Chinese restaurant workers busted washing pots, grill in local lake

They made chop suey of the health regulations. Just hours after being busted for washing down kitchen equipment in a local lake, a Chinese restaurant was open for business.

Employees of No. 1 Chinese Restaurant in suburban Nashville, Tenn., were caught washing everything from pots and rags to grill tops at a boat dock at nearby Old Hickory Lake — a popular recreation spot — NewsChannel5 reported.

A series of videos showing the restaurant’s organic approach to food safety was shared first on Facebook and then with the health department, which quickly sent an inspector to the scene Tuesday.

“Their explanation was it was a drain that collected a lot of grease, and they wanted to wash it somewhere where that grease wasn’t going down their drain,” Hugh Atkins, bureau director of environmental health services at the Metro Health Department, told the station.

“It’s disturbing to see something like that.”

The restaurant was closed and ordered to sanitize, well, basically everything. The eatery’s owner was also issued a citation. But you can’t keep the No. 1 Chinese restaurant down. By 6:30 p.m. the same day, they were back in business, having miraculously received an all-clear from the Health Department.

“If customers see that restaurant open, that means we’ve addressed this issue to our satisfaction,” said Atkins.

Some Facebook commenters slammed the shared videos, declaring they were “destroying a person’s business,” and Heather Williams, a loyal No. 1 Chinese patron of more than three years, told NewsChannel 5: “I’ve never gotten sick from the food here. It’s clean.”

But apparently this wasn’t the restaurant’s first rodeo at the lake. Another local was able to produce another video of employees washing kitchen tools in the lake and added that they had witnessed it “multiple times” over the last year, the Nashville outlet reported.

Order up!