Excuse me waiter, there's a hair in my salad

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I went across the street at lunch to buy a bag of non-perishables for the Thanksgiving food drive. I figured while I was there, I’d read a little while I ate my lunch. There’s a cafe section of the supermarket where you can get lunch and eat it upstairs in a big lounge. I got a chicken caesar salad, which I love but haven’t had in a while. I take my salad and book upstairs and dig in.

The salad was delicious, but I was getting pretty into the book so I wasn’t really looking at the bowl, just blindly stabbing at the food with my fork while I read. At one point I looked at the bowl and froze. I had stabbed a bunch of lettuce, and stuck to one of the leaves was a dark brown pubic hair. I dropped the fork in disgust, then scraped the whole forkful onto the plastic lid of the container. I started pushing the remaining salad around in the bowl- I was only about 1/2 way finished- and found another one.

I could barely finish swallowing what was in my mouth, which was already on its way down my throat. I complained, showing them my receipt, and they actually asked me if I wanted another salad. Um, no, just my money back.

Every time I think about how many of them I might have eaten while I wasn’t really paying attention to the salad, I feel like I need to retch.

I think I might be sick.

2

Can you really be sure it was a pubic hair? My leg hair is thicker and darker than the rest of my body hair (excluding pubes,) so it could easily pass for one if viewed out of context. So it’s not hard to imagine someone with arm hair that might pass for pubes (cause I can’t imagine how leg hair would get in a salad, but arm hair is easy to see.)

Not that arm hair is a good thing, but better than a pubic hair, to be sure.

3

We don’t eat at my local Red Lobster any more.

This being a very small town on the outskirts of Nowhere, there isn’t anywhere else to get seafood. Every now and again, my Hubby would get a craving for lobster, so off we’d go.

My favorite dish was the calamari. I’d order it as my meal, 'cause God knows, they give you enough to feed a football team.

Once, while chowing down, I noticed that there was still a sticker on one of my fried peppers. I was sort of grossed out because it’s like finding a sign that says “THIS VEGETABLE WAS NOT WASHED!” The manager must have seen me recoil in horror because she came over, apologized profusely and refunded my meal without even being asked.

Figuring it was a fluke, the next time we went there, I went ahead and ordered the calamari. I’ll be damned if there wasn’t a sticker in that mess, too. (This time, I called the manager to complain, not because I wanted free stuff, but because there hs to be a problem in the kitchen.)

'Twas a long time before we went again, but I figured, hey, mistakes happen, right? I decided I’d get the clam chowder.

I was nearly half-way through the bowl when I felt something in my mouth. As subtly as possible, I extracted it, and guess what I found? It was a sticker which said “THURSDAY”. My waitress saw it sitting on the rim of my bowl and told me I ought to look on the bright side. This being Tuesday, I knew that my soup wasn’t out of date.

We don’t eat at my local Red Lobster any more.

4

I took my nephews out for the day in London.
They ate loads of icecream during the afternoon, then asked politely for a evening pizza meal.
So we’re tucking in to pizza and salad, when one of them feels queasy. He’d just overdone it a bit that afternoon).
I’m all ready to pay for the food (since we ordered it) and call for the bill with food still on the plate.
The manager sees the uneaten food and immediately says there’s no charge. :confused: I offer to pay, but am politely ushered out.

As we stand on the pavement, another group come out complaining that there were bugs in their salad.
I guess the manager thought we might be about to complain too, so just got rid of us…

5

Just to give the story from the other side for once, I used to work for a well-known pizza chain and had just opened a new restaurant. Been opened about three days and I’m in a meeting with a new member of staff when my head waitress comes rushing in to tell me there’s a problem. I go out to find uproar and one woman rushes up to me screaming and showing me something in her hand. I look down to see she is holding a tooth, which she has found in her pizza.

She is now screaming in my face, demanding to know what I am going to do.

“Madam, I’ll recommend you a good dentist”

It was her own front tooth that had fallen out… and she hadn’t noticed

6

I was with a friend at one of our favourite Oxford (UK) café-bars. As we were eating our sandwiches, her expression changed and she removed something from her mouth. A soggy cigarette end. In a ciabatta with mozarella, basil, sun-dried tomato and roasted aubergine. We both pushed our plates away and called the waiter over.

We weren’t charged, and didn’t press it any further. The manageress was apologetic, hinting that it might have been put there deliberately by a disgruntled employee. Disgruntled with her, not us.

7

I was enjoying my favorite brunch-leftover in the hotel cafeteria one Sunday (Asian-like chicken slaw/salad). I found something odd in it, and immediately went to talk with Annie about it.

Cog888: “Annie, this salad is really good today”
Annie: “Thanks, how did you know I made it?”
Cog888: “Lucky guess…”
I then hand Annie her clip-on name tag.

Oddly, this was the second name tag found in food that month.

8

“Waiter! What’s this hair doing in my salad?”

“The backstroke, sir!”

What? Did I tell it wrong?

9

Yeah, but it made me laugh anyway.

And OK, it might not have been a pube, but it was a couple inches long and curly, and not uniformly curly, but irregularly curly. And frankly, whether it was a pube, a leg hair, an eyelash, an armpit hair, or the freshly washed tresses of an angel sent directly from God, it was disgusting nonetheless. More disgusting than the time I pulled a twistie-tie out of my mouth that was camouflaged in my salad at Denny’s. Maybe that’s my problem- I should stay away from salads.

10

Not at a restaurant, but my mom was eating lunch with a group at a private home and was chewing on a cookie. It has a strange consistency so she discreetly went into the kitchen to check and found…a band-aid.

11

Several years ago I got a sandwich from a local sub shop, and was about halfway through it when I found a staple in the middle. I went up to the counter and showed it to the girl and she said, “Oh yeah, that happens to me all the time. Our stapler is on a shelf over the prep table.” I wound up getting a free sandwich out of the deal, but you’d think someone would have the sense to move the stapler somewhere else after the first couple times it happened.

And from the other side, during my brief stint at a fast food place in college, I was refilling the shredded lettuce that they use on the burgers when I found a small worm or caterpillar in the bag. I showed it to the manager, who (jokingly) said “Let me know if you find any more. I can start charging for extra meat!”

12

All that stuff makes me want to eat in. I have a few stories of my own.

At Applebees I found a 5" long (no exaggeration) twig in my mashed potatoes. A twig about 1/8" thick. They discounted the meal and replaced the mashed potatoes. I wasn’t hungry after that.

From a Chinese restaurant - a dead roach in the rice. I totally lost my apetite on that one. Never went back to that place… they closed down shortly after.

Another Chinese restaurant - a piece of metal. I assume it was from a brillo pad scrubber. Thankfully I spotted it before I ate it.

At a local breakfast restaurant I was finishing up my hot chocolate and felt something touch my lip. I looked down in the mug and there was a sugar packet stuck in the bottom. I was totally disgusted. Did they not even wash the mug? Before that incident happened we had another complaint at the same restaurant. We told them that they shouldn’t put the syrup container ON TOP of the pancakes and we weren’t going to eat it. Wtf do people think!? Needless to say, we haven’t been back.

13

I used to frequent a .99 cent Chinese take-out near my home until the evening I found a 10" hair wrapped around and around and around a piece of sweet 'n sour chicken.

Blech! Makes me nauseous to think about it!

14

In a college dorm cafeteria, I lifted the top of my sandwich to find a live roach sitting there. Every person at the table screamed and scattered, which was fairly amusing.

I’ve found long hairs in food several times, and it certainly puts one off one’s lunch, almost as much as a live insect in your sandwich does.

15

I was eating with Ivylad in a Tex-Mex restaurant. He ordered quesadillas, I ordered a salad.

I was about halfway through my salad when I saw a live bug crawl out from under the lettuce and make its way to the edge of the plate. I called over the waiter, who called over the manager, who basically shrugged and said sometimes that was the nature of fresh veggies.

I didn’t finish eating and we didn’t get our meal comped. Needless to say we won’t be back.

16

Thing is, he’s right.

I’m pretty obsessive about cleaning veges, especially anything that isn’t going to be cooked. They get washed thoroughly, and lettuce and similar items gets spun in the salad spinner. But still, every now and again, despite my vigilance, a bug makes it to the table. At least i know it’s a very clean bug.

As long as the food itself is clean, i’d much prefer a bug* to a human hair or other foreign object.

  • I’m talking, of course, about plant bugs; cockroaches and other vermin that infest buildings are a different matter.
17

I was dining with a group at the Hard Rock Cafe in downtown Indianapolis when my friend Jim discovered a metal bolt at the bottom of his water glass. The manager was summoned, came over to the table, and said that the bolt had probably worked its way loose from the ice machine. After a search of that machine and a few others in the kitchen, however, he came back to the table, shrugged, and declared that the source of the bolt would probably forever remain a mystery. As I recall, Jim got a discount on his meal, but no other member of our party received similar consideration. The service was otherwise subpar – had a mandatory gratuity not been added to our bill, we’d have been tempted to limit our collective tip to whatever coins we were carrying at the time.

18

Yesterday evening I overheard someone complaining that a false fingernail had found its way into his glass of water at a restaurant recently.