America's Greatest Villain: I Defeat Magic with Magic

Then Chen Yuan saw that the woman was holding a shiny metal wire in her hand, which looked like the steel wool used to scrub dishes in the kitchen.

At this moment, Hu Dan and Emily hurriedly walked to the woman's side. After hearing what the woman said, Hu Dan seemed to intend to apologize to her first, but Emily grabbed his shoulder to stop him.

Then Emily smiled, but remained neither humble nor arrogant, and said:

"Madam, our tableware and food undergo rigorous testing; it's impossible for something like what you have in your hand to exist."

The woman seemed surprised that a sharp-tongued white waiter would appear in a Chinese restaurant, but she knew very well that it was precisely at times like these that she needed to occupy the moral high ground.

So she suddenly stood up, pointed at the little boy next to her, and shouted:

"This thing came out of my son's mouth! He's acting very strangely right now, and I suspect he's ingested some of it. If you don't want to admit it, you can take him to the hospital for a checkup."

At the same time, the little boy covered his face and started crying, attracting the attention of the surrounding diners.

Emily was quite certain that the other party was trying to scam her, something that was not uncommon in the countryside.

But Los Angeles is a big city, so she didn't have a good solution for the time being.

Seeing this, Chen Yuan was about to help out when Anna suddenly asked him:

"Boss... I noticed there's a security camera pointing directly in their direction. Could I see the footage?"

Chen Yuan looked up at the surveillance camera in the corner of the ceiling, but frowned.

"With the camera so far away, how could it possibly capture clearly what she was doing?"

Chen Yuan remembered that in order to save costs, Boss Huang installed very cheap surveillance cameras in the store, mainly to serve as a deterrent.

"It doesn't matter!" Anna's eyes gleamed with excitement behind her black-rimmed glasses. "As long as I can capture even a little bit of footage, I'll find a way to reconstruct the truth!"

When faced with these professional scammers, the American restaurant industry usually has a tacit understanding on how to deal with them.

To avoid potential legal disputes and to prevent affecting the dining experience of other customers, some large chain restaurants often choose to settle things quietly.

It's common for the manager to apologize, the whole table to eat for free, or even give out gift cards worth hundreds of dollars.

Because most of these scammers only want to get a free meal, chain restaurants wouldn't suffer much loss even if they waive the bill.

Moreover, even if they choose to apologize, the perpetrators won't actually sue the chain restaurant, since the legal departments of large companies are not to be underestimated.

Only some smaller restaurants might choose to confront the situation head-on and call 911 to have the police intervene and remove the people.

However, LAPD is usually very slow to respond to disputes that do not result in injuries.

If the person attempting to stage an accident causes too much trouble in the restaurant, it can easily drive away other customers, causing the restaurant to suffer heavy losses.

If you encounter a professional fraud group with lawyers behind the scenes, they might even actually file a lawsuit.

In such situations, if small restaurants blindly apologize and admit that it is their responsibility, it often leads to more serious legal disputes.

Emily, who had experience as a waitress, knew this "unspoken rule of the industry," which is why she stopped Hu Dan from making a hasty apology at the first opportunity.

But nowadays, "respecting minorities" has become the politically correct thing to do at Rongding Pavilion restaurant, and the woman causing trouble in front of us happens to be Latina.

If the restaurant chooses to call the police to remove the customers, but cannot provide concrete evidence, the Rongdingge restaurant, which has just become a "cooperative pilot" with USC University, will once again be caught in a media storm.

The woman seemed to have grasped this point as well, and shouted at the top of her lungs towards the diners in the lobby:

"Everyone be careful, the food at this restaurant isn't clean, and no one will be responsible if you get sick from eating there!"

Emily couldn't let them throw dirty water on her like that, so she immediately put her hands on her hips and yelled:

"Stop your disgusting tricks, you bitch! I just saw you take a wire out of your bag and put it in the plate. I've seen plenty of dine-and-dash scum like you! Believe me or not, I'll call security right now and smash your fake nose!"

Although Emily didn't know how the other person found the foreign object in their food, she wanted to clear herself of any responsibility first.

Just as the two sides were about to start a war of words, Chen Yuan, the boss, finally arrived late.

He stepped forward and glanced at the leftovers on the table. They were mostly some of Rongding Pavilion's most expensive signature dishes.

Although the dishes at Rongding Pavilion are very cost-effective, a table full of food like this would cost at least two or three hundred US dollars.

Clearly, the other party intended to use the pretext of finding a foreign object in their food to avoid paying the bill.

Chen Yuan didn't mince words, coldly asking, "You claim to have found foreign objects in the food at our restaurant, do you have any evidence?"

The woman, dressed in a suit, was likely the restaurant manager, so Chen Yuan immediately held up the wire in his hand in front of him.

"This is what I got from my son's mouth! What other evidence do you need?"

However, Chen Yuan shook his head and retorted:

"Even if this substance was found in your son's mouth, it doesn't prove that he ate it from the food at our restaurant."

As he spoke, Chen Yuan stepped forward, staring into the other person's eyes, and said:

"What if it's your son who hid it in his mouth beforehand, and then pretended to spit it out after eating our food? Ms. Margaret?"

The middle-aged woman's face turned pale; she clearly hadn't expected Chen Yuan to be able to call her by name.

Just then, the television hanging on the restaurant ceiling suddenly stopped broadcasting the news and switched to a surveillance camera feed.

Chen Yuan pointed to the television above and said slowly:

"Ms. Margaret, what you just did has been clearly captured on our surveillance cameras. If you settle the bill now, I can pretend this never happened. Otherwise, we'll have to let the 911 officers determine who's lying."

How could that woman, a professional con artist, possibly give in?

Moreover, she had already observed the location of the restaurant's security cameras before arriving today, so she specifically chose a window seat that was quite far away.

In this way, even if captured by surveillance cameras, only a dark shadow can be seen due to the distance and backlighting, and no further details can be seen.

As a professional con artist, these details were second nature to Margaret.

Sure enough, when the surveillance video started playing on the TV, Chen Yuan and the other diners who were watching the commotion quickly noticed that although the footage captured Margaret's family having a meal, the details were completely obscured due to backlighting and other factors.

"Ha! I knew you were just bluffing!"

Margaret pointed at the blurry television screen and burst into laughter, her arrogance returning.

"Bring 911 on, and better yet, call the reporters too, so that all of Los Angeles can see the ugly face of your shady business shirking responsibility!"