Chinese Restaurant Caught Serving Street Pigeons as ‘Roasted Duck’

A Chinese restaurant in the heart of Madrid has been shut down after police discovered it was passing off street pigeons as “roast duck” — and that was just the beginning of the horror show inside.

On March 25, officers with Madrid’s Municipal Police raided the restaurant in the Usera district and found a laundry list of disgusting health code violations. The place was infested with cockroaches, rat traps were scattered on the floor, and officers even found featherless pigeons that appeared to have been hunted from the streets.

Behind a fake shelf in the disabled bathroom, police uncovered a hidden room that wasn’t even listed on the restaurant’s business license. Inside were eight freezers filled with unlabeled and untraceable meat and fish — some reportedly rotting and without any expiration dates. The kitchen didn’t even have thermometers to monitor food storage temperatures, a basic requirement for food safety.

To make matters worse, other reports claim around 300 kilos of spoiled food were found, with meat hanging to dry on a clothesline. Local newspaper El Mundo reported that restaurant staff were allegedly catching pigeons in the street and “kicking them to death” before cooking them.

“It smelled like rotten seafood. It was almost unbearable,” one police officer said.

A resident who lived in the building told reporters, “None of us ever ate there. It always smelled bad, and we saw food being dropped off in carts and left out in the open.”

Police shut the restaurant down immediately. The owner now faces potential charges for animal cruelty, public health violations, and consumer fraud.

Elsewhere: Vietnamese Restaurant Busted for Drowning Cats for Meat

In a separate incident across the globe, a notorious restaurant in Vietnam has been shut down after it was caught drowning cats to supply the country’s controversial feline meat market.

Pham Quoc Doanh, 37, ran the Gia Bảo restaurant in Thái Nguyên, where he allegedly killed up to 300 cats a month. A sign outside the now-closed establishment once advertised “Specialty cat meat” beside a photo of a wide-eyed black cat.

Cat meat is still consumed in some parts of Vietnam, often considered a good-luck charm or even a supposed remedy against illnesses like COVID-19. An estimated one million cats — including stolen pets — are killed for meat each year in the country.

Doanh later claimed he never intended to enter the cat meat trade but said rising costs and low income from his original business left him no choice. “Before selling cat meat, I served regular food and drinks,” he told Metro. “But the income wasn’t enough to support my family.”