered properly. It’s another to simply chop up some roadkill in the kitchen and pass it off to your customers, and that is why a Chinese food restaurant in Kentucky is now closed.

It all began last week when a few friends were leaving the restaurant after chowing down at the buffet and spied something odd going on.

“Two of the workers came in wheeling a garbage can and they had a box sitting on top of it,” one of the diners tells WYMT-TV. “And hanging out of the garbage can, they were trying to be real quick with it. So that nobody could see it. But there was like a tail, and a foot and leg. Sticking out of the garbage can and they wheeled it straight back into the kitchen… It was very disturbing. There was actually a blood trail that they were mopping up behind the garbage can.”

Faster than you can say “roadkill stew,” she was on the phone to the health department, which did indeed find roadkill — specifically a dead deer — in the restaurant’s kitchen, which the owner’s son said he’d picked up off the side of I-75.

“They said they didn’t know that they weren’t allowed to. So that makes me concerned,” says the health inspector, who immediately shut the restaurant down. “But maybe they could have before. They didn’t admit to doing it before.”

The owner says he wasn’t going to serve the dead deer to customers, but just to his family. Regardless, you can’t go butchering roadkill inside a restaurant kitchen, so the only way for the eatery to reopen is to sanitize the kitchen and pass a health inspection.

But even if it does open up again, the woman who called the health department tells WKYT, “I don’t think I’ll ever eat Chinese food ever again.”

[via NY Daily News]

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