I know a pizza place that runs their stinking, filthy mop heads through the dishwasher.
I also worked for a roadhouse that specialized in fried chicken. The chicken was kept in 55 gallon Rubbermaids in the walk-in – which wouldn’t be so bad, except it took a long time to work down to the chicken on the bottom, which would turn shades of green.
On your first - I’m pretty certain the industrial dishwasher at the restaurant I worked in 25 years ago didn’t recycle/reuse water, so there wouldn’t be a hygiene issue running mop heads through it. Still probably a code violation though.
They did want us to save unused butter that came back from tables, so the kitchen could use it for frying.
I also one day witnessed the head cook/owner go to the basement to investigate a broken drain pipe, stick his fingers in the hole, then go right back to the kitchen to continue cooking.
And one of the teenage busboys (who happened to be the owner’s son) would initiate far too much body contact when sliding past attractive waitresses, regardless of the amount of space he actually had. I’m pretty sure his dad would have beat him into oblivion if any of the waitresses had complained, but none of them ever did.
My wife ordered a glass of wine once that came with a small bug in it (very small, like a gnat). When she asked for a new glass, I watched the server take her glass to the bar, use a straw to get the bug out of the wine, then bring the same glass of wine back to our table. We ended up getting our meal comped.
I know of one KFC in Athens, Ga that has a habit of washing food off and serving it if it fell on the floor. Saw it happen on many occasions.
When I was working at McD’s, we were only allowed to empty the grease traps when they were about to flow over. (Huge code violation at the time, not to mention dangerous.) At the same McD’s, we never cleaned the filters above the grill. Huge fire hazard that was. If we had leftover patties, the manager would have us stick them in the freezer, then use them the next morning.
The KFC my mom worked at, the last manager there would make the cooks use chicken that was turning green, smelled funny, or was slimy. As the assistant manager, my mom refused to do this, and wouldn’t allow the cooks to when she was there. (One of the unofficial reasons she was fired.)
There’s a DQ in Commerce Ga that had dead, mummified rats falling out of the ceiling at one time. The owner would pick it up barehanded, toss it in the garbage, and go back to cooking.
A Mexican restaurant in the same town used to store its weed-eater in the kitchen, mere feet from the food prep area.
The same KFC my mom worked at was once shut down after an employee urinated and defecated in the fryer. The manager the next day served food that had been cooked in the same oil, even though the cooks and other employees were complaining about the smell coming from it.
Many years ago I worked at a hippie bakery’s retail store.
My first day, I was given a tour, and I was told about all the delicious pastries on offer. At some point I said, “What’s in the bear claw?”
The shift manager gave me a sickly smile and led me to the back. At the bottom of the cookie storage unit, there was a five gallon bucket filled with smashed up pastries. “If anything’s delivered from the bakery and it’s broken, or if things get too stale to sell, or if anything else bad happens,” he explained, “throw it in the Bear Claw Bucket. When it’s full, it goes back to the bakery and gets ground up with sugar, cinnamon, and cocoa, and becomes the filling for bear claws.”
It gets worse. A co-worker went to work at the downtown bakery for a few days and came back because, she explained, she almost got fired. She went into the walk-in freezer there and found over a dozen full bear-claw buckets, all badly freezer-burned, some with mold on them (apparently they hadn’t always been in the freezer), so she started throwing them out. The owner nearly fired her when he saw what she was doing with valuable inventory.
The best part was the comic some wag had posted on the front of our register. Little Jeffy was looking at his breakfast plate, making a face, and saying, “Bear claws? Ewwww!”
Right there with you, Jeffy.
Many years ago at a Bino’s (sort of a low-rent Denny’s,) I was appalled to observe a table full of filthy orphans (and their oblivious, classless parents.) The whole show was disgusting, but the center attraction was the bottle of ketchup that they gave to their youngest to keep him quiet in his high-chair.
The kid sucked on that open bottle for more than a half an hour, and the ketchup was fairly everywhere. This was observed without comment by the waitress, which I suppose is forgivable because it’s not her job to parent the damned kids. What was less forgivable was that after the pig family cleared out, the bottle was given a wipe and set back on the table. You could see puddles and rivulets of of saliva and now-runny ketchup at the top of the bottle. :eek:
In another lifetime, a friend and I were both dishwashers at a family restaurant. Next to the dishwashing area was the garage where we go out to smoke, and there were usually a bunch of roaches scurrying around in the depths of the room. There were a number of holes in the brick walls, and there were also cans of foaming roach spray around. Every now and then we’d entertain ourselves by shooting a little of the spray in a hole and watching as roaches would come scurrying out of other holes.
One day, we decided to really go to town on the little bastards. We each armed ourselves with two cans of spray and we unleashed hell into every hole we could find. After two minutes, the wall was dripping with foam and there were roaches clamoring through the muck, only to drop dead on the floor. Mission accomplished, we went back to work.
A minute later, there were screams and chaos from the dining room. It would seem that the other side of that wall we so gleefully filled with roach poison faced the dining room. It was covered with pictures which were nailed into the wall, and apparently those nail holes were now being used as an escape route for roughly 17 kajillion roaches.
Wha-oops.
Once when I was in the Taco Bell drive-thru, I saw the server remove excess foam from the cups of soda by sipping it off.
Larry, that ketchup story made my throat clench! If I’d seen it in person, I’m pretty sure I’d have just puked.
When working at McDonald’s, I saw a co-worker filling a twenty-piece McNugget box from the fryer basket…”fourteen, fifteen, sixteen”, and then, turning to the wastebasket…”Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty!”
I once watched the bartender fill a wine carafe with half of each of house red and house white.
When I inquired, he said something to the effect of an idiot customer, at the evening rush, absolutely insisted on a carafe of ‘rosé’…
I never witnessed this first-hand, but since I knew several people who worked there, I know it to be true.
This was at a Pizza Hut that just happened to be the closest restaurant to a police station. The staff there wasn’t at all fond of the local constabulary, and this was aggravated by the fact that they would constantly come in, always expecting free food. Quite a few of the staff there would regularly each add their own very personal special ingredients. (spit) It got to be such a regular and known thing, that even the manager (who was also tired of the police expecting comp’ed meals) would occasionally direct the staff to make sure the gratis orders from police got the special ingredients.
The owner of the bar/restaurant I tended used to do this all the time. He’d also fill the bottles of Absolute and Grey Goose on the shelf behind me with the cheapest, plastic-bottled crap vodka he could find.
I’ve seen a container of taco meat dropped on the floor, the meat scraped off the ground and back into the container which then made its way dirrectly to the buffet.
My first job was at a Shakey’s Pizza. They also had fried chicken on the buffet. The least appreciated job at the end of the night was disassembling whole chickens into plastic lined 55 gallon barrels, filling them with water/marinade mix, then rolling them into the walk-in for the next day. We had no trouble going through those barrels though.
I used to live in an apartment in the back of a building that overlooked the rear of a row of shops and a curry house.
One hot ,sunny day as I was walking across the carpark I passed by the wide open Fire doors of the restaraunt and the chef was blowing his nose into the sink, first one nostril and then the other, and I can tell you that he had a totally streaming cold.
Even though I love curries, and this was the closest place to me I swore that I would never ever have food from there ever again even if I was starving to death.
I never actually saw anything like this when I worked in a restaurant. I guess it’s possible the line cooks were doing things I never saw since I wasn’t up there as often.
I do remember seeing just a month or so ago a waitress complain to a bartender about overfilling the martini glasses, then stick a finger into the same drink to fish out an apparently-unwanted garnish.
Missed the edit window - this was at the bar, not behind the scenes.
I hate to tell you this, but this is the standard recipe for bakery Bear Claws. It’s always made this way, although the pastry scraps aren’t supposed to be moldy or freezer-burnt. I once worked at a very prominent bakery where the open 55-gallon pastry scrap drums were located next to the loading dock, and birds would regularly fly in and help themselves to scraps out of the drums.
(Along the same line, rum ball filling is made of cake scraps (cake and frosting) all mashed up with chocolate and rum flavoring.)
I worked at a restaurant where the owner regularly changed her baby’s diaper on the prep counter, and at one where the owner stored the table linens on open racks in the men’s bathroom only a couple of feet from the open toilet (no stall). Both were reported to the health dept. The latter owner also found an old bottle of booze that was infested with about a hundred dead bugs, and tried to strain them out to reclaim the booze. I wouldn’t let him.
I guess I was pretty lucky and worked at pretty clean places. Never saw too much that would cause a stir… except a couple…
The kitchen was a loooong way from the dining area (big hotel/casino). You had to walk a good 50-75 yards down a couple hallways before entering the dining area. One night, I was trotting out a plate of Nachos, and I looked down and saw one lonely little chip *waaaay *off to the side of the plate. It didn’t look right, and hell, I was hungry, so I snagged it and chowed it down.
I keep walkin’, and just before turning the corner to hit the swinging door into the seating area, I look down and see a string of cheese,* from the plate of Nachos to the corner of my mouth!* 
The other one was butter-pats. The busboys used to throw them up to the ceiling of the ice machine room, a good 16 foot ceiling. Several were stuck there one summer. I came home from school the following summer and got my job back. The butter-pats remained!