The sight of a severed snake's head under his broccoli made Jack Pendleton lose interest in dessert.
Pendleton said he found the head, the size of the end of his thumb, while eating Sunday at the T.G.I. Friday's in Clifton Park. The chain restaurant said it regrets the appetite-killing error. Pendleton said he has no plans to sue.
Pendleton said he ordered vegetables instead of fries with his chicken sandwich. When he started to eat his broccoli, he saw something gray on the plate he at first thought was a mushroom. "I start to turn it over. I see this gray-green patch," he said.
Next he saw a V-shape that turned out to be the mouth of a snake. "I could see these black, rotted eye sockets on the top," he said. The severed head also had bits of tendon and part of the spine attached, he said.
"I stopped eating. I told my girlfriend, 'I think this is a head,'" he said.
Pendleton snapped a photo with his cellphone camera, then summoned the waiter. He covered the dish with his hand and described his find.
"He thought I was joking until I took my hand away," Pendleton said. The waiter grabbed the plate and took it back to the kitchen, the diner said.
"The manager came over white as a sheet," said Pendleton, 28, of Ballston Lake, a senior art director for a textbook company in Clifton Park. "He explained in five years he'd never run into anything like this."
Amy Freshwater, a spokeswoman for the chain, said in an e-mailed statement the company is trying to determine what happened.
"We are taking this situation very seriously," she said. "We immediately pulled the broccoli from this restaurant and began an extensive investigation. As a precautionary measure, we pulled broccoli from all restaurants that received product from this supplier. We have since isolated the specific lot date of the broccoli in question and have now reintroduced the product in all restaurants not included in the product hold."
