"What's happened is that one of our guests Thursday evening found a frog in her salad. She went to the manager and showed him the frog. He saw it was there and that's a fact, " said spokeswoman Christine Frey.

Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad quoted the customer, identified as 23year-old Astrid Roek, as saying "it was a big black thing, a frog or a toad." She said she found the amphibian while halfway through her meal at the Burger King restaurant at The Hague's central train station.

"I stood up and screamed the place upside-down, " she told the paper. Roek has submitted a complaint to the Dutch Food and Wares Authority but is not expected to sue for emotional damages or punitive damages in the matter: large compensation suits are virtually unknown in the Netherlands.

"We know that everybody sues everybody in the United States, but Holland is not like that, it's not how it works here, " Frey said.

Frey said the company had given its excuses and is trying to figure out how the frog got into the salad.

It appeared likely it happened between packaging at the restaurant and when the diner reported finding it.

Frey said the company's basic salad supplier was confident the frog was not in the large, vacuum-sealed bags of salad the restaurant receives.

"The fact is . . . it's in the process of how we prepare our basic salad - it's just not possible a frog will survive, " Frey said.

"Any frog would have been killed by dicing of leaves or refrigeration, or certainly by suffocation in the bags, " she said.

"We just don't know how it's happened, and we have to be careful what we say, " the spokeswoman added.