The owner of a Chinese restaurant has confessed to selling opium laced noodles in a desperate bid to keep his customers returning again and again and again.
In today’s fiercely competitive climate it’s pretty cut-throat out there and any restauranteur worth their salt knows the secret to a good eatery is a loyal and satisfied customer base.
But how do they become loyal and satisfied in the first instance? Well, the old fashioned way was to provide quality food and superb service at a reasonable price. Many restaurants will often opt to slash their prices to undermine their rivals and get the jump on their competitors. but as in so many other things in life, you get what you pay for, and quality will always win out.
The gentle and underhanded art of cooking up noodles and lacing them with opium is pretty much unheard of in the dining and wining industry when it comes to putting bums on seats. Yet one Chinese noodle shop owner seemed to believe that such a black-hat practice would be a perfect way to make his business a sure-fire success.
Yet it all went dramatically wrong for the restaurant owner, named only as Zhang, after one of his customers tested positive for drugs in a routine urine test by traffic police.
According to the Xi’an Evening News , the restaurant in Yan’an in Shaanxi province was busted for putting a little extra something in the noodles when the man who tested positive for drugs complained he had no idea why because he was not a user.
Suspecting the noodle shop he had eaten at a few hours prior to the test might somehow be responsible for the opium in his blood, the customer, Liu Juyou, managed to convince relatives to also dine in the shop before taking a drug test to see if the results came back positive.
Surprise, surprise, they did. Zhang was caught dead to rights, and the restaurant owner confessed to police that he bought 2 KG (4.4lb) of poppy buds – which contain the plant’s seeds – for $100 last month, crushed them into a powder and started to add that to his noodles.
Police released a statement explaining that processed seeds contain enough opiates to gradually build up in the body and eventually trigger a positive drugs test result. The South China Morning Post reported that poppy seeds used to be a popular ingredient in Chinese hot pot sauce until their use was banned.
And who said junk food was addictive?
