Souper Salad has to be the dirtiest, grossest dive I have ever had the fortune to avoid e coli from. I shall not chance it again…
Having been stationed in Germany several times one thing I noticed about ordering steak there…it will be rare unless you specifically tell the waiter/waitress you want it well done. I hate rare steaks.
2 years ago my wife and I were shopping and I hadn’t eaten all day. So we stopped at little restaurant in the village for a meal. I ordered a steak and forgot to say “well done”. Well, I forgot to get my wife (who can speak german rather fluently) to remind the waitress that it needed to be well done. When we got our food it was bloody rare, but I was so hungry I thought “Well, if everyone else can eat it this way, I can…I’m getting lightheaded due to hungry so I’ll have to eat this now”.
Wrong answer. I became so sick that evening that I could barely drive the short distance home. (and I had to drive, my wife can’t drive a stick). I just can’t eat rare beef. I spent all night with fantastic stomach pains and throwing up. And the runs all day after.
Long John Silver’s (batter-fried crunchy salty bleechh)
Red Lobster (EXPENSIVE batter-fried crunch salty bleechh)
Quizno’s (gives me intestinal problems every time)
Sbarro’s (do I really need to explain?)
Panda Express (ditto) or most any other factory-assembly kind of Chinese place
But my #1 place that I avoid is . . .
Pizza Hut (to me it’s like eating a soggy bathroom sponge with garlic-ketchup on it)
After reading the first couple of posts, I have to say I love Papa Johns, and have never gotten sick eating it. I prefer that pizza to most others.
Recently, my family and I ate at Noble Roman’s pizzaria for the first time in 20 years or so, mainly because we hadn’t seen one for that long. But the Noble Roman’s pizza had been pre-cooked, and the counter monkeys just had to heat it up and serve it, a job at which they failed miserably. It was cold in the middle, and hot at the edges.
I also despise most mall food, like Sbarro. Moldy cardboard tastes better than their pizzas.
Anything I’ve ever seen on Kitchen Nightmares.
There’s a rest area on the New Jersey Turnpike (yes, I know, I was in transit and killing time – it’s the Vince Lombardi if you need to know) where the restaurant served me food with notably moldy bread. There were green patches the size of quarters. The number of quality control failures that would lead to that are kind of humbling. Never again.
The sickest I’ve ever been after a meal was after eating the red snapper at a restaurant in Utah. I realize in retrospect that this was a mistake on my part. However, I’ve backpacked through Mexico and West Africa and did not get the scours anywhere near that bad.
So what’s the source of all this sickness from fast food joints? It’s cooked to death and is handled more or less in front of you. I would assume the food would be tasteless but pretty safe as par as pathogens go. Unwashed Mexican lettuce? Inexpert bun-handling by Typhoid Mary? Or are these all just reactions to grease overload rather than food poisoning?
Do you have a cite for that? Not that I think you should eat at McDonald’s, just asking. I know that they used to cook their fries in beef tallow (fat), but thought they’d stopped doing that years ago.
Cause to me it tastes like flavorless floppy cardboard, only marginally better than Domino’s, and on-par or worse than Pizza Hut. However, my own favorite in this most-hated list is Long John Silver’s. Perfectly serviceable fried fish in a crispy, thin, tempura-like batter. It’s awful if it sits around, but straight out of the frier, pure heaven.
For me, the only one I can be reasonably sure about was Subway. We were in a hurry and I chose to ignore the fact that the meat didn’t look like it was properly refrigerated (everything was out in those little bins, and looked rather wilted). I didn’t actually get sick from eating it, but I felt pretty lousy for the next few hours.
No idea what it was about KFC. I was convinced it was the biscuits (I tend to think when I get food poisoning, whatever I’m tasting the most for hours afterward is the culprit) but I don’t really see how that’s possible. The sickness and the food could have been completely unrelated as far as I know for sure.
I used to work at both McDonald’s and Burger King during my college days, and I never saw anything even remotely suspect in food-handling at either place. Everything is very assembly-line. I suppose it would be possible to serve outdated or otherwise suspect food, but I never saw it. Of course, this was back in the 80s so things might well have changed.
I’d be willing to bet that some of the digestive distress is due to inesting larger than normal amounts of fats and some is sloppy sanitation.
The opportunities for cross contamination are huge in a fast-food setting, moreso than in most regular restaurants.
Low paid, inexperienced employees, many of whom are kids who don’t really care about keeping their job and following the rules.
Money handling then food handling.
The guys who handle the food also clean the bathrooms.
Many foods with mixed cooked and uncooked ingredients (think hamburgers with lettuce).
Less attention paid to food temperatures. Mostly due to the apathetic/uninformed kids and the freezer to fryer to customer workflow.
Tight margins and heavy competition give more incentive to cut corners.
The owners and management, while good entrepreneurs, likely do not come from a restaurant/culinary school background. They may not fully understand how critical food safety is.
(Bold) Or vice-versa. It’s great that fast-food joints make their employees wear gloves, but there’s a problem when the employee who makes the sandwich takes your money without taking off or changing the gloves! WTF?!
I’m not lee, but poking around the internet seems to turn up a lot of anti-Canadian seafood sites who are upset over the treatment of seals. The two US restaurants that get targeted with boycotts over this are Red Lobster and Olive Garden, who allegedly buy more Canadian seafood than any other chain.
Don’t know about Wendy’s. And I agree the Domino’s boycott is rather pointless now; Tom Monaghan, the old deeply anti-abortion owner of the chain, sold the company in 1998 and has little to nothing to do with it now. I still wouldn’t eat their pizza, mind, but not eating it is going to do nothing to deprive Monaghan of more cash.
Like most everyone else in the thread, I’m not a huge fan of fast food, but will eat it in a pinch. I generally avoid chain restaurants, too and especially those that serve “Italian” food.
I have never been a fan of buffets, and once got sick after eating at one, so I tend to stay away.
We recently ate at an IHOP that’s practically across the street from us. We crossed it off our list after discovering that we can get better service and food that’s 100% tastier for the same price at a local, family-owned and -run place with a great view. Now that’s a no-brainer.
Can’t really stomach Chipotle after seeing my friend’s kid barf all over the table in one.
Many years ago, when I was living in Providence, some friends suggested eating at a popular pan-Asian place in a semi-grungy part of town. Very hip. I mentioned it to my father, who knows A LOT about food and local restaurants. He strongly recommended against the place, saying it was dirty. Of course I had to eat there anyway. I saw rats outside. Never again.
Most chain restaurants. We frequent a small regional chain for our burgers. For dinners we tend to go to local restaurants as much as possible. I refuse to spend three hours (two of which are spent waiting) for a mediocre dinner. Olive Garden, Applebees, Chili’s, etc. all have extreme wait times. I’ve been in groups that wanted to eat at those places and ended up waiting long enough to have watched a movie and then come back in time to get our table.
We get better food and no wait at local places.
Also allergies. AC can’t eat pizzeria pizza–doesn’t matter if it’s Pizza Hut, Domino’s, Papa John’s, or whatever–unless we have 'em leave off the pizza sauce. Grocery store pizzas are fine but not pizzeria pizzas with the red sauce. Green sauce (i.e.: pesto), white sauce, or BBQ sauce (hooray for Papa John’s!) are perfectly fine but not red. We have no idea why.
Papa Bear’s in Canton, Ohio.
Myself and the wife had the flank steak.
She spent 5 days in Akron City Hospital with food poisoning.
Oddly, I had nothing worse than wind.
They don’t do that any longer, but their fries and hash browns are soaked in beef broth or something similar, for flavor. They stopped doing this in India after the huge backlash after discovery, but in the US and other places, they just note it on their website and wherever else they may post ingredient lists.
I can’t directly link due to how they changed their site (at least, I couldn’t find the way to do so) but go to their website, pick USA, Nutrition, then check on the ingredients in an order of french fries. It says:
The way it’s worded initially, it makes it sound like the “natural beef flavor” is just made out of wheat and milk. But check the last two sentences; those are just pointed out for food allergy reasons, and wheat and milk are common problems for people. The wheat and milk products are just part of the base for the beef-based flavoring.
Hometown Buffet, after a doctor identified it as the probable source for a bacteria that gave me really bad vomiting and diarrhea.
We avoid chains whenever possible. The ones at which we will dine if we must:
Ruby Tuesday’s: decent salad bar and veggie burger
Subway/Chipotle/q’Doba: fresh fixings you get to pick out made right in front of you
Sweet Tomatoes: super healthy, gives nutrition info., tons of vegetarian options
Red Lobster/Olive Garden: I’ve never actually been disappointed by either
Also, never go to any kind of ethnic restaurant solely based on the fact that there are a lot of people of that ethnicity eating there. McDonald’s, Cracker Barrel and Ryan’s are always packed with white people.
A friend told me about this burrito he ate. Two bites in he notices maggots. So he goes back to complain and this fine establishment offers him another burrito for compensation. Unfortunately, he didn’t remember the name of the exact restaurant but gave me the cross street it was near. I don’t anything within a 2 mile radius of the place.