Around 4:30 AM, a Florida family of four drove themselves to the emergency room at Santa Rosa hospital. They complained that they couldn't sleep and had been up all night chatting. The family reported feeling weird.
I mean, parents sitting up late into the night talking to their children about things other than how they don't need another glass of water is pretty weird I suppose.
Then to their surprise, three familiar faces entered the emergency room reporting the exact same symptoms (the sleep part, not the chatting with their children about things other than glasses of water part). The three new patients had sat with them at the same hibachi station at Nikko Japanese Steakhouse for dinner earlier that evening.
All seven patrons tested positive for methamphetamines.
The patients said that the chef had been using two different soy sauces bottles, and one was a thicker consistency than the other. The mother remembered asking about it, and the chef ignored her.
He was probably too busy making onion-volcano choo-choo trains full of meth to notice.
Santa Rosa police got a warrant and went to the restaurant and tested the soy sauces. They found that some bottles tested positive for meth. But when they tested sealed packets of soy sauces as a control, those also tested positive for meth, so they ruled the prior results "false positives".
That said, I'm now eyeing the soy sauce bottles in the kitchen suspiciously wondering what they put in that stuff.
When police indicated which hibachi station the patients had been sitting at, the restaurant manager said that station was not scheduled to be in use that night. When asked if there was anything else suspicious about the night, the manager remembered something odd.
There was a stranger at the restaurant dressed as a hibachi chef. He said he was a new hire and accessed the kitchen multiple times before they asked him to leave.
He turned out to be a sushi chef from a competing restaurant who had been fired because he was always moving erratically and talking to people who weren't there.
However, the man has no history of narcotics in his record, the restaurant employees said that no one tampered with the guests' food, and the police could find no concrete evidence of meth contamination at the restaurant.
So, they've dropped the investigation.
I guess it's just a wild coincidence that a family of four along with three strangers all decided to unknowingly ingest meth at an unmanned hibachi station with a phantom sushi chef at the same time at the same restaurant.
This is how urban legends start.
