# Please ruin restaurant food for me **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [August 19, 2003, 3:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-ruin-restaurant-food-for-me/196116 "2003-08-19T03:19:48Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Freiheit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e8c25b/32.png) [@Freiheit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Freiheit)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 5:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-ruin-restaurant-food-for-me/196116/21 "2003-08-19T05:19:52Z")
A guy in my auto shop class last year regularly used saliva as a seasoning for the innocent customers at McD’s. He was fired, but everbody (he said) did it. Anyone else thinking about fight club? ---
**Author:** ![I\_can\_t\_believe\_that\_s\_butter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/8edcca/32.png) [@I\_can\_t\_believe\_that\_s\_butter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/I_can_t_believe_that_s_butter)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 5:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-ruin-restaurant-food-for-me/196116/22 "2003-08-19T05:34:20Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Freiheit \* > \*\*Anyone else thinking about fight club? \*\* As far as thinking of the ass-kicking (as well as other things) that these people who condone food-altering deserve? Yes. ---
**Author:** ![Leaper](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/4bbf92/32.png) [@Leaper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaper)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 5:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-ruin-restaurant-food-for-me/196116/23 "2003-08-19T05:58:16Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by appletreats \* > \*\*In the interest of accuracy, I should have noted that the fact in question was pulled straight from my ass. \*\* I’d expect as much, since you WERE talking about fecal matter… ---
**Author:** ![rjung](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/45deac/32.png) [@rjung](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rjung)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 6:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-ruin-restaurant-food-for-me/196116/24 "2003-08-19T06:25:45Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by BayleDomon \* > I shouldn’t be reading this thread, as I still like to eat fast food. The scary thing is…it’s not affecting my desire for a Whopper in any way. Just think of this thread as a testament to the durability of the human digestive system. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Zenster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/cdc98d/32.png) [@Zenster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zenster)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 7:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-ruin-restaurant-food-for-me/196116/25 "2003-08-19T07:19:34Z")
Once again, from someone who has worked as a professional chef, most of the above misdeeds would have whichever employee out the door so fast there would be a popping sound of air rushing back in to fill the void their body once occupied. Intentionally tainting food or exposing customers to unnecessary risk of disease and contamination is a severe violation of ethics. No one in any kitchen of mine would dare to pull such crap. ---
**Author:** ![Tikki](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/5daacb/32.png) [@Tikki](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tikki)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 7:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-ruin-restaurant-food-for-me/196116/26 "2003-08-19T07:23:52Z")
I keep thinking about the piece on 20/20 where they took a camera undercover in a restaurant and recorded an employee shoving her hand down the back of her pants, scratching herself, then continuing working on the salad bar. ---
**Author:** ![Zenster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/cdc98d/32.png) [@Zenster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zenster)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 7:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-ruin-restaurant-food-for-me/196116/27 "2003-08-19T07:29:08Z")
And, yes, I watched at an Arabic restaurant in Silicon Valley while the line cook sliced off some gyros for my order and brought it to the stove. One particularly large piece fell off of his spatula and onto the floor. I saw him pick it back up and place it on the edge of the stove. About thirty seconds later I watched him casually shift it from the stove’s edge and onto the griddle. Needless to say (then why say it?), I spun on my heel and left never to return. I was happy to stick them with an unbought order. Sadly, I’m sure that they cheerfully sold it to someone else. However, I’m glad to report that they recently went out of business. ---
**Author:** ![Audrey\_Levins](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/73ab20/32.png) [@Audrey\_Levins](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Audrey_Levins)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 10:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-ruin-restaurant-food-for-me/196116/28 "2003-08-19T10:46:26Z")
In every single restaurant I’ve ever worked at, the baked potatoes, pre-dinner salads, tortilla chips, bread, etc., etc., are all grabbed by the servers with their bare hands. (For those of you who feel like getting righteous, why yes of course there are tongs for all of these purposes. Err…somewhere. If you can find 'em, feel free to try to make someone use them til they get lost again.) And yes, these servers handle money. Dirty plates. Hair. Cigarettes. Old dish towels. And God knows what else. Over and over again. Do they wash their hands? :chuckling: You know the answer. I myself bartend, and squeeze limes and lemons into your drink with the same hand in which I take your money and count out your change. Every bartender you’ve ever seen does this; you’ve just never noticed it, have you. _bwahahahaha_ Of course, to be fair, I also wash about ten billion glasses a night, at every available second, so my hands are dipped into cleansing and sanitizing solution so often that my cuticles crack. If that makes you feel any better at all. What may not is the fact that I am one of the minority of bartenders I know who is particular about their dish-water. Many of my present and previous coworkers have no qualms at all about “washing” bar glassware in water that is so cold, brown, and slimy that you can’t see the bottom of the sink anymore. Oops. Is this TMI? Drink from a straw, ladies and gentlemen. That’s all I’m gonna say. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![jjimm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ba8739/32.png) [@jjimm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jjimm)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 11:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-ruin-restaurant-food-for-me/196116/29 "2003-08-19T11:10:08Z")
McDonalds don’t use ground beef for their hamburgers: they use worms. It’s true. A bloke told me. In seriousness, the dangers from food poisoning are much lower than you’d realise. If you’ve eaten out, then you’ve eaten all this stuff already. Enjoy it, and build up your immune system at the same time! ---
**Author:** ![Jadis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/87869e/32.png) [@Jadis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jadis)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 3:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-ruin-restaurant-food-for-me/196116/30 "2003-08-19T15:39:07Z")
When I did banquet waitressing during high school/college, the place I worked was run by a group of 4 brothers…the brother in charge of the money side of the business was one of the cheapest bastards you’ve ever met. We used to get linens from a service that would come in these huge bags…tons and tons of linens in every imaginable color. Tons. In spite of the available quantity of linens, Eddie hated to see any of the waitstaff using clean napkins to wipe anything down. One of the waitstaff’s jobs at the end of the night was to dry all of the silverware and sort it out into these big storeage drawers. If Eddie saw you taking a clean napkin from the linen supply to wipe silverware, he’d freak out and try to make you take dirty napkins that had been cleared from the tables to dry silverware. I could go on and on, but that’s the one that grosses me out the worst. Silverware dried with used napkins. Blech. ---
**Author:** ![SentientMeat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/43a26b/32.png) [@SentientMeat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SentientMeat)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 3:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-ruin-restaurant-food-for-me/196116/31 "2003-08-19T15:59:56Z")
In a bittersweet way, the most delicious meal I ever ate was at the most shocking restaurant I ever visited. Kerala, southern India. We had just eaten positively _the_ most delicious garlic tiger prawns in the world ever, and were watching the sunset over Kovalam beach. From out of the kitchen, I see the biggest rat I have ever seen. It was _enormous_: literally the size of a small dog. (For an idea of size, the diameter of the base of the 3ft long tail where it met the body was about an inch.) Didn’t tell the girlfriend, of course. Left, hurriedly. ---
**Author:** ![Jessity](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/c67d28/32.png) [@Jessity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jessity)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 4:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-ruin-restaurant-food-for-me/196116/32 "2003-08-19T16:00:01Z")
Once, while making cinnamon rolls in a buffet restaurant, I dropped a … “log” of dough on the floor. Losing that one log meant that I’d have to make a full batch over again, so I quickly acted on the Five Second Rule and snatched it up, rolled it, cut it, and baked it. Another time, I helped hand peel around 15 cases of potatoes and run them through a slicer into a 45 gallon tub on wheels thing filled with ice water. While rolling that thing into the cooler, a wheel caught on the drain and flipped it. Do you think we were about to peel another 15 cases of potatoes by hand? ---
**Author:** ![smam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/46a35a/32.png) [@smam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smam)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 4:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-ruin-restaurant-food-for-me/196116/33 "2003-08-19T16:10:37Z")
Two McD’s in our city were closed for inspection at the same time, the cause was a burger that one girl had taken a but out of then noticed some irregularity with taste a consistency of the sauce on her Big-Mac, she took it to health and safety and 3 different kinds of semen were found to be the secret ingredient, the patron as the story goes got herpes of the mouth as a free gift, people got fired. I nthe other McD’s urine was found to be mixed with the mayonaisse in a store that seems to be run by 16 year olds, the entire staff got sacked. This story I got from several sources around the time it supposedly happened about 3-4 weeks ago. One thing i saw first hand was in a chain sandwhich shop that was completely staffed by council estate 16 year olds who pulled a lettuce off the shelf, chopped it up then without washing it put it in the tray for use. ---
**Author:** ![kung\_fu\_lola](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/f4b2a3/32.png) [@kung\_fu\_lola](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kung_fu_lola)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 4:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-ruin-restaurant-food-for-me/196116/34 "2003-08-19T16:23:01Z")
Nothing bad to say about Tim’s. Honestly. But once I bought a breakfast sandwich from A & W and the egg was only partially cooked. There was also some shards of shell in it. And my hash brown was still frozen in one corner. I will never eat at another A & W. ---
**Author:** ![Lyllyan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/b2d939/32.png) [@Lyllyan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lyllyan)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 4:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-ruin-restaurant-food-for-me/196116/35 "2003-08-19T16:30:21Z")
My SO repairs restaurant equipment, so he is constantly in the kitchens of the “sit-down” places. We rarely eat out anymore because of the nastiness he has observed, such as, Mold literally dripping from the Coke machines and running out over the drain. Mold and mildrew covering the fountains (where your drink comes out) 4 inch thick “stalagtites” of old grease and food particles under the ovens. Coolers that are not up to temp, and haven’t been for a day or two, so that the food is no longer as cold as it should be, but the food is cooked and served anyway. Cooks/Line servers literally sweating onto the plates they were preparing. In one recent incident, the air conditioning had gone out on the back line, making the temperature in that area around 140 degrees while the guys were cooking. And I am sure you have opened a ketchup bottle and found the opening black with old ketchup. Bon appetite! ---
**Author:** ![Gr8Kat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gr8kat/32/18668_2.png) [@Gr8Kat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gr8Kat)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-ruin-restaurant-food-for-me/196116/36 "2003-08-19T18:58:17Z")
These stories are old, and I probably posted them years ago, but what the heck. Everyone enjoys a good rerun! My sister’s ex-boyfriend used to work at Dairy Queen, and he used to regale us with the horrors he witnessed. One particularly horrifying story was about the _manager_ who cut his hand while slicing tomatoes, bled all over burger fixings, and still assembled the burger and gave it to a customer. Then there was the basin of antiseptic wash that was meant to be used _after_, not _in lieu_ of, washing hands. Evidently, it was so brackish that it probably was more sanitary to _just_ wash your hands without giving them a dip. Then there was the story my dad told from his dairy farming days. He was delivering milk to a local restaurant at the same time another farmer was making some delivery of his own. I don’t remember now the reason, but the other farmer was given access to the refrigerator, where he proceeded to climb up the lower shelves in order to reach an upper shelf. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he was wearing his barn boots, which were covered in manure. Manure dripped off his boots into open containers of mayonaise, etc., in the bottom of the fridge. But, instead of tossing the whole container, they just scooped out the manure. My dad vowed to never eat at that restaurant again. ---
**Author:** ![Homebrew](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/c89c15/32.png) [@Homebrew](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Homebrew)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 7:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-ruin-restaurant-food-for-me/196116/37 "2003-08-19T19:13:46Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Skwerl \* > \*\*Or, just buy healthy options (eg, McD’s salads are low cal, so is the Chicken McGrill w/o mayo.) \*\* Fast food salads are hardly a healthy alternative. from [MedicineNet.com](http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/Art.asp?ArticleKey=23373) > [@](#): > > Fast Food Salads High in Fat > The New “Salads”: The Latest in Fast Fraud > > Rating the New Fast-Food and Quick-Serve Salad Entrees > > The latest marketing trend in the fast food industry is the salad entree, promoted as a “healthy” alternative to fatty burgers and fries. But how healthy are these salads? > > To see how they stack up nutritionally, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) analyzed them based on five dietary measures. One star was given for meeting each of the following criteria, with five stars signifying the highest rating. > > One star for = 13 g fat > One star for = 4.5 g saturated fat > One star for = 50 mg of cholesterol > One star for = 3 g of fiber > One star for = 1,000 mg of sodium > > Each salad was rated using two ounces of the dressing that it is served with or, if no dressing is recommended, the lowest-fat dressing on the menu. > > [snip] > > The report’s results were quite surprising. Only two out of 34 salads received all five stars. Most of the salads were no more healthful than a burger without the bun, dipped in salad dressing. > > [snip] > > Most shocking of all, **McDonald’s Crispy Bacon Ranch Salad has _more_ fat and calories and just as much cholesterol as a Big Mac.** (emphasis in original) ---
**Author:** ![I\_can\_t\_believe\_that\_s\_butter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/8edcca/32.png) [@I\_can\_t\_believe\_that\_s\_butter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/I_can_t_believe_that_s_butter)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 9:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-ruin-restaurant-food-for-me/196116/38 "2003-08-19T21:38:54Z")
**Audrey** : What’s the matter with having some Purell around, at the least, and using it? ---
**Author:** ![Gadfly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/aeb1de/32.png) [@Gadfly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gadfly)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 10:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-ruin-restaurant-food-for-me/196116/39 "2003-08-19T22:37:52Z")
[quote] Once, while making cinnamon rolls in a buffet restaurant, I dropped a … “log” of dough on the floor. Losing that one log meant that I’d have to make a full batch over again, so I quickly acted on the Five Second Rule and snatched it up, rolled it, cut it, and baked it. [quote] This isn’t quite as horrendous, as most of the nasty stuff picked up would be incinerated. \ ---
**Author:** ![Sofa\_King](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/58956e/32.png) [@Sofa\_King](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sofa_King)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2003, 11:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-ruin-restaurant-food-for-me/196116/40 "2003-08-19T23:08:06Z")
I don’t know what it was about the Hardee’s kitchen, but there were enough sharp objects and hot things around back there that practically everyone, including me, was sporting at least one Band-Aid at a given time. I don’t ever recall wearing a pair of gloves. If you have a lapse there **Gumbercules** , take a look at the employees’ hands–chances are you’ll see a few bound fingers. Then ask yourself about all the Band-Aid in the food stories you’ve no doubt heard about but refused to believe. But it can get much worse. I knew a guy–though admittedly not well–who widely and proudly claimed that upon the day of his being laid off from McDonalds, he went into the cooler and took a crap in a five-gallon bucket of pickle chips. He said it was a sinker. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-ruin-restaurant-food-for-me/196116.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-ruin-restaurant-food-for-me/196116.md?page=3)