Rat Served in Atlanta Asian Restaurant Hoax

The message included below claims that a popular restaurant in Atlanta has been shut down by health authorities.

Supposedly, shipments of rats, mice, kittens and puppies were discovered in the restaurant’s kitchen ready to be served as Asian dishes to the establishment’s high profile guests.

The message includes photographs featuring trays of rodents supposedly ready for use in the eatery’s kitchen.



 However, it is not difficult to identify the message as a hoax:

• Some time spent in Google Image Search quickly reveals that the very same images were originally shown on Dumerils.com, a (now defunct) website that supplied food for pet snakes.
• There was no mention of the restaurant closure in the mainstream media. If an eatery frequented by celebrities such as Whitney Houston was really serving rat meat to its patrons, it would almost certainly be a top story in newspaper and TV news, not only in Atlanta but also around the world.
• Like similar hoaxes, the message is quite vague when it comes to details. The restaurant or its owners are not named, the actual date of the supposed closure is not stated and no collaborating reference material is supplied.

In fact, this hoax is just another manifestation of a long-standing urban legend that unfairly maligns Asian restaurants.

Here in Australia, vague stories about cats or rats being used as a secret substitute for chicken at Chinese eateries have circulated for many years.

There is the yarn about the town where a lot of pet cats have gone missing until the mystery is solved when sanitation workers find cat skeletons in the local Chinese restaurant garbage bins. Another tells of the suspicious Asian restaurant patron who takes a sample of his “chicken” to be analysed only to discover that he or she has been eating cat or rat or another animal that Westerners would not normally consider eating.

These stories are almost always passed around orally and are never substantiated.

Example