Waitress, there’s a cockroach in my salad! Well, sir, if you’re not partial to them, I’ll eat it…

It reads like a gag from a dusty old joke book – but the line above describes what really happened when a customer complained at a restaurant in China.

Businessman Zhang Yen called over Jin Kuo after finding the bug in his salad. The 39-year-old waitress told him such a discovery was perfectly common, and there was nothing to worry about.

When he sarcastically asked if she fancied tucking into the insect, she scooped it off his plate and gulped it down.




Fascinated customers filmed the heated exchange between Mr Zhang and his waitress at the Jinsha Era Plaza hotel restaurant in the western city of Chengdu.

Ms Jin is seen telling the 43-year-old: ‘No matter which restaurant you go to, you will always find cockroaches in the food. It is very normal.’

After she ate the bug, Mr Zhang had nothing more to say. He paid his bill and left, shaking his head.

The restaurant apologised, saying Ms Jin had been given a pay cut to punish her.

It is not the first time Chinese restaurant staff have tried to defuse a hygiene row by eating the evidence.

In May, a manager ate a condom – insisting it was a ring of calamari – after customers found it in a fish dish in Hefei.

MORE: ‘These are my children.’ Woman keeps 100,000 cockroaches in her home

MORE: Horrified mother discovers dead cockroach in Tesco spinach