I’ve worked at a reasonable number of restaurants in my day and I, like many people I’ve talked to, wouldn’t / won’t eat at them. Here are some:
A Chinese food place - with a good reputation: I saw cooks farmer-spit into the garbage and wipe their noses with the backs of their bare hands as they were tossing meat in breading. Another time
I came in to work and the kitchen reeked of spoiled fish - it was from the buckets of raw shrimp that had sitting out in room temperature water that had been there for about two hours before I walked in.
Then there were the many blissful \hours I spent one week scraping the mold off of the walls of the fridges / coolers.
A Greyhound greasy spoon - My first shift I ordered a three-piece chicken dinner for supper break. The cook replied, “Pick something else, we’re using the green stuff this week.” She showed me the chicken and it had a distinct green tint.
An upscale steakery - The food was okay (if you didn’t have to pay for it) but you couldn’t ever get the same meal twice. They were so painfully inconsistent. That’s alright if free but at the prices they charged ($17 for a plain chicken burger and fries) I wouldn’t go as a customer. This was easily the cleanest restaurant I ever worked - possibly owing to being shut down on a health code violation about six months before I started.
A hotel restaurant - I ordered the blackened snapper once and the cook managed to tear-gas the kitchen, dining area and adjoined bar. I don’t know how he did it but everyone left for fresh air with tears pouring out of their eyes and coughing like 3 pack-a-days.
All of these places save for the Greyhound had good reputations and seemed popular.
I used to work at a place that was a small regional chain but was very similar in concept to Sizzler. Cheap steaks ordered in a cafeteria-type line, with a long salad and hot food bar in the middle. In term of stuff in the kitchen, it’s was a clean operation. Not perfect, but nothing that would put me off eating there.
It was the customers that were the problem. My job was to keep the salad and hot food bars full and clean. I think letting a pack of dogs have at it could not have been much worse. We always had a couple varieties of disgusting jello salad on the bar (what do they call it when it’s part whipped cream?) I saw people scoop that with their bare hands. There’d be a tray of fried chicken, and people would eat it standing in line and PUT THE BONES BACK. How about getting a big old scoop of salad dressing, then keeping the ladle as your personal tool to scoop every other thing that you want, ensuring that that everything has some quantity of everything else mixed in. Horrific.
I’d eat there on my breaks, and I wouldn’t touch anything off the salad bar with a ten foot pole.
Here’s another thing I remember; somewhat less egregious.
We had a small dessert bar. I can’t remember what all was on there, but I know the most popular thing was the bread pudding. Sometimes we’d run out and people would badger me to make more. I could never tell them the reason I couldn’t which only served to frustrate people more.
The bread pudding recipe was this: Take all of the leftover desserts at the end of the night and scrape them into a pan. Cover it with vanilla wafers (one for me, one for the pan…) and then bake it for a while. That’s why I couldn’t simply produce more at a moment’s notice. I had to wait for leftovers.
It was always strange to me how much people liked it. It was never the same proportion of ingredients twice since it was so dependent on what didn’t sell the day before.
A drive-in movie theater refreshment stand. The popcorn was safe, everything else was a gamble. The rule was always sell the oldest stuff first, and some of that stuff was really old. They never cleaned out that pot full of melted cheese product, just pour more in if it gets low. They had a chest freezer full of packaged appetizers like fried shrimp. They must have been there for years and some fool would order one and they’d get thrown under a little broiler and they looked like lumps crap. No food ever got thrown away because it wasn’t sold. They inventoried weekly and no matter how bad it looked it wasn’t getting thrown away and the company running the place wouldn’t restock anything until it was sold out.
I have a friend who worked at the McDonalds on the Garden State Parkway near Exit 142. He could write a book on the disgusting things he witnessed. This was circa 1990, but I still avoid that place.
That actually sounds really good! However, I was guessing that the bread pudding was made in a factory and you had to thaw it first.
The hospital I used to work at had a breakfast bar, and scrambled egg consumption dropped for a while after an employee brought out a bag that had been “cooked” in hot water, and proceeded to cut it open and dump the contents into the vat on the steam table. :rolleyes: