An investigation has been opened into a case involving an alleged needle that was reportedly found in a piece of pork served to a customer this week at popular Hong Kong chain restaurant Xin Wang, the Shanghai Food and Drug Administration said Thursday.
A customer dined at Xin Wang’s restaurant on Huaihai Road on Tuesday and posted a picture of the serving in question on weibo.com the next day, saying that she discovered a needle in her order of pork trotter, which appeared as a thin pinhead used for injecting fluids into livestock.
The customer, who asked not to be named, said that Xin Wang staff told her that the restaurant would pay her hospital bill if she felt unwell within 24 hours, but she said Thursday that she never fell ill.
But the city’s food and drug administration said Thursday that authorities are taking the case seriously, after food safety became a top priority for officials earlier this year, following a slew of food scandals in the city.
“We’re checking everything out to see if we can determine how the object ended up in the food,” Gu Zhenhua, the administration’s head of food supervision, told the Global Times Thursday.
He added that the results will be publicized upon the conclusion of the investigation, a case that has garnered wide public attention on the Internet – having been re-tweeted on weibo some four thousand times since the posting was made.
The Global Times failed to reach someone from Xin Wang to comment on the situation Thursday, but local media earlier reported that a manager, identified only by his surname, Zhu, from the restaurant’s Shanghai headquarters, said that the object found inside the pork was a piece of metal wire, not a needle.
Global Times