Man finds snake head in TGIFriday's dinner



CLIFTON PARK, N.Y. -- So you hit up your favorite local casual dining chain restaurant on a Sunday night, sit down for a good old chicken sandwich -- and halfway through your meal, you find a dead snake's head in your veggies.

If the mere idea makes you a little queasy, imagine how Jack Pendleton of Clifton Park felt when it happened to him.

Finding the animal part in his meal while eating at TGI Friday's in Clifton Park a few days ago, Pendleton says, "I started to feel nauseous when I recognized what it was and I realized I had been eating the vegetables where I'd found it."

Pendleton had gone to the restaurant Sunday night for dinner and ordered a chicken sandwich and a side of broccoli and string beans.

"I finish the sandwich, and I start digging into the veggies, and I see this gray shape," he explains to CBS 6 News.
"I thought it was a mushroom, 'cause sometimes you get a mushroom with the vegetables. And I'm turning it over with my fork, and I see this green patch on the bottom. And I'd never seen a green mushroom, so I continued to look at it a little more closely -- and I noticed this v-shaped mouth.

"It was clearly a reptile," Pendleton continues. "I'm guessing it was a snake because of the shape. It was gray, decomposed, and parts of the skin on the forehead was missing so that you could see the skull plate. It didn't look like it'd been cut -- there were bits of spine and tendon hanging out the back, and it was about the size of this section of my thumb, so it was fairly large," Pendleton says, gesturing with the top half of his thumb.

"I immediately feel that tightness in the back of [my] throat," he recalls.

Pendleton says he waved the waiter over and explained to him what he had found. The waiter chuckled at first, but when Pendleton showed him the snake head, the waiter "took maybe a second to recognize what it was -- and then he started to gag."

The waiter apologized immediately and took the snake ahead away to the back of the restaurant, says Pendleton. The manager appeared at Pendleton's table "what seemed just like a few seconds later, just as white as a sheet."

"He apologized and explained that in the five years that he's worked there, he'd never seen anything like this," Pendleton says. To the restaurant's credit, Pendleton believes the waiter and the manager reacted "quickly and appropriately."

"All I really wanted was for them to make sure they went through that kitchen top to bottom because I'm wondering, 'Where's the rest of this animal? Is it in someone else's dinner?,'" Pendleton says. "And they assured me they would."

Pendleton says he filed a complaint with the TGIFriday's corporation. An official with the parent company, Carlson Restaurants Worldwide, issued a statement to CBS 6 News, saying, "We are taking this situation very seriously. We immediately pulled the broccoli from this restaurant and began an extensive investigation.

"As a precautionary measure, we pulled broccoli from all restaurants that received product from this supplier," continued Amy Freshwater, vice president of corporate communications and public relations at Carlson Restaurants. "We have since isolated the specific lot date of the broccoli in question and have now re-introduced the product in all restaurants not included in the product hold."

Freshwater said the company has contacted the supplier, who has also started a "thorough investigation" into their processes.

The snake head is being sent to an independent lab for testing, said Freshwater.
"We have very strict and thorough safety and sanitation procedures and regret that this situation occurred in one of our restaurants," Freshwater said.

Pendleton says he's satisfied with the way the restaurant handled the situation -- his meal, of course, was comped -- and insists he's not looking for a windfall. "I thought to myself when it happened... they're going to think I planted this because there was no conceivable way in my mind an item like this could find its way into my meal," he says, recalling past similar headlines.

"I've had some friends say, 'You could have gotten a lawsuit out of this,'" he continues. "That's not anything I'm really interested in. It's the single most horrifying thing that's happened to me at a restaruant, but I don't have any long-term psychological damage or anything like that."

Where Pendleton was left unsatisfied, though, was his ability -- or lack thereof -- to easily file a complaint with the state health department. He says he had difficulty finding useful tools and forms to communicate his situation to the Department of Health on its website. "It's just disappointing," he says.

Three days later, Pendleton is still reeling from memories of the unpleasant dinner surprise, but is finding humor to have an antidotal effect. "It' still alarming to me," he says, admitting he'll probably be examining meals more closely when he dines out, "but I have to smile about it now, because if I don't, I'll start to feel nauseous."

And in case you're wondering, as some of Pendleton's friends have: "No, I have not developed reptile-based superpowers," Pendleton deadpans.