Outrageous Confessions From (Former) Restaurant Employees

In My Humble Opinion
21

The most common one I have seen was taking french fries that had been sitting around for a couple of hours, dipping them in the fryer to heat them back up, and then serving them.

The worst was a boss with no sense whatsoever. He went into the dish room and started digging around in the trash and noticed a lot unopened coffee creamers, which must cost all of 2 cents each. He dug around for an hour and managed to find 100 of them (that’s a whole $2.00). He bitched about throwing money away and said to reuse these things. Well, since they had come out of the trash they were covered in crud. So his bright idea was to run them through the dishwasher! Then. mix them back in with the unused ones! As you can imagine, customers started complaining that the cream was spoiled and ruined their coffee. So he ended up giving away free coffee the rest of that night. What a DMF.

22

When I was in high school, I worked at a fresh seafood market. A big seller for New Years was the clam bake - a tin container filled with shrimp, clams, corn, potatoes, & lobster tails. Customers bought them, took them home, added water, and cooked them on their stovetops. We prepared them ourselves, filling them with the seafood & veggies, then punching holes in the top of the containers with an oyster knife (not the safest thing to do).
One year, I had the job of punching the holes in the top. My hand slipped, and I sliced my palm open with the knife, bleeding all over the contents of the container. My boss told me to rinse everything off and stick it back in there. Luckily, I was a 16 year old, non-drug-using, healthy virgin, so there probably wasn’t any real risk involved, but I’m sure he could have gotten in serious trouble with the health department.

I used to have a friend who worked at a very popular donut chain when she was in high school. She said they used to leave the big vats of glaze out overnight. When they came in in the morning, there would be a layer of these little green flies on the surface of the glaze. They’d just scoop them off and keep using the stuff. That story instantly cured me of my donut cravings.

23

Wow. 99% of those are shocking but unfortunately not surprising.

One thing I remember about dairy queen. My wife and I went there last year for a couple of Blizzards (mmmm…good). Well, this fellow is making them (as a side note, I believe him to be the owner. He was an middle-aged oriental man, and I know an oriental man owns it). He proceeds to do a “hacking cough” right into his hand. You know the type…the kind after you cough you have to look to see if there is any phlem in your palm.

Well, at least he covered his mouth. Anyhow, he finishes the Blizzards and grabs our spoons with his hand he coughed into, base of the spoon first. I wasn’t very impressed. I don’t think he was either when I told him there was no way in we were going to eat those. He asked why and I told him. He grudgingly agreed to make another, and we both watched him like a hawk as he did it.

24

Sorry, but it’s almost impossible to explain…you just have to do it. Basically, you shake some salt out on a stable surface and then just try, try, try until the shaker balances. Once it does, you can gently blow away the excess salt. We used to set up long lines of them and see how long it took before the vibrations of people walking by would knock them down. :smiley:

25

I worked at a ponderosa for two years as a broiler cook. I once had a steak returned to me because it had a cooked spider on it. Sure enough there was a charred litte corpse of an eight-legged critter on the steak. How the customer noticed I don’t know because unless you got down and looked at it really closely it looked like a part of the char mark.

I also know that the food that the have on the buffet is usually leftovers. They would take leftovers from the day before and put the clean fresh items on top of the leftovers. This was especially popular with the cheesecake on the dessert bar.

Right before I quit there was this one cook who would sell packages of frozen steaks to his friends out the back door.

I know that one time I had a steak that was ordered “WELL WELL”. So I charred the hell out of it. It was returned as ‘too dry’. Well, duh. What did the customer expect. So I waited around five minutes and dropped the charred steak into the deep fryer. I pulled it out a few seconds later and flipped it a few times on the grill and then sent it out. The customer thought that steak was perfect.

I saw this one cook purposely drop a steak on the ground before serving it because this one beautiful waitress said that the customers were being assholes.

While wrapping baked potatoes in foil we would juggle them.

We would throw country fried steaks like frisbees into the fryer.

The place was infested with rats too. I found that out one night when I was cleaning out from under the refers and a rat trap snapped down on the broom. I asked the manager about it and he said, “Shh, don’t tell anyone.” This other time there was a bat in the stock room that kept flying around and scaring all the females.

If we ran out of porter house steaks before I could tell the cashier I would send out t-bones instead. The customers could never tell the difference.

That about sums up my experiences.

26

I’ve worked in about a half dozen food service jobs over the last 10 years and I’ve never seen anything that disgusting. I’ve personally never spit or anything into food, and I’ve never heard of my co-workers doing it either. Usually the food is bad enough to punish patrons.

27

No, that isn’t gross. I’ll tell you something gross.

You know in the Canterbury Tales? In the Prologue, the lines:

The martyr who helped them when they were sick was St. Thomas à Becket. He had been slain two centuries before Chaucer’s time in Canterbury Cathedral.

How did he help the sick? The pilgrims drank from a special fount of holy water that was reputed to have healing qualities. When King Henry’s men slew St. Thomas with their broadswords, they slashed off the top of his head. His acolytes gathered up from the floor all the blood, brain matter, and bits of skull they could collect, put that in a big vat, and filled it with water. That was the holy water doled out to pilgrims. Every time the water level got low they would fill it up again. So by Chaucer’s time the martyr’s relic molecules must have been extremely dilute, but it was the same water that had been kept in there all along. (Of course, a cathedral is not a restaurant, but it’s a similar process–giving people to drink.)

28

Wonko-please tell me that the man was banned from deliveries, at the very least!

29

I install and service fire suppression systems in restaurant kitchens so I get to see a lot of kitchens intimately. I’m always amazed at the filth in the typical commercial kitchen, even or especially the costlier ones. I end up having to lay on the floor to re-light the gas ovens, seen some incredible sights under there.

30

Not so much a restaraunt story but…

The first (and last) day I worked in a pork processing plant, the owner’s son was showing me how they made smoked picnic hams. After the spices and whatnot were injected into the ham, you would grab the ham with a hook and toos it into a big hopper type machine which, when filled, would be sealed and the hams then smoked. There was a drainage pit that ran the length of the work floor directly in front of these things that had all the sludge and miscellaneous pork parts that didn’t get used. I literally saw him drop at LEAST 15 of these things into the drain pit, scoop them out and then throw them into the hopper. I quit a few hours later.

And I’ve NEVER eaten a picnic ham again…

31

Not digusting, but pretty funny…

A friend of mine worked in a Chinese restaurant - not take-out or buffet, a sit-down type. One of her co-workers had a HORRIBLE table - three women who did nothing but bitch then entire meal about stupid stuff. The co-worker brought out the fortune cookies at the end of the meal and my friend passed the table a short time later, only to hear the women bitching about the lack of fortunes in the cookies!

My friend went back to the kitchen, but before she had a chance to ask, the co-worker grinned and held up a pair of tweezers :wink:

32

Speaking of counter-culture, neohippie, pagan waitstaff, I went to one such place near my house. It was summer, the waitress had a sleeveless top. She brought out the silverware tucked under her armpit. :eek: (At least it was rolled up in a napkin!)

Then there’s the Chinese place where I no longer dine because there were always flies buzzing around.

Baby flies.

33

A friend in college worked at a Ponderosa and, early one evening, they ran out of baked potatoes. The supervisor ordered my friend to crawl into the dumpster outside where, two nights before, this same supervisor had thrown out the potatoes because they were turning green and covered with those weird growths. The supervisor assured my friend that they were perfectly safe to eat–and that the knawing marks on some (apparently from a rat) didn’t have any effect on the inside.

They washed them up, covered them with foil, baked them and served the whole rat-eaten mess of green potatoes to the customers–with generous amounts of sour cream, butter, and chives.

Not one complaint!

34

Baby flies are maggots, wingless pink things that squirm. Anything flying is adult.

35

In Fight Club (the book), the narrator blackmails his boss at a hotel by telling him all the stuff he and Tyler have done to the food. He says something to the effect of, “I might be in jail, but this hotel will be forever known as the place where rich people ate piss.”

36

Not a restaurant, nor anything food-related. I have a friend who is afraid of heights. On one occasion, during a visit to Ireland, he and his travelling companions went to Blarney Castle, home of the famed Blarney Stone. The one people kiss. The Blarney Stone is at the very top of the castle, quite a ways off the ground. My friend chose to remain on terra firma while his companions went up to kiss the Stone. While he was waiting for them to return, he struck up a conversation with a tour guide, who was taking a job elsewhere and whose last day it happened to be.

“Good thing you didn’t go up there,” the guide said.
“Why is that?”
“Because when all the tourists go home, some of the guides go up there and pee on the Blarney Stone.”

(Reminder to self: Urine is sterile. Urine is sterile. Urine is sterile. Nope. Doesn’t help.)

37

Sigh.

I know. Perhaps I was unclear. These were tiny, very young, newly-emerged flies. Meaning that there were maggots somewhere nearby. Get my meaning?

38

For lots more stories like this, some even more shocking and disgusting, read Sabotage in the American Workplace. Not just food service, either: hotels, computers, and more.

My story: A friend of mine used to work in a pizza place. He used to tell me they’d do horrible things to unpleasant customers, particularly regulars who were always assholes, but he never told me specifically what they did.

So I go to pick him up at work one time. I park and walk up to the big window that looks in on the kitchen. He and a couple of other guys are inside, working at the counter, putting toppings on pizzas. I knock lightly; he glances up, I point at my watch.

He nods. Then he smiles. Then he…

<gorge rising – swallow heavily – resume typing>

… He leans forward to the window, plucks a dead fly out of the little aluminum gutter at the edge of the glass, lifts up a pepperoni disk on the uncooked pizza, puts the dead fly on the pizza, and puts the pepperoni disk back down on it. He arranges a couple of bits of grated cheese overlapping the edge of the pepperoni, apparently so they’ll melt and hold it down.

Then he gives me a saintly smile, grabs the big wooden paddle, and puts the pizza into the oven.

A few minutes later, he comes outside, ready to go.

“I never want to see that again,” I said, still not sure if I’m going to puke.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “The guy deserved it.”

And we never said two words about it again.

39

Well, after 14 years in the Fast food biz as a Manager, I have some stories I could tell. But the worst ones came from other managers or employees of other stores. Because if we caught anyone doing stuff like this they’d be fired so fast it wasn’t funny. Does this mean that are employees never did it? Nope, it just means we didn’t catch them doing it. I’d be stupid if I thought my employees were above stupid stuff like that.

But the worst story I have, is this. One night after we had closed, our bug guy came in for his weekly spraying. Well, I’m sitting there talking to him, and he says, “Ya know, I like this store cause you guys keep it clean. Now the ********** store? Hell, I just came from there, and they told me to spray the shake machine.” At this point he shakes his head in disgust and continues. “Well, I hit this machine with the spray, and I shit you not, a couple thousand roaches come runnin’ outta this thing.” I looked at him and told him he was pullin my leg, and he stated that, he wasn’t, and that in 20 years in the pest control biz, he NEVER saw that many roaches pour out of a machine like that. He said that he ended up having to spray for another 40 minutes just because of that. Well, needless to say, I made sure everyone I knew NEVER got a shake from the store he mentioned.

Becuase of that, there are still certain places I won’t order shakes from, unless I can tell if it’s a self contained unit (i.e. no top mounted vats)

40

I once went to a dinner in New York City with this guy I worked for. He insisted that since it was New York he was supposed to be rude to the waitress. He (of course) was from New Jersey. I was from New York and I had never seen a customer as rude as him. Reading this thread, it just occured to me how many “special additives” that guy must have eaten in his life.