A longtime customer of a popular chicken and chip shop in Kingston was shocked to discover he’d received some extra, unsolicited protein with his meal in the form of an unspecified creepy crawly recently.

Around 7pm on September 30, Ayat Awan, a Kingston resident who was eating with his family when the incident occurred, found more than he had ordered after opening his snack box.

“I was just at home dealing with Covid as we all are and my sister comes back to the house so we all decided to get a takeaway after along and exhausting day,” Ayat told the Surrey Comet.

“We grew up in this area and it’s been there throughout my childhood really.

“I’d ordered my chicken poppers and chips, like a snack box, and then I just noticed these black lines on each chicken popper, it was a very strange thing that seemed scattered and cooked with the food,” Ayat described.

“In the corner of the box there was an insect. Yet the whole thing looked as though it had been fried...you’d think they would have seen it before serving it,” he added.

It was unclear whether the insect had indeed been fried first with the rest of the meal or had somehow made its way into the box after the cooking process.

Regardless, the photograph sent to the Surrey Comet by Ayat clearly shows an insect of some kind lying inside the chicken poppers and chips box.

The Kingston man described his initial reaction after noticing the creepy crawly inside his meal box:

“It was pure disgust and pure shock. I’m generally not afraid of insects generally but I’m not a fan of eating them. I’m not Bear Grylls. It’s not what I wanted,” Ayat said.

“It’s really negligence, especially at a time like this. We’re already all suffering enough, and businesses too in fact. I run my own business too here, I’m self-employed, and you’d really expect more from businesses at the moment.”

The Surrey Comet reached out to the fried chicken franchise in question for a comment on what happened with Ayat’s meal.

While they declined to offer a direct comment on what happened, a spokesperson said they had “not had any customer complaint raised with us directly regarding this matter. Should we receive one we will investigate it accordingly.”

It was unclear whether the response will be sufficient for Ayat, who said he had in fact approached the restaurant directly after finding the insect but that they had simply expressed shock too and told him it was possibly “to do with their supplier”.

“We really should not have to deal with something like that, in an economy so far advanced, where we hold everything to very high standards, I don’t think people should be treated like that,” Ayat said.

“Surely you would have seen it. It had its legs scattered over the box like salt and pepper. I would say I will probably never eat there again. It’s just sad because this restaurant was a place we could always go to.”