May 12, 2009
KANSAS CITY, Mo. - A NBC Action News investigation
indicates the vast majority of Kansas City restaurants sampled in a 20
restaurant test were serving diners something other than
what was promised on the menu.
The undercover video
obtained during the NBC Action News investigation shows restaurant workers
repeatedly identifying the fish served as what was labeled on the
menu.
“Excellent,” is how the waiter at Bice on the
Power & Light District described the grouper on the menu. “Very
light, white flakey fish.”
“It's pretty good,” is what the clerk at
KCK’s City Fish & More said about the red snapper special.
The
investigation went undercover inside
20 metro restaurants.
We took samples from each
restaurant and sent them to the
Guy Harvey Research Institute at Nova Southeastern
University in Florida.
“She's actually going to extract the DNA
from the sample,” said Professor Mahmood Shivji as a technician extracted
a thin slice of frozen fish retrieved from one of the tested Kansas City
restaurants.
The Guy Harvey Research Institute’s DNA tests would
reveal so much mislabeled fish, out of 20 Kansas City restaurants sampled,
the tests indicate 17 restaurants – or 85 percent - substituted fish, most
of them with cheaper counterfeits.
Scroll Down to
Continue Reading
Test Results Not Good
Only three restaurants passed our test.
See Complete
Results
The Savoy in Kansas City, Bonefish Grill in
Leawood, and Islamorada in the Independence Bass Pro Shop served the fish
promised on the menu.
The 17 other restaurants substituted or
mislabeled their menu items according to the Guy Harvey Research
Institute’s tests.
“Those are completely different fishes,” Shivji
said. “That is the highest frequency of substitution and fraud that we've
seen.”
“Yeah, red snapper” said the server at the upscale sushi
restaurant Nara in the Crossroads District describing what we’d ordered
off the menu there.
Nara’s snapper tested out to be much cheaper
tilapia.
“You are on private property, I'm going to ask you to
leave,” Nara Manager Marco Diaz said when we stopped at the restaurant
asking why our DNA test showed we didn’t get what we ordered.
“Ok,
let me call 911,” Diaz said, refusing to answer our question. “This is a
restaurant.”
Sushi or Something Else?
Nara wasn't alone.
Every sushi restaurant we sampled failed the DNA test.
“I was told
not to speak on camera by the boss lady,” said the manager of Sushi Gin in
Overland Park.
Several sushi restaurants claimed serving cheaper
fish as red snapper is an accepted industry standard.
“Everybody
uses the same, the whole area,” said a man who identified himself as the
manager of Mr. Sushi in Lee’s Summit. “When we open the restaurant, the
customer wanted the same thing as (the other restauarants).”
The
Guy Harvey Research Institute said even some of the samples from Kansas
City’s high priced restaurants failed to meet FDA labeling
standards.
“It's a blue nose grouper,” the waiter at the Leawood
Bristol is heard on undercover video when asked to describe the grouper
there. “Very good.”
