A customer at a Buffalo Wild Wings in California was recently met with something wild that wasn’t a wing — a live rat that fell from the ceiling, forcing the restaurant to temporarily shut down.
Alisha Norman said she was watching the Women’s World Cup soccer game at Buffalo Wild Wings in the Westchester neighborhood of Los Angeles with friends on Thursday when a rat fell onto a table.
“So what do you do when a rat falls from the ceiling onto your table?” Norman wrote in a Facebook post accompanied with photos of the rat resting atop a menu. “Really LA? I was just trying to watch the soccer game.”
Norman, who lives in Houston, Texas, was vacationing in California. She said she had yet to order when she heard something overhead.
“I knew the rat was going to be injured because it hit like a Mack truck,” she told NBC Los Angeles. “It was big.”
Norman said she requested a manager who scooped up the rat using two plates and dumped it into a garbage bag.
“It was terrible,” she said. “It was disgusting.”
Norman did not order any food but said some of her friends did and their meals were compensated to make up for the lunchtime fallout.
Buffalo Wild Wings said the “isolated incident” was unfortunate and construction at Howard Hughes Center, where the restaurant is located, was to blame.
“The center where the restaurant is located is undergoing significant construction and we are confident it was directly related,” the company said in a statement.
The company said it closed the restaurant for proper remediation, cleaning and sanitization.
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health told NBC News “Buffalo Wild Wings took appropriate action to voluntarily close their facility to investigate and ensure that there was no ongoing imminent health hazard,” adding that an inspection of the facility is planned before it reopens.
The restaurant reopened over the weekend.
