Customers share salad leftovers with chickens in outdoor restaurant

Chickens and roosters are fascinating and entertaining creatures. If we are lucky enough to visit a farm where they are kept, we can see them running, clucking, scratching the dirt and investigating their surroundings. They are curious creatures and they are always in high speed mode. Like turbo charged wind up toys, they race around looking for food and pecking at almost everything they can find.

But the place that you would least expect to find them is in a restaurant. Yet, that's exactly where these chickens live. It's an open air restaurant outside the parking lot of the Grand Cayman Island airport. The chickens are wild, although they are more than comfortable with humans. They run freely in and out of the parking lot and under the tables. If they get a chance, they even hop up on the chairs and the tables, although the staff will quickly chase them away.

Amused customers, especially from North America, where this is unusual, excitedly watch the chickens and take pictures. They even sneak them food, a practice that is frowned upon by the staff, because it encourages bold behavior from the roosters. But the staff seem to understand that people can't resist sneaking them a treat or a few leftovers.

This family from Canada had more Caesar salad than they could finish and they saw that the chickens were hungry. They couldn't resist sharing and the chickens were thrilled. They gathered around and gobbled up the vegetables like they were starving. The truth is that chickens will eat all day long and these ones were actually quite well fed, but their excitement was fun to watch. Of course, the irony of feeding chickens a Caesar salad, especially so close to a restaurant grill, was not lost and there were many jokes being made about this being an easy way to create a chicken Caesar salad.

These chickens are smarter than we might think and they had learned the difference between customers who were waiting for food and those who already had food. They watched the waitress and followed her to tables where she was delivering trays of food, and they definitely understood where they were more likely to get some scraps. They even seemed to understand how to determine when people had stopped eating, their best opportunity to get the leftovers. They gathered around the tables of customers who had finished their meals, possibly to get leftovers, or possibly to hop up on the tables in the moments before the waitress came to take the plates away.

Either way, these chickens were amazing and the restaurant experience was a unique one with all of these birds running around between tables.