For Your Starter, Madam: Soup a la Fly…
Everybody knows the “waiter, there’s a fly in my soup” jokes. But it was no joke for Andrea Svensson when she tried to tuck into her French onion soup at a prestigious restaurant in Gothenburg, Sweden. The young lady was out for a romantic dinner with her fiancé but the evening took a sour turn when she actually found a dead fly floating in her $30 starter. “I feel sick just talking about it,” said Miss Svensson, 27 years old. “I would have swallowed the filthy insect if my boyfriend hadn’t seen it.” The couple, outraged, immediately called the waiter over to complain. To make matters worse, the waiter who came to see them actually took it as a joke and walked away, grinning knowingly! “It may seem funny, but we weren’t impressed.” said David Tomas, Andrea’s boyfriend. “We expect better standards of hygiene from a restaurant this expensive. When they didn’t take us seriously it just made me more upset.” The couple eventually had to call the restaurant manager, who saw the fly and immediately withdrew the dish, offering them a free meal. However the young lovers by this point were far too put off their meal and decided to take their business elsewhere.
Joking aside, any restaurant knows how big a health and safety nightmare this situation could be. The hot summer weather naturally attracts insects, especially in a food preparation area, and installing a low cost electric fly killer is an absolute must in any commercial kitchen. However this establishment, not being used to hot weather due to the normally chilly Swedish climate, was not equipped with one. “This has never happened to us before – we are aware of the importance of making sure it never happens again,” said the head chef. “We do take hygiene very seriously in our kitchens, and actually have an air filter already to trap airborne viruses, as well as air conditioners throughout the restaurant.” Let’s hope other restaurants learn the lesson from this. It only takes one such event for word to spread amongst loyal restaurant-goers and reputations to be destroyed. Then of course there’s the even bigger danger of a visit from the health inspector, who has the power to shut down a restaurant for incidents like these.
