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Chef Daniel Boulud AP/Press Association Images

Award-winning chef's restaurant fined €1.2 million after metal wire served in coq au vin

A diner who swallowed it needed emergency surgery.

A PIECE OF metal wire in a plate of coq au vin could cost award-winning French chef Daniel Boulud dearly: a jury has fined one of his restaurants  €1.2 million after a diner swallowed it and needed emergency surgery.

The customer, Barry Brett, went with his wife in February 2015 to db Bistro Moderne on West 44th Street in midtown Manhattan, not far from Times Square.

It is one of several Boulud restaurants in the Big Apple, opening in 2001 and known for its gourmet burgers.

Shortly after he began eating, Brett felt a foreign object lodged in his throat and had to leave the restaurant, according to court documents seen by AFP.

The wire eventually caused a potentially fatal infection, his lawyers argued.

The surgeon said the 2.5-centimetre wire had come from a cheap grill brush.

A New York jury ruled last week that the restaurant had been negligent, awarding Brett $300,000 and fining the restaurant an additional $1 million in punitive damages. Another $11,000 went to Brett’s wife.

JP Bottari, a lawyer for the restaurant, said he planned to appeal.

“This was not intentional,” he said, adding that Brett had waited four days to go to the hospital.

Brett’s lawyer Elizabeth Eilender said she was “very pleased that the jury recognised how seriously injured Mr Brett was as result of that brush and how dangerous it is for a wire brush to be used around food”.

“The restaurant never wanted to take responsibility for what happened and blamed the victim,” she said.

Boulud has made New York his hub since the 1980s, but also runs restaurants in Boston, Las Vegas, London, Miami, Montreal, Palm Beach, Singapore, Toronto and Washington.

© – AFP, 2016

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    Mute Celticspirit321
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    May 20th 2015, 3:10 PM

    Tesla invented a way to wirelessly transfer electricity. Free electricity. That was years ago. Corporations didn’t like it. No profit for them.

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    Mute Neal Ireland Hello
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    May 20th 2015, 3:46 PM

    Or to put it another way, the concept was financially unviable.

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    Mute Thomas Murphy
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    May 20th 2015, 6:00 PM

    It also caught fire when being shown to investers if I remember correctly. Not that I was there, just that I heard it somewhere.

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    Mute One Human Being
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    May 20th 2015, 8:27 PM

    So wardenclyffe http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardenclyffe_Tower was a success it just was denied money because tesla had developed a way of pulling electricity from the ionosphere. Replication of this technology has been tried with haarp http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Frequency_Active_Auroral_Research_Program good stuff by the great man who was not in it for the money unlike his great rival Thomas Edison.

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    Mute R39CRW8f
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    May 21st 2015, 12:46 AM

    When Edison tried to show the world the dangers of electricity (a.c vs his d.c) he did so by publicly electrocuting an elephant using AC current. It was so powerful that the elephant caught fire.. As did the first prisoner on whom it was used as an execution method…
    Nothing to do with his free electricity system though.

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    Mute The Hooded Biscuit
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    May 21st 2015, 12:29 AM

    AirDrop doesn’t work

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