How Well Dragon Chinese Restaurant Chinese Food Ripoff, unsanitary, bad customer service Atlanta Georgia

My food has always tasted wonderful and delivered quick and hot. Maybe you should plan ahead of the lunch cruch and order before noon. This food take a little time to prepare, its not like a billion-n-one burger joint.

Hope you "fill" better in the future.

J Byrd, Atlanta

I posted the snopes thing too (just the link). It sure comes in handy everytime someone repeats some silly urban legend and tries to pass it off as the truth. Along with ripoffreport.com, I think snopes is one of the handiest websites out there.

My favorite is when some joker says cat or dog is being served in a chinese restaurant. I ask for proof and they say "Oh, I don't have any proof but I know its true because my daddy's brother's momma's cousin's nephew's father's next door neighbor's preacher's brother in law said it happened.

Please.

http://www.snopes.com/horrors/food/chinese.htm

Amy,

Here's a little snippet from Snopes to let you know that you are lying about finding cats in the freezer. It even comes with references to help you out.

-------------------

Claim: Chinese restaurants use cat meat in their entrees.
Status: False.

Examples:

[Smith, 1983]
One evening several friends went out to a local Chinese restaurant for a celebratory meal. Half way through the meal one of the party suddenly started to cough and choke. Thoroughly alarmed they rushed her to hospital and she had to undergo minor surgery to remove a small bone stuck in her throat.

The surgeon who removed the bone was somewhat perplexed as he did not recognise the type of bone found. He therefore sent it off for analysis and the report came back saying that it was a rat bone.

The public health department immediately visited the restaurant to inspect the kitchens and in the fridge they found numerous tins of cat food, half an Alsatian dog and several rats all waiting to be served up.

---------------------------

[Collected on the Internet, 1999]

Okay, at this chinese restaurant where I live, it's called moon palace, they suddenly closed down. Everybody wondered why they closed down, but then we finally heard the truth. When the health inspectors went to inspect the so-called "clean" facility, they found cages and cages of cats. So they were like "okay" and then they went to the freezer. FROZEN CATS EVERYWHERE!!!! Happy eating!

Variations:

In North America, this rumor usually takes the form of cats' turning up in Chinese food, but in other parts of the world, dogs and rats also end up being served to unsuspecting patrons.

Though Chinese restaurants bear the brunt of this rumor, East Indian and Italian eating establishments are also fingered.

How this ghastly misdeed is discovered varies from telling to telling. Sometimes animal carcasses are found in nearby dumpsters. Sometimes a Health Department inspection turns up the butchered little kitties in the restaurant's freezer. And sometimes it's the astute diner who spots, er, Spot. (Brunvand reports a version in which a veterinarian or archaeologist dining at an ethic establishment filches a suspect bone from his plate, brings it home, and analyzes it. In another Brunvandian version, a bone lodged in a diner's throat is extracted by a doctor who pronounces it to of rodential origin.)
Origins: How old is old? The rumor about Fluffy's or Fido's being slipped into Chinese food by unscrupulous restaurateurs has been traced by British researchers to the earliest years of the British Empire in England and to the 1850s in the United States.

[Jacobson, 1948]
How ripe small towns actually are for rumors was amply demonstrated a few years ago. In a town of thirteen thousand inhabitants, which was gradually blossoming into cityhood, there was a restaurant operated by three Chinese. It was the most successful eating place around, patronized by businessmen and citizens morning, noon, and night. Everyone agreed that the food and service were good. But without the slightest warning business suddenly took a drastic drop. The once-prosperous proprietors became miserably unhappy, for they could not understand what had happened to all their patrons. Then they found out that someone, maybe a competitor, maybe just a person who nursed a real or imagined grudge against Chinese, had initiated a rumor that the police had found three skinned cats, labeled rabbits, in the restaurant's refrigerator.

Ancient slur or not, wherever this rumor goes it affects how the locals feel about the Chinese in their midst, and it often impacts a restaurant's fragile bottom line. As an example (this rumor has turned up in so many cities, it would be impossible to list them all), in 1995 the closing of two Chinese restaurants in Columbus, Ohio, awakened the sleeping rumor yet again. Calls were fielded, both by the local paper and the board of health, about whispers that these closings were the result of dead cats' being discovered in each eatery's meat locker. Never mind that just the previous day the local paper had run a story about the closure (for business reasons) of all 51 restaurants in this particular chain -- the cat meat rumor would not be denied.

In 1996, county health department officials in Knoxville, Tennessee, stepped forward to issue a strong denial about frozen cats' being found at a particular local Chinese restaurant. It seemed everyone had heard the rumor, yet no such complaint was on file. Indeed, this particular restaurant had always met Health Department regulations, a claim supported by inspection records.

In 1991, after a Burlington, Ontario [Canada] Chinese eatery lost 30% of its trade to this rumor, its owners attempted to combat the talk by inviting the local professional football team, the Hamilton Ti-Cats, to eat there on the house. Due to the loss of business, restaurant staff had seen their work week cut by 10 hours. The trouble had started two months earlier, with its first sign being a phone call from a woman asking if the restaurant was closed. A friend had told her health officials had padlocked the 434-seat restaurant because it "had been serving cat." That call was the first of many to the restaurant, the health department, and the media. Callers often said others told them the rumor was on radio or in the papers, but no such reports had been broadcast or published. Again, this restaurant had a good reputation with the health department, but that didn't stop the progress of the rumor and the damage it did to the livelihoods of the small business owners and their employees.

This legend is a classic example of xenophobia (fear and hatred of foreigners or that which is foreign). Asian culture is markedly different from Western culture, with language but the first barrier to be hurdled. Customs, religious observances, traditions -- all are wildly different from their North American counterparts. As with all xenophobic reactions, that which isn't the same is vilified. The Asian culinary practice of making a tiny bit of meat stretch to feed a family by cutting it up fine and making it part of a larger dish of vegetables or noodles is transformed by fear into a vehicle for "them" to slip something objectionable into our unwitting stomachs. Likewise, that the Chinese don't as a rule keep cats and dogs as pets becomes seen as a willingness to plop someone else's animal companion into the stew pot. Anything for a buck, says this legend, and if in the process one puts over on the white devils, so much the better.

Though the Chinese have been known to dine on cats or dogs in their homeland, it's not a widespread practice and by many reports remains limited to certain far-flung backwards regions. The Chinese certainly don't do this in Europe or North America where these animals are known to enjoy the exalted status of family pets. It is true, however, that dog is more or less routinely consumed in Korea where it's seen as a game meat. Yet even in Korea, Western sensibilities are catered to on this issue. When the Olympics were held in Seoul, every wire service ran stories about dog being one of the dishes that could be ordered in a restaurant there. In response, the South Korean government temporarily shut down more than 400 eateries where dog soup was a staple. It knew visiting cultures would never understand.

In North America, Koreans don't eat dog. (See our Hound by the Pound page for the story of an elaborate hoax about a Korean-American company approaching animal shelters with an offer to buy excess dogs.)

Also in North America, the Vietnamese are tarred with a variation of the Chinese restaurant rumor -- according to this slander, when a Vietnamese family moves into the neighborhood, all the stray cats disappear. That the Vietnamese don't eat cat doesn't impact this rumor one whit.

Barbara "catty gossip" Mikkelson

Additional information: The link below plays a fabulous (RealAudio) musical version of this legend set to the tune of Harry Chapin's "Cat's in the Cradle":

Cat's in the Ladle

Sightings: Swayed by the police discount a new East Indian restaurant is offering, various members of the force partake of kitty curry before discovering what they're dining on in an episode of television's Hill Street Blues ("Bangladesh Slowly," original air date 1 November 1984).

Last updated: 29 April 1999

The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/horrors/food/chinese.htm
Click here to e-mail this page to a friend
Urban Legends Reference Pages 1995-2003
by Barbara and David P. Mikkelson
This material may not be reproduced without permission

-------------------------
Sources:
Brunvand, Jan Harold. The Choking Doberman.
New York: W. W. Norton, 1984. ISBN 0-393-30321-7 (pp. 121-122).

Chenoweth, Doral. "Cat, Dog Meat Rumors Should Be Put to Rest."
The Columbus Dispatch. 7 September 1995 (Features; p. 16).

de Vos, Gail. Tales, Rumors and Gossip.
Englewood: Libraries Unlimited, 1996. ISBN 1-56308-190-3 (p. 39).

Jacobson, David J. The Affairs of Dame Rumor.
New York: Rinehart & Co., 1948 (p. 168).

Goleman, Daniel. "Anatomy of a Rumor: It Flies on Fear."
The New York Times. 4 June 1991 (p. C1).

Kidd, Paul. "TiCat Feast to Fight Cat Meat Slur."
The Toronto Star. 8 August 1991 (p. A10).

Smith, Amy. "Frozen-Cats-At-Eatery Story Called Only a Rumor."
Knoxville News-Sentinel. 3 December 1996 (p. A4).

Smith, Paul. The Book of Nasty Legends.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983. ISBN 0-00-636856-5 (p. 54).

-----------------------------

Let me guess Amy... You heard the stories of cat being served in chinese restaurants from a friend who heard it from a friends friend, or some crap like that.

You do know that all restaurants are given a yearly inspection, and they are not easy to pass. If a restaurant scores below 70/100 then they are rescheduled for 3 months later for a new inspection to bring up the score. If they fail that inspection then the restaurant is shut down until they are brought up to code. I'm sure that the inspectors would notice cat hairs, or other "Cat" parts lying around.

Please don't go spreading false rumors around like that Amy. It's pathetic.

Let me guess Amy... You heard the stories of cat being served in chinese restaurants from a friend who heard it from a friends friend, or some crap like that.

You do know that all restaurants are given a yearly inspection, and they are not easy to pass. If a restaurant scores below 70/100 then they are rescheduled for 3 months later for a new inspection to bring up the score. If they fail that inspection then the restaurant is shut down until they are brought up to code. I'm sure that the inspectors would notice cat hairs, or other "Cat" parts lying around.

Please don't go spreading false rumors around like that Amy. It's pathetic.

Let me guess Amy... You heard the stories of cat being served in chinese restaurants from a friend who heard it from a friends friend, or some crap like that.

You do know that all restaurants are given a yearly inspection, and they are not easy to pass. If a restaurant scores below 70/100 then they are rescheduled for 3 months later for a new inspection to bring up the score. If they fail that inspection then the restaurant is shut down until they are brought up to code. I'm sure that the inspectors would notice cat hairs, or other "Cat" parts lying around.

Please don't go spreading false rumors around like that Amy. It's pathetic.

Let me guess Amy... You heard the stories of cat being served in chinese restaurants from a friend who heard it from a friends friend, or some crap like that.

You do know that all restaurants are given a yearly inspection, and they are not easy to pass. If a restaurant scores below 70/100 then they are rescheduled for 3 months later for a new inspection to bring up the score. If they fail that inspection then the restaurant is shut down until they are brought up to code. I'm sure that the inspectors would notice cat hairs, or other "Cat" parts lying around.

Please don't go spreading false rumors around like that Amy. It's pathetic.

lets me see never seen cat meat at the market . if fact in any store here in the USA . so first you have to catch a cat (thats fun ) kill a cat , skin a cat . de bone a cat . for how much meat 8 oz 16oz ?? .The last time i bought chicken at the store . it was 79 cents a pound . sounds like a lot of work to save 79 cents .

I live in NC also. I have never heard of any chinese restaurants serving cat to their customers. Please validate your allegations with links to newsites that give detailed information about chinese restaurants in NC serving cat meat.

Hey, just the other day I heard second hand that a young man went into a Chinese restaurant in my area to do some contract work and when he walked through the kitchen, he saw that there were shrimp sitting on ice in the mop sink. Just think about were public restroom floor water, etc., goes. Yummy! And here I thought this place was so nice when they would give me extras. I could do without those kinds of extras.

Sometimes I feel like going out to eat is like buying a mystery goodie bag...you never know what you're getting but much of the time, it ends up being some bad stuff.

I love Chinese food and there are a lot of good Chinese restaurants out there. However, you have to be careful because at some of them you never know what you are getting. For example, I've heard about several in my area that were caught serving cats! I could not believe this! I live in North Carolina and know of one restaurant in particular where the health inspectors found cats in the freezer! When questioned, they said that they keep the cats to eat themselves, but do not serve them to customers. But do you really believe that? Well anyway their restaurant got shut down because of the incident, and I also know one more that got shut down for serving cats. One of my co-workers who is from New York told me that there was one restaurant there where they kill the alley cats and serve them. My uncle was talking about a Chinese restaurant he had eaten at and how much he loved the food. Hopefully it was one of the good ones, but I jokingly asked him, "How do you really know it was chicken you were eating? What if it was really cat?" To which he replied, "I don't know, but if it was, it sure was GOOD cat!" Which I'm sure he meant to be funny but I have cats as pets and love animals so I didn't laugh too much at the joke. But anyway I still love to eat at Chinese restaurants and we can only hope that the majority of them are honest and that when you order chicken, you really do get chicken. I guess that is just a chance you take. I was sorry to hear about your unpleasant experience and really hope you get justice. Please keep us updated as to what happens and if you find out what they really served you, please let us know.