In the interest of losing the last 20 pounds, I have decided to avoid eating fast food and sit down restaurants. Problem is, I love them.
So everyone who has worked in the food servide industry: tell me your horror stories. Things you have done to food or seen others do to food.
Some recent threads have touched on this, but they always seem to shy away from it when the people start bitching “That’s disgusting and illegal…” Yeah, we all know it’s illegal.
So tell me why you will never eat at ________ again. PLEASE.
Glad to help, Gumbercules! I worked at McD’s when I was in high school. MORE than once I dropped a burger on the floor, picked it up with my spatula, dropped it on the grill, flipped it, and sent it on with the rest!
I worked at Hardees as a teenager. Once we found a mouse happily noshing away inside an open bag of buns. We chased the mouse off, threw out the buns that had been obviously gnawed on…
Here is a story that I heard that has become one of my favorites.
Some workers in a restaurant found that their chicken was starting to look a little green, so they tossed it into the garbage. Soon, some people came into the restaurant and ordered a bunch of chicken sandwiches. The workers were about to say that they were all out of chicken when the manager pulled them aside and told them to use the stuff they had thrown out. So they fished it out of the garbage, dunked in bleach to disinfect it, and cooked and served it like normal.
Read that Anthony Bourdain book, “Kitchen Confidential”. It’s really good on it’s own. And if you’re of the right disposition, it will convince you even the most expensive restaurants are disturbingly disgusting.
As a current McD’s worker, I just want to say that in my store I have never seen anyone do any crazy things like spitting in food or using stuff that fell on the floor.
As far as quitting restaurants, you could think of the money you’re saving. Or, just buy healthy options (eg, McD’s salads are low cal, so is the Chicken McGrill w/o mayo.) Many sit down restaurants serve lean grilled fish or chicken, which are both quite delicious, I think, and you still get to go to a restaurant and get the experience.
In the interest of losing the last 20 pounds, I have decided to avoid eating fast food and sit down restaurants.
Well, there’s the problem right there! Fast food is bad enough, but do you realize how many calories there are in a restaurant? Even a small takeout joint, let alone a sit down place?
At a pizza place I worked at, they used a knife to cut up the giant dough ball into smaller ones for pizzas. Occasionally somone would nick themselves with the knife. The workers with a conscience would make sure no blood ended up in the dough. The people without, i.e. the majority, wouldn’t care.
At nice sit down restaurants, the most I could complain about are poor hygiene of the cooks and/or pest infestations. Unless you have a habit of sending back food that isn’t quite right, something I’d never ever do at any restaurant.
As a current employee of McD’s I can honestly say I have never seen anything at quite this level. However, the holding time (from cooking to serving) for meat is 20 minutes and we regularly hang on to it for hours. The chicken products (holding time: 30 minutes) are even worse.
A lot of the time workers forget to start the timers on deep fried stuff, so we just kinda guess when it’s done. If it occurs to me I’ll cut it open to make sure it’s cooked, but that doesn’t always happen.
I worked at a place in high school where they served a complimentary loaf of bread and a little ramiken of butter with every meal. When the table was bussed, the remaining butter was scooped out and put back into the butter tub. The bread was turned into the croutons for the salads. All of which had been alone with the previous diners fo a few hours, who knows what got in where.
As for the “employees must wash hands before returning to work” signs, I can count on one hand the number of people I have worked with in the food industry that adhered to this policy regularly.
When I worked in a Mexican restaurant as a teenager, I used to take half empty salsa bowls from tables, pour them together, and give them to new tables. I also used to wipe off plates and silverware with the same rag I used to clean the drains when there weren’t any clean dishes.
I heard the following story firsthand from the person it involves:
A pizza delivery driver who repeatedly brought pies to a certain customer who repeatedly refused to tip, and was an asshole as well, once stopped on the way to the customer’s house and relieved himself upon said pizza. The quantities involved were small, so as to not be noticed.
I once saw a ‘mentally challenged’ employee, given the task of opening a can of mushrooms, completely mangle the lid in his efforts. Who knows how many shards of metal got onto people’s pizzas before I noticed what he’d done? Nobody else in the store cared, at all, including the manager.
I once watched as a manager was consulted about a pizza that had been made and was awaiting delivery, but which had been made missing a topping. Common practice in these cases is to simply grab a handful of the topping and throw it onto the cooked pizza, in hopes that it will be hot by the time it arrives at the customer’s house. So that’s what he did. With a handful of RAW BACON. And the driver delivered it.
And of course, there’s my own experience with the ‘unusually soggy’ soft tacos from a bell-related restaurant. Eeewww.
My friends all have some good horror stories. Every last one of them who have ever worked in food service.
There are ‘good’ employees out there, who actually wash their hands and know food-handling procedures, etc.
They’re Vastly outnumbered by the other types.
I once watched in horror as a nasty couple in a Bino’s (think “low-class version of Denny’s”, if you can get your head around such a thing,) allowed their two-year-old to suck on the ketchup bottle for the entire time they ate their breakfast. Ketchup and drool everywhere.
That wasn’t the bad part, though.
The bad part was when the table was bussed. The bottle was wiped off with a rag and left on the table. :eek:
