Paul Elisha Finger only wanted his lunch.
Instead, he saw something he couldn’t resist recording: a Panda Express employee standing right over the fryer area, spraying cleaning products while attacking a grease-covered exhaust hood. Below him, with food already in the frying baskets, a coworker kept working as if nothing were happening. At one point, she reached her hand between the man’s legs to adjust a bowl of food that seconds later would end up on some customer’s plate.
The incident took place in early July at a location in West Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but no one knew about it until the video reached TikTok and blew up weeks later. Panda Restaurant Group acknowledged the incident and called it ‘inconsistent’ with its food safety standards, saying it took corrective action and retrained the staff. The question that lingers is simple: how many people ate food from beneath that fryer before someone noticed?