When Julie Patterson (COL ’12) bit down on something hard mixed in with her fried rice at Leo’s on Thursday night, she figured it was a bone—it wasn’t.

“It was so disgusting …  I realized it was round and I thought, oh God is it somebody’s ring?” she said. “And I spit it out and it was this nut, as in nuts and bolts. It was rusty.”

Patterson, who eating at late night, said her friends suggested she talk to personnel at Leo’s. In the end, she didn’t tell staff about the offending hardware, pictured left.

“I figured they would say, ‘Thanks for bringing this to our attention,’ and not do anything about it because it’s unlikely to happen again,” she said. (Disclosure: Patterson has written occasionally for Vox Populi.)

Update 02/20 8:04 p.m.:Vox received the following e-mail today from Executive Director of Dining at Georgetown Andrew Lindquist:

“Georgetown Dining takes food safety very seriously. We not only have a strict preventative maintenance plan in place to avoid such situations, but also have not had any reports of this specific issue previously.

“Following your note, our management team conducted a strict impromptu review of each location along with all of the equipment within Leo’s to identify a potential source and was unable to identify one. Nuts and bolts are somewhat hard to come by in a commercial kitchen to avoid such issues. Most of our equipment and utensils are constructed with welds and other fusing methods.

“If in the future a student does come across any foreign object we do ask that they notify management right away to identify the source and execute a solution.”

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