Nope, I’ve never worked in a restaurant, but several friends have, and their recent confessions were revolting. One said that while working in a very elegant restaurant, on several occasions she dropped her orders onto the greasy kitchen floor at which point the chef would casually throw them back onto the grill for a few seconds, sprinkle a bit more pepper on them, and have her serve it.
Another, who worked in a fast-food restaurant in college, said a psycho co-worker would regularly spit into the soft drinks of obnoxious/irratating drive-through customers–someitmes clearing his sinuses in the process before letting it rip. Yet another said the milk shake machine was seldom cleaned out, and when it was, ground-up roach carcasses would be found floating inside. Big roaches.
Tell me your most disgusting, stomach-churning, repulsive tale from the restaurant kitchen you once worked in–or still do!
My buddy Fred Smith, who was a preachers son, told me that he urinated in a box of lettuce while working at a fast food chain. BTW, how do you spell the past tense of pee?
Here’s a horror story though, there was this guy who worked at this fast food chain here in NW Indiana. EVERYTIME we went in there, he looked like he had a bad cold and we would try like crazy not to be served by him. His nose would be all red and he’d be wiping it while he punched in our order. We were so grossed out by it that we just stopped going there all together.
Once, as a dinner cook, I tried to thicken a broken Bernaise sauce by adding flour. It sucked, so I tossed it and made another, which resulted in one of the customer’s dinners arriving at the table later then the other dinners. That’s the worst I did and saw done by me or anyone else during the 8 years I worked in restaurants.
i walked into a domino’s pizza once to pick up a pizza, and watched them drop a pizza on the floor taking it out of the oven, pick it up, cut it and box it up, then notice me standing there and sheepishly toss it in the trash.
it made me laugh. they were a funny bunch- always called me by the totally wrong name, even though i used a credit card to pay half the time. but they gave me free pizzas a lot, so it would have been dumb to correct them. maybe they were floor pizzas.
I can’t get away with doing any of the bad stuff myself, but I’ve seen others do really bizaarre crap to the food at McDonalds while they didn’t know I was watching. There was this one night, the grill closer made a filet of fish, it was the last one he had ready. He dropped it on the floor. He was to lazy to drop more (into the vats!), so he was gonna use it. I’m not sure what he was thinking, but he started tossing it in the air and catching it. Not only does he drop it again, it flew under the dress table. He got down on his knees, fished it out, and was gonna serv it. He got yelled at, the customer got a refund. The same kid used to routinely cook happy meal toys on the grll, and it the fry vats. He was pretty weird like that. (He was fired not long after, for the record)
When I was a line cook in an Italian place, I once made a customer puke by serving primavera with spoiled veggies. It was accidental, though. My sense of smell is almost completely non-functional.
I saw guys I work with spit in sauces, drop food, then pick it up and serve it, all sorts of stuff. But I could never do that stuff myself. The couple of times I did, I felt really guilty afterwards.
Back in the late 80’s I was working at a whole foods cafe.
It was an interesting place, most of the people who also worked there were counter-culture, neohippie, pagan, etc. This place had great food and breakfasts were the specialty (this really is leading to something). Anyway, one day a customer returned his pancake, asked for a new one. When the cook asked why he didn’t like it, the customer picked the pancake up by the ENTIRE DREADLOCK that had been cooked inside of the pancake (cue sound of twenty jaws hitting the floor). Talk about hair in your food!!
My sister worked at a restaurant and told me that the owner recycled coffee. When the waitresses would bring back partial pots from tables, the owner (and other waitresses) would dump them back into the main pot. If a customer comes in everday and orders coffee, it’s likely they’re drinking the same coffee from the day before. That’s really gross.
One thing I saw was food falling on the floor, and the cooks would just put it back on the grill, (what’s a little crunchiness?)
I actually saw a waitress get a basket of rolls and rub the rolls on the toilet seat of the bathroom…mm mm good!
She served the rolls to her table and the customers loved them.
I thought the 10 second rule was universal in the food industry. You know…if food hits the floor, and stays there for less than 10 seconds, it’s still servable. In the catering/banquet establishment where I worked all through high school, you’d frequently hear one of the cooks yelling “Oops…oh, fell on a clean spot!” We thought it was hilarious at the time, but now…gag.
The guy who ran this banquet business was also notoriously cheap. It was the waitstaff’s responsibility to dry all of the silverware at the end of the evening and sort it out into these big drawers. Eddie used to get really steamed if we took clean napkins out of the linen supply to dry the silver. We’d constantly see him picking in the dirty laundry bag (full of napkins that we’d cleared from the tables at the end of the night, which people had at the very least wiped their mouths with…and god knows what else) for napkins that appeared clean enough to dry silver with. Ack!! I always refused and got a clean napkin when he wasn’t looking.
When the dinners being served were to be plated (rather than served family style), all of the idle staff (such as the bartenders, since the bar was closed during dinner) would be recruited to form the assembly line to plate food. There was also this really skanky bartender who used to take bites of food off of the plates as they passed…and I mean literally putting his face down into a mound of mashed potatoes, taking a bite and passing the plate along. Gross.
[slight hijack]
One cool thing that I learned at that place was how to balance one of those octagonal salt shakers on its edge on a single grain of salt. Way cool.
When I worked at a small Chinese take-out place, I came into contact with some of the nastiest cooks out there. All of them were Chinese immigrants, and they had the worst hygiene I had ever seen. They went weeks without showering, and you could literally see the grime building up on their faces, as well as smell their horrendous b.o. One guy in particular, had the bad habit of picking his nose while stir-frying, and I saw him on more than one occasion clear his nose out onto the kitchen floor. And when we would leave for the night, the cooks took all the leftover fried rice in a big bowl, covered it with a dish rag, and left it out. When we would come in the next day they would just reheat it in a wok and serve it up again.
When I worked at a pizza place, people would order pizza, and then complain about it, expecting a replacement pizza (sometimes people just wanted other toppings, sometimes it was a mistake…) So this guy calls up, and bitches about his pizza- we tell him we would be happy to replace it…yadda yadda… and we will be by with another pizza in about 30 min to replace the one we will be picking up (sometimes people just wanted 2 pizzas) the guy bitched about having to give up the pizza he did not want and so on.
When we picked up the pizza and brought it back, we found a large human turd on it.
I never ate pizza that was at a customers house and came back.
If you are not toilet rolls, sneezers, and other items of disgust will be served to you with a smile. The above posts are tame examples of what can and does happen to food.
I spent four years working in the dining hall while in college. Amazingly enough, I never saw anything like what some people have described. Of course, the staff did not have to sully the food to get revenge at the students. Cooking and serving it properly was revenge enough. The food was barely edible, cooked in grease and oil, left under heat lamps all day, and recycled as leftovers the following day. The refrigerators and warmers were often the same temperature, the microwave must have been a 50-watt judging by how slow it cooked, and the soda machines had bugs hovering around them because of the years of spilled syrup. Not to mention the 25 years’ worth of food ground into the carpeting and tile grout. Oh, and don’t look under the tables.
When I was 14 I worked at a Dairy Queen. There was one of those heated container thingies with a pump that we kept the nacho cheez in. They NEVER cleaned it. When it got low, they just told us to open another can of cheez and dump it in. So it caused this big buildup of old, old, old cheez on the bottom and on the top edge. There were ants living under it, feeding of crusty cheez. Blecch.
Also, instead of using milk for the milkshakes, they used the melted drippings from the ice cream machines. The runoff would go into a bucket and we would have to take the bucket into the cooler (out of sight of customers), get a funnel and pour it into a used milk jug that the owners brought from home.
The worst ever was one time when a lady came in asking to pick up the birthday cake she had ordered. The owner was the only one who knew how to decorate the cakes, using this machine that projected whatever picture onto the cake and then following the lines with the icing, etc. Anyway, she forgot to do this particular cake and the customer was really angry, because she had 10 6-year-olds at her house and she needed cake. But she wouldn’t take a non-decorated cake because she had paid for hers to be personalized with her kid’s name. So one of the guys I worked with and I said we woud try to decorate it for her. We got the cake all set up and figured out the machine, got it almost all decorated and my fellow employee is concentrating really hard, leaning over the cake, trying to write the kid’s name on it with the icing and all of a sudden he drooled. On the cake. Which happened to be a frozen ice cream cake, which caused the drool to immediately freeze into a little puddle.
We had just spent like a half an hour on this stupid cake, so the guy looks at me, looks at the frozen-drool-puddle and says, “Get a box.” And we boxed up the drool cake and cheerfully gave it to the customer.
I still feel bad about it to this day, but if our stupid boss had just done her job it wouldn’t have happened! Plus, how harmful could a little drool be?
