Meal time etiquette: important, appreciated, sometimes divisive.
Like spitting, for instance. Some might feel that it’s not appropriate to hawk up a glob at 9am, in a restaurant setting.
Others may not care and, in fact, go on the attack at the suggestion their habit’s wholly obnoxious.
That’s what went down on the weekend, when an American man called out a fellow customer at Le Méridien in Pok Fu Lam’s Cyberport for straight up spitting while diners were enjoying breakfast, according to HK01.
Shit got messy, though luckily restaurant staff prevented the pair from coming to blows.
Aggrieved by being accused, the man, reportedly from the mainland, stormed over and confronted the man who called him out, yelling in Mandarin “What did you say?”
Throughout the video, he can be seen getting up to walk towards the American, only for hotel staff and his girlfriend to stop him and tell him to calm down.
At one point in the video, the man can be seen grabbing some cutlery from next to the coffee machine, only for hotel staff to pull him away.
As this is happening, a male hotel staff member can be heard telling his colleagues to call the police.
Apple Daily reports that police arrived at the scene shortly afterwards to interview a 54-year-old American man, and a 39-year-old mainland man.
It is not clear from reports if the mainland man understood that the American was telling him to stop spitting, but police, somewhat diplomatically, characterized the dispute as a “misunderstanding”.
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