Shawna Cepeda lost her appetite after finding a frog in her BJ's salad. (Shawna Cepeda)
A woman from San Dimas, Calif., tells Fox News she was “beyond grossed out” after finding a dead frog in a salad she ordered from BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse.
Cepeda and her family were dining at the BJ’s in West Covina when she claims she noticed something off about her salad — but only after she took several bites and tasted something “a little sour,” reports the San Gabriel Valley Tribune.
“I see something kind of rolled up,” Covina told the Tribune. “I passed it to my husband. I asked, ‘Is that a piece of lettuce?’”
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To Cepeda’s horror, her husband and daughter surveyed the salad and broke the news that, no, it wasn’t lettuce.
“It’s a frickin’ frog,” Cepeda’s husband responded.
In her subsequent one-star Yelp review, Cepeda, 40, says she notified the manager about the unwanted fixin’, but he only offered to comp her meal.
“I told him this frog could contain salmonella and who knows how long it's been sitting in a produce bag,” she wrote.
“He still made us pay for our drinks which consist[ed] of three beers total!” she added.
Cepeda further tells Fox News that the staff appeared to do nothing to prevent fellow diners from similar contamination.
“The restaurant did nothing about notifying any other customers there that night [who were] eating salad,” says Cepeda. “At that point, all the salad is contaminated and people needed to know they had a potential to get sick.”
Indeed, Cepeda told the San Gabriel Valley Tribune that she’s felt “queasy” since the incident. She went to a doctor who told her she wasn’t suffering from salmonella poisoning — healthy amphibians can carry salmonella, according to the CDC — but he prescribed antibiotics to treat a possible bacterial infection she may have contracted.
BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse has since reached out to her, but Cepeda claims their response was a little lacking.
“I received a phone call from the corporate office with an apology … followed by a $50 gift card,” Cepeda tells Fox News. “First of all, I'm never eating there again, and second, they thought by sending $50, that was going to say sorry for the dead frog that was missing its guts."
“I would have been fine with the ‘I'm sorry,’ and that’s it.”
In a statement obtained by Fox News, a representative for BJ's Restaurant claims the company is looking into the situation.
"Guest satisfaction and quality control are our highest priorities," reads the statement. "We take situations like this very seriously and have launched an internal investigation including discussions with our suppliers and distributors to ensure that nothing like this happens in the future."
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The case has also been referred to the California Department of Public Health, an investigator for the Los Angeles Department of Public Health confirmed to the San Gabriel Valley Times.
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