In another thread someone brought up the notion of “restaurant sabotage” - ie workers sabotaging the food of asshole customers.
Can anyone here who works or has worked in the restaurant industry attest to that? What sort of mischief have you been party to?
I can tell you from personal experience it does happen, but it is rare.
I worked at a chain seafood restaurant for about a year back in the 90s, and though we had our share of asshole customers, the only act sabotage I saw take place involved a woman who sent back her corn on the cob three times complaining that it wasn’t warm enough and didn’t have enough butter on it. The assistant manager finally got sick of her, dropped the corn into a sink full of dirty dishwater, literally drenched the corn in butter sauce and then nuked the hell out of it. She did not send the corn back again.
My dad, who worked in the restaurant industry back in the '70s, saw all sorts of shenanigans take place - recyling drinks and salads, dropping stuff on the floor, and other things that would probably get them shut down instantly nowadays.
I have very little restaurant experience, but the few places I’ve worked have shown a huge contrast with regard to cleanliness and attitude.
I worked at Olive Garden for a little while and the worst thing I ever saw there was deliberately taking a very long time to fix a problem customer’s (or problem server’s) food. And even that wouldn’t last too long once a manager got wind of it. I never saw any spitting or dropping or anything else that was gross or unsanitary. The place was always pretty clean and while it’s not my favorite restaurant I don’t have a problem eating there if I’m with somebody else that wants to go.
I also worked at a small sports bar, and there was one cook there that I heard some horror stories about. Putting pubic hair in food, spitting in it, dropping it on the floor and cooking it anyway, just being awful whenever he felt like it. And they didn’t even have to be problem customers, just people who’d order something he didn’t feel like cooking or just because he thought it was funny.
I never saw him do it, so I don’t know if it’s true, but I wouldn’t have put it past him or even some of the other cooks. The whole atmosphere of the place was pretty toxic and nobody seemed to give a shit about much of anything. I warned my friends about the place, didn’t eat the food there, and found another job as soon as I could. They closed down not too long after that.
I worked in a restaurant for about 5 years in college and I never saw any deliberate acts of food retaliation. Oh sure, there were some “man, I’d like to” stories and one dumb guy who dropped a kid’s hamburger and then tried to serve it, but the manager saw him do it and fired him (the server was just rushed and frazzled and did a terrible thing, but he didn’t do it as a deliberate act against a table).
Passive aggressive actions against aggravating customers were more common. There was this woman who used to come in by herself, always ordered diet pepsies and wow, did she drink a LOT of diet pepsi. Whoever was waiting on her would bring her a diet pepsi every time they came out of the kitchen and not clear away the empty glasses. By the time she left, her table would be covered with empty glasses (because the woman could literally drink 20+ glasses of soda at dinner). She could run a server to death and never left a good tip (she came in often enough where some servers TRIED to get a good tip out of her but eventually just gave up), so she got the very clever monniker “The Diet Pepsi Lady.” Giving nicknames to regular tables was also pretty common.
I’ve worked in a few restaurants and cafes during my college years.
In one restaurant, where I worked as a hostess, I saw that the servers made the salads, and they grabbed the lettuce/spinach with their bare, unwashed hands. Most of the servers were college students so they knew it was unsanitary. Management knew of this practice that all of the servers engaged in, but management didn’t care. Doing otherwise was not an option because salad tongs were not provided. This was at a moderately-priced restaurant.
At a vegetarian cafe, the workers made fresh juices using a machine. Some of the other workers would not wash the fruits and vegetables before juicing them, and they knew it was wrong. Some of the vegetables such as the spinach and carrots had a lot of dirt visibly stuck on them before being thrown into the juicer.
The two situations I observed, these things were done indiscriminately to customers instead of because they were angry at anyone in particular. It was done mostly out of laziness and possibly a general contempt for their job and/or the world. All the employees who did so were in college or college graduates, and outwardly did not exhibit any hostility to the customers whose food/drinks they were sabotaging, even the servers who got big tips because of their cute 19 year old smiles.
I’ve spoken to a lot of people who have worked in food service who have similar or worse experiences.
I worked at a well-known ice cream parlor chain in college. One summer it was decided that we would offer lemonade. Okay. The lemonade was a mixture of lemon juice, simple syrup, and water, with a chunk of the lemon in it.
For some reason the owner of the shop decided that we should pre-mix the lemon juice and simple syrup in the plastic cups before the shop opened every morning so when somebody ordered it we just had to add water and ice.
The problem being that there was no place to keep these pre-mixed cups except the counter, and by the middle of the day the cups were swarming with fruit flies, and even with lids on flies would manage to get into the juice and die. See, the owner of the shop didn’t feel like getting the air conditioning in the shop fixed when it broke at the beginning of the summer, meaning that every door and window in the place had to be open so that we didn’t die in the summer heat.
Absolutely disgusting. Whenever anybody ordered a lemonade from me I’d just make a new one, but I kept the pre-made cups out so I didn’t get in trouble when the owner came by. He, however, would serve the pre-made lemonades to customers indiscriminately even though they were full of bugs that I guess you couldn’t really see amongst the lemon pulp and ice cubes once he was done. Blargh!
As I said in that other thread, I worked as a line cook from about 16 to 25ish. I never saw anyone do anything to the food (except us cooks stealing beer and busboys doing whippets of the whipped cream canisters (don’t get anything with whipped cream)). One guy one time boasted that he put weed in cop’s lunch, but I think he was bsing.
My police officer friend will not order from restaurants when in uniform, or where they know him by sight as a cop. He takes the possibility of contamination quite seriously.
I heard many very sincere wishes that the customer would choke to death on their onion rings that, after three tries, were finally the right shade of taupe, but never any deliberate mishandling of food by a server or cook.
However, I spent part of one summer working at a pretty famous barbecue place at home with a buffet, and the stuff the management wanted us to do in the interest of saving money was pretty gross. I once got a right royal reaming for cutting out the rotten or moldy spots in strawberries I was cutting up to go over various desserts. My god, didn’t I know how much a flat of strawberries cost!? Another time, I was setting up the hot table on the buffet and spilled a tray of fried shrimp into the guts of the table. The manager on duty insisted that I scrape them up and put them back in the pan and on the buffet.
I haven’t eaten there since.
I worked as a waitress during high school and college, and I never saw anyone do any deliberate sabotage. Hurried and sloppy, sure, but not sabotage. Not that there weren’t plenty of times that I wished I could…
While I never personally participated in food sabotage while working as a cook in a (then-) trendy and fashionable stone-oven pizzeria, I did witness some pretty horrible deeds. Two examples:
One head cook, upon noticing that a local food critic and personal enemy had entered the establishment, proceeded to gather up a small handful of mouse feces and sprinkle them on the bottom of the bowl before ladling in his tomato marjoram bisque. Another assistant cook deposited his…man-goo…onto a frozen dessert intended for another employee against whom he had some sort of grudge.
It should be noted that all the worst offenses were directed at particular people due to personal grudges, so nobody got intentionally tainted food who didn’t “deserve” it, at least in the eyes of the offender. General hygiene is another matter; everywhere I’ve worked I’ve seen lapses at one time or another. The real horrors are the exception. Be nice to your server and try not to be send your food back more than once.
Did you actually SEE those 2 events (well, hopefully you did not see the man goo deposit) or was it just swaggering talk? I heard a LOT of talk, but never personally witnessed anything (and I dismiss the talk I heard as just urban legend or wishing).
And I have to ask, if you did see someone put mouse feces into soup - why didn’t you stop it? That’s disgusting.
I have a relative who has been a hotel and restaurant chef for years.
He said it is very common for head chefs or managers to allow staff to spit in the food, as it allows a bit of temper outlet for the staff when frustrations rise.
He didn’t condone it, just observed it.
I didn’t witness the goo deposition, but my eyes did behold the Bisque of Doom. The offender was technically my boss and he was large and very pissed off. I wasn’t about to risk my job (and possibly my physical well-being) by stepping in. In hindsight, the moral thing to do would have been to warn the rodent recipent (whether or not he deserved his soup) and quit the job. But busy kitchens are war zones, where all kinds of shady things go on, and looking the other way when poo is sprinkled seemed at the time to be just what was done.
There was a Hoss’ steakhouse in the Pittsburgh area that made the news a few years back after they were sued by one of their servers for creating a hostile work environment. The server claimed several employees routinely dropped steaks on the floor, picked them up and served them to customers. They were also allegedly Satanists, and had bizarre rituals in the kitchen, including putting a barbie doll in the fryer, letting it melt, and not changing the grease when cooking french fries.
The restaurant closed about a year after the case came to trial.
Other than that I’ve not heard of any other deliberate tampering with food. There have been a few places that I stopped eating at because (judging by what I was served) they were a bit low on the hygiene standards. A restaurant (now closed) served my girlfriend a sandwich on moldy bread. I’m not talking microscopic little dots of mold either, I’m talking blue-green patches the size of nickels that should definitely been noticed.
I worked at a summertime-only restaurant that wasn’t air conditioned. I sweat a ton, even though my job was salad and dessert prep and I wasn’t too close to the grill.
Every so often, when I was scooping out a cup of $8 sorbet, a bit of my sweat would end up in the glass. I in no way did this on purpose, but I also never re-scooped because the orders went by so fast.
I apologize, rich concert-goers into whose sorbet I sweat.
I got my first job in a small family owned Italian restaurant. The woman who founded the place was well into her eighties. Her sons were running the place, but Mama was there every night. She spoke very little English but we all learned what she meant when she said “Se non mangiare, non serve” Italian for “If you wouldn’t eat it, don’t serve it”
I’m of the opinion that “if you didn’t do it yourself, or witness it being done” then it probably is an apocryphal story. Most of the posts in this thread would confirm this.
In my nearly 26 years in foodservice I have never deliberately tampered with a customer’s food, nor have I seen it done, at least not in a way that would make the food unsafe to eat. The closest thing I’ve seen was at my very first job, in an Arby’s restaurant. I was working the drive-thru one night, and some smartass placed his order like this: “I want a Regular Roast Beef Sandwich. Hot. And a large order of fries. Hot.” I passed this order to the kitchen verbatim. The cooks made the sandwich and fries, and then placed everything into the microwave and nuked the hell out of it. The roast beef used at Arby’s does not handle being microwaved very well - it becomes very rubbery and hard to chew. So it was probably not a very satisfying sandwich, but hey, it was hot!
The few tampering stories I’ve heard from other cooks have, in every case, been situations where the customer was either a friend of the cook or a good-natured regular customer, and the cook was simply playing a practical joke. For example, one cook told me of working at Denny’s, and a regular customer who always ordered a single pancake, “well done”. So one day this guy cooked a circular piece of cardboard into the pancake and served it up, and then got a good laugh as the extremely puzzled customer attempted to saw through the pancake. (The cook had a second, proper pancake ready to go as soon as the prank was revealed.)
However, I (and most other cooks I’ve known) are happy to let the scarier stories circulate. We don’t mind if people think we might do something to their food if they’re jerks. After all there’s that old adage, “Be careful how you treat the person who’s preparing your food.” 
I worked at an independently-owned ice cream shop for a year, the owner of which was a right bastard. Not quite in the same caliber, but the same vein as some of these stories. When the store was running low on some basic flavor like chocolate or mint or whatever, instead of ordering more like a normal ice-cream-store-owner, he’d send whatever employee he liked least to run up to the grocery store, buy a gallon of the cheapest crap ice cream, and then mix it in with the rest of the stuff in the freezer. Probably would have irked some of the customers who were paying a pretty penny for what they thought was Edy’s, and turned out to be Joe’s Ice Kreem or whatever. He also used to make all his ice cream cakes in the dead of winter, when there was next to no business, and then store them in the display freezer for folks to buy in the summer months. Mmmm, six- or seven-month-old ice cream cake! Occasionally there would be melted drips and drabs of another ice cream cake obscuring the frosting, and he’d have us just pick it off.
There were a million different toppings, too–jimmies, sprinkles, pretty much every type of gummi or chocolate thing you could imagine, and when the Boss Man wasn’t around, it was common practice for the employees to snack directly out of the containers without bothering to wash their hands, put on gloves, or use a dispenser.
That was a year I’d like to forget.
I worked in food service for about 10 years. I never saw any of the kinds of retaliation that you hear horror stories about. I sometimes heard anecdotes of dubious quality or people claiming to have done something (but it was always something that happened at some other place or time, never right here last night).
What I did see in spades was plenty of casual mishandling of food, food picked up off the floor and served, food being kept out of the cooler too long, etc. At one place I worked (a well known family chain store), we had a GM who would get pissed if somebody threw something away just because it had been on the floor. As long as it wasn’t something like soup, it got cleaned up and served.
Don’t eat the bread pudding, by the way. That’s made from all the bread slices and buns that fall on the floor. I actually saw bread slices go into the pudding that had footprints on them.
Another thing – if somebody orders a well-done steak, they’re liable to get the lower quality cuts. No reason to waste a good piece of meat for somebody that just wants to ruin it.