Well, do they? What do they do?
Of course not. That would be a gross violation of the professional waitstaff code of conduct, which strictly prohibits such shenanigans
Of course not. They spit in * everybody’s * food.
It is not as easy for a bartender since they mostly work right out front but we often found a way.
Worked in service all my life. Never saw it. Never heard of it. Never worked in a place where the mere hint of such a thing wouldn’t cost you your job. Never saw anything dropped on the floor and then served.
The thing of customer nightmares and server fantasies, but, in my experience, not a reality.
(Remember there is staff flying around in a busy restaurant, it won’t be easy for the server to do something to the food without being seen. And once seen, everyone would hear of it within a very short time. Secrets are harder to keep in a restaurant, than you imagine.)
I used to know a bartender who was very showy. He did all kinds of cool things like behind the back pours. He held glasses with a finger inside the glass so he could tell how full the glass was.
However, he also wrapped part of that finger with white medical tape to aid in twisting off beer bottle caps. Over the course of a night that white tape became black with accumulated dirt and grime.
I enjoyed watching him work, but just drank draft beer.
Worked in service all my life and…yes.
I wouldn’t know because I always make it a point to be a great customer and the easiest table that they’ve had to wait on all day!
While my time in the industry was much shorter, This was my experiance as well.
A couple of times I went to a restaurant with a friend who was a Known Bitch about her food. I’ve mentioned her before.
So one time they screwed up the hollandaise sauce and then said they were out. I don’t know, I myself, not a great cook, can whip up hollandaise in the microwave in about 3 minutes. But, you know, shit happens.
The next time we went she complained about something, and when the food came back she asked me to taste it because she thought it seemed awfully salty. It was–just awfully salty.
Like they were daring her to send it back one more time.
This ^ and this ^. In the 1980s I worked in everything from 5 star restaurants, to hole in the wall burger joints (not fast food), to bar-tending in New Orleans. I never saw it happen. Not once.
Most waitstaff have at least heard the tales. Even if it’s extremely unlikely for any given meal, the numbers of times that risk is applied is huge. It likely happens sometimes. Whether it’s more or less likely than any number of really unlikely fears like being struck by a meteorite… who knows.
People do nasty things to other people that piss them off, but it probably doesn’t happen any more often in the restaurant business than anywhere else.
Now, each other’s food - that was a different story! Staff food was fair game!
I worked at a place that specialized in a beautiful schnitzel, sometimes served, at lunch, on a bun. After lunch one day the chef made one for the bartender only used a fresh clean bar rag in place of the actual schnitzel. And once breaded and fried it looked EXACTLY like the real thing. He put it on the bun and we all took up positions in the now empty bar, to watch and enjoy. It was awesome to watch him bite into it, then realize what we’d done. 
When I worked at McDonald’s as a teenager. I saw some shit go down.
Mainly, patties being dropped on the floor and then served up to the customers.
It wasn’t done out of spite though. It was mainly because if you weren’t serving up the burgers at breakneck speeds, the manager on duty starts yelling at you. So you’d pick up the burger to keep the quotas on target.
It will normally be a buffet or a place where you can see your food prepared. Otherwise they can be recipients of all sorts of unrequested DNA samples.
I don’t think it happens often. I don’t have a lifetime’s experience in food service, just a year or two apportioned over different places in different years, but there are two things against it: proximity, and knowing who was being an arsehole.
WRT proximity, most fast food is cooked in front of you. Or it is if you crane your neck, and there will always be people around you who could get a lot more from dobbing you in than you could ever get from gobbing in someone’s food.
WRT knowing who is being an arsehole, I can think of some over-privileged guests, especially at the Zoo Cafe in Berlin, but then the worst we’d do is put them to the back of the line and even that took some coordination; the chefs don’t really know which customer is an arsehole - they’re just a name on a post-it, or were back then.
Exactly what I came to say. I saw a guy once putting together a 20 piece nugget, counting aloud until he ran out of nuggets, whereupon he turned to the ones in the trash can and continued, “fifteen, sixteen, seventeen…”
When I was a cook, we never ever did anything disgusting or unsanitary to people’s food. No spitting or dropping it on the floor or anything. There were cameras up everywhere on us and the owners did actually use them to watch what was going on, so we would have been in deep shit if we had done anything horrible.
What we would do if you were enough of an asshole that we heard about it or you came in five minutes before close or something was let some mistakes slide. We might forget your pickle or cut your sandwich crooked or decide it’s fine if it’s only a little burnt or give you the smallest piece of something that was already prepared (like lasagna) or make your sandwich with the bread heel. If one piece of your appetizer fell on the floor, we’d go ahead and serve it one piece short instead of re-making the whole thing. The worst we might do is re-heat something that had been made by mistake earlier in the day or occasionally give you salad with dressing on the side rather than mixing it all up for you.
So it was like… never anything actually harmful. And mostly stuff that you’d probably never notice. But it made us feel a little better to be like, “He insulted her? Oh I am so going to cut his sandwich crooked! He’ll have one big giant half and one tiny half. No, you know what? I’m not even going to cut it all the way through. Let him rip it. That’ll show him. We’ll give him this tiny, smashed roll, too.”
Did you ever see a dead fly that had died a while back? They shrivel up and look a lot like a little pepper ball. My cousin still delights in telling of the times they would served a particular asshole of a regular customer his pastrami sandwiches with fly cadavers hidden in the pepper. Yummy.
Yeah, never piss off the cook or the service staff.