Time and time again, I hear that if you send your food back, if you’re an asshole, or if you’re a cop, somebody is going to hawk a loogie into your burger.
I’ve never actually seen anyone do anything like this, though. I’m not currently a foodservice worker, but when I was, I did stints of roughly nine months each at McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Shoney’s, and Dempsy’s (a now-defunct small chain of Denny’s-like restaurants).
In all that time, I never once saw a cook screw with a customer’s food.
One time, when I was a 15 year-old McDonald’s worker, I wedged a frozen hamburger pattie into the zipper of my pants and told a co-worker, “Look! I got my meat stuck in my fly!” He returned my bad joke with a disgusted look and told me to throw the pattie in the trash.
So, are my work experiences atypical, or is there a rash of phlegm-coated burgers in America that I don’t know about?
A friend of mine who worked at an upper priced restaurant says he saw a cook throw a returned steak across the room. She had to fish it out from under a freezer with a broom handle. I never return food.
What food adulteration I saw during my brief sojurn in the fast food business and have heard about in the stories of friends has mainly been from accidents or indifference.
I got the impression while I worked there that the person preparing the food didn’t care if someone complained. They’re making a dozen more of those food items at any moment, so it’s not a big deal just to slap another together. Nor do they usually take personal pride in that work, so if the burger doesn’t taste right, they don’t get* offended* like a fine chef.
I’m a server in a restaurant. There’s generally not enough time to get worked up over it. Just fix the problem and move on. But I’m sure it occasionally happens, though I’ve never seen it.
I’ve worked in lots of restaurants, and I’ve never seen it done. Bartenders used to talk about giving people a Visine Cocktail, as in ‘I’d sure love to give that guy a visine cocktail’.
Mostly in a joking manner.
Granted it’s been a lot of years since I’ve done that kind of work. Maybe things have changed, but I’ve never seen or knew of anyone actually doing it.
I saw a waitress plop ice cream on someone’s head at a Christmas party, but the guest was seeing the waitresses boyfriend.
When I worked at a hot wing delivery place, on occasion people did get food that had ended up on the floor (as in, the occasional wing, not an entire order of them). When one hit the ground after it had been cooked, the un-official policy was to put it back in the vat for a minute to cook off whatever had gotten on the floor since the last time we cleaned it (the floors there are cleaned at least once a day, sometimes more if it’s a slow day). If something gets dropped on the floor BEFORE it gets cooked… well, if 9 minutes in boiling oil doesn’t make it safe to eat, I’d be afraid to walk on that floor.
Mind you, I never saw food tampered with intentionally, even with some highly asshole customers and a cook with a massive attitude/temper problem who on occasion would just start shouting at customers. He’d just cook their food the way it was supposed to be cooked and he would complain incessantly.
Actually, more often than not, if he was particularly annoyed at anyone in particular, the business itself, or just the universe in general, he’d get his revenge by cooking himself some hot wings and not paying for them. :rolleyes:
Would a waiter who did that get in legal trouble if someone observed him tampering with the food? Would they get in legal trouble if a patron got sick?
I worked 14 months in an Applebee’s - never saw intentional tampering with food. There was an accident with a vat of garlic mashed potatos and a used band-aid, though…
I worked at McDonald’s. Mostly I saw situations where people were in a rush, dropped the food, then picked it up and served it anyway. Another time, someone had been waiting forever on a twenty piece nugget, so the worker counted out the eighteen available ones, then added two more out of the trash can.
Another McDonalds story. I am not sure if this is the tampering that you are looking for, but McDonalds had (still has in a lot of places) these little numbers to let you know how long the burgers had been sitting out. If it hit the 6 (4:30, anything ending with the six hand on the dial), or 7 (5:35, you get the point), you had to throw the food away. To cut back on waste, we would just change the time (put the 7 away, change it to a 9). So if you came in and it were really slow, you might get a burger that had been sitting out for 45 minutes or an hour.
Nasty actually. Always wondered how many people got food poisoning.
In my time as a server, I never saw anyone intentionally tamper with food either. This is beyond the “food on the floor sometimes gets sent out after a heat disinfection” type of thing, which happened all the time.
The only people I’ve heard say that it happens are those people who heard it from a “friend”, never any firsthand experience. And this thread seems to bear that out.
Has anyone here every personally seen someone intentially tamper with food and then send it out to a customer?
I never saw it done. I wouldn’t have let food be served if someone had spit on it. I mean when I was just a busboy. I have no problem with despising the customer, but you don’t do that. I know there were two kids who went to jail for spitting and peeing people’s food at a Burger King about 10 years ago. They did serious time, too.
There was just a story in the Sun-Sentinel (South Florida paper) about a cop picking his burger up through some fast food place, and noticed there was spit in it. He went in, and some kid admitted he did. It turns out the kid did not even know a cop was getting this food. Bad luck for the kid (kind of). They actually arrested him not really for spitting in the food, but some other law. Sorry, I can not find a cite, but I did read it myself.
All I know is Chuck Palahniuk reports that since he wrote Fight Club he can’t go anywhere without waiters telling him about the horrible things they’ve done to food.
Of course this may be so much bragging (one story was about a guy who claimed Barbara Striesand had eaten his semen more than once). But I’m thinking Mr. Palahniuk cooks at home now.
One of the reasons I hate the movie “Waiting” so much is that it makes big jokes out of waiters tampering with food. I worked in restaurants for a long time, and I never saw anyone do that. I saw some cooks whose personal hygine was questionable, and I saw people work while sick because they had to make money, but I never saw anyone fuck with anyone’s food intentionally.
At the first one it happened all the time. I saw food intentionally fucked with and sent out.
At the second one, I never saw it happen.
I think it depends, in part, at the sort of working atmosphere there is at the place. First place was a hell hole to work at - management were assholes, customers were assholes, etc. It doesn’t excuse people messing with other people’s food, but I guess it explanes it a little.
2 1/2 years in fast food and I never personally saw it happen. I did have a roommate who was a manager at a taco bell, he said he would sometimes mess with peoples food. But it was more along the lines of putting large amounts of hot sauce on something as far as I recall.
Put myself through college waiting tables and never saw anyone maliciously harm food in retaliation for a particular customer. One guy did get fired for dropping a kiddie hamburger on steps going to the upper level seating and trying to serve it to the kid anyway. Manager saw him pick it up and fired him immediately.
There was a lot of TALK but as far as I know, no one ever did anything to the food.
