Esquire Treats: Kentucky Restaurant Shut Down for (Almost) Serving Roadkill

I was born in Kentucky, and I live the Bluegrass state. I still call it home even though I live 750 miles from where I grew up. So when I her stories about something bad that has happened in the Commonwealth, I still get a bit of an uneasy feeling over it. I especially hate to see stories like the one that has shone a spotlight on the tiny border town of Williamsburg, Kentucky this week.

Doesn't exactly let you pinpoint it on a map, does it?

It seems a customer at a Chinese restaurant in the town of 5200 people happened to notice two employees sneaking something into a back door at the restaurant a few days ago. It was a trash can. But it was not filled with ordinary trash. The customer noted a tail and feet protruding from the container. So she notified authorities. When questioned, the owners of the restaurant admitted that they had brought a dead deer into the kitchen area. Since it was not deer hunting season, the owner was either guilty of hunting out of season or the alternative. It was the alternative -- road kill.

Here is how a local news channel reported on the story. (I like the guy named Jack Hardigree -- Kentuckian through and through. Although he may be from across the border in Tennessee.)

Now, I love Chinese food, so this kind of story disturbs me on another level also. Yet, deer meat is some of the best eating you can find at home. If this was a fresh kill, I would not be that concerned about the incident. Yes, they should not do it again, but I would not want to see them shut down. They make have to pay a fine and get regular inspections, but let them learn fro their mistakes.

I have learned from my mistakes when t comes to deer, that's for sure. I learned I will never drive through the night in West Virginia in November again. A few years ago I got hit by a deer while I was traveling from D.C. to KY. My husband was asleep in the passenger seat, having just finished the first 6 hours of the drive. It was 2:15 in the morning, and I was tooling long at 55 mph (yeah, that's my story and I'm stickin' to it). Out of my left peripheral vision I saw movement and that son-of-a-doe ran right into my front right fender. I came to halt about 200 yards up the road, with the sound of metal and plastic scraping the tire. Hubby woke up and I think he thought he was dreaming.

"What happened?" he half shouted as he saw I was pulling over Unable to speak at first, I took a few seconds to regain my composure and blink back the tears that I could feel welling u in my eyes.

"A deer hit me!" I shouted "Son of a doe!" Except I did not say doe. I said the B-word.

Hubby got out to view the damage. I could not open my door, as the crunched fender would not let it open.

My car after hubby ripped the wheel lining out with brute force and left it on the road side

To make a long story short, we had to wait at the next exit until dawn, call Geico, drive to New Albany, IN for the nearest Geico affiliated garage (250 miles away), stop along the way to buy duct tape to hold the bumper on, leave the car in IN to be fixed, but not before we waited for 2 hours for a rental replacement since they had none due to the astronomical number of people hitting deer over the previous week. And to top it all off, when we got to my mother's house hours later than planned, and we told them why we were late, the first thing everyone asked was, "What happened to the deer? Did it die?" Agggghhh!

Later my stepdaughters would reward me with a lovely cake to mark the occasion of getting my car fixed.

Ever since then, I have learned to keep an eye out and heed the deer crossing signs that pop up along the road, especially in November. You've seen the before no doubt.

Have you ever seen the deer heed them?

Apparently the guy who wrote this ad knows that deer in the picture above.

Crown Point is in Indiana, not Kentucky.

A few years ago a friend sent me some pictures of an accident where a deer had hit a car head-on. I cannot find the pictures now, which is probably good because the were pretty gnarly. But I did find some other pictures on the Internet that might be an indication of what happened to the deer that the Red Flower Chinese Restaurant took in. If you are squeamish, this is where you should bail out. I chose the less graphic pictures (no blood), so that might make it better. Please, no PETA comments!