CHINESE RESTAURANT COMPENSATES 4,000 DINERS AFTER VIDEO SHOWED TWO DRUNK TEENS URINATING INTO HOTPOT BROTH

A Chinese restaurant has offered to compensate 4,000 diners after a video showing two teenagers urinating into a hotpot broth was shared on social media.

The boys, both aged 17, filmed standing on a dining table and peeing into the broth pot in a private room at a Shanghai branch of Haidilao, China's biggest hotpot chain, in late February.

Police said the two teens were drunk during the stunt and that they were arrested soon after.

Footage of the incident was shared online last month, but it is unclear who took the video. There is no indication that anyone consumed the broth.

While the broth cooked in the personal hotpot equipment used by Haidilao customers is not re-served, it is unclear whether the hotpot the boys urinated into was cleaned and disinfected properly before it was used by a new customers.

Haidilao apologised to customers and said it replaced all hotpots and dining utensils, the BBC reports.

The company only found out about the teenagers peeing into their equipment days after the incident when several videos circulated on social media.

But it then took another week to identify which of the dozen Haidilao restaurants in Shanghai was seen in the video. 

Staff working in the restaurant failed to stop the boys, the company said. 

'We fully understand that the distress caused to our customers by this incident cannot be fully compensated for by any means, but we will do our utmost to take responsibility,' Haidilao said in a statement. 

The company has now announced that customers that dined at the Shanghai restaurant between February 24 and March 8 will be given a full refund as well as a cash compensation 10 times the amount they were billed for their meals.

This follows a similar incident in China in 2018, which saw a noodle shop owner at Haikou in Hainan Province, southern China, catching a man urinating and defecating in the broth in his restaurant.

Believing the malicious act was done by the people from the restaurant next door, the man identified by local media as Mr Jiang installed security cameras in his noodle shop after noticing an awful smell from the beef broth.

China Food and Drug Administration collected samples from the broth and confirmed the soup contained human faeces and urine.

Mr Jiang told Haikou Police that the father of his restaurant rival Mr Li father had urinated and defecated at two big pots. It's claimed the pots were used to keep beef broth. Mr Li's father was detained by the police but released later.