I feel fortunate. The only thing I’ve ever found in my food has been the occasional hair. And since I’m not really a squeamish guy, I tend not to make a fuss.
My cousin once found a paper clip baked into the crust of a Marie Calender’s pie.
Great, zenzelli, I really liked the white mocha.
Not really that gross, but I guess I gotta tell a story. I was standing at an order counter one day, and one of the employees went through the “employees only” door. Tacked to a cabinet door back there was a sign that said “Congratulations guys!!! 90 on our health exam!!!”
And I also knew a guy who worked at Domino’s for six months and refuses to eat pizza now. I don’t want to know.
I found a hair in a Ritz cracker once, you could dangle the cracker by said hair. I think I still have it around somewhere, actually.
Oh, you ever wash dishes in a chinese restaurant? Bleh, worst job I ever had.
I’m a commercial pest control technician. Trust me, you don’t wanna know the conditions of restaurant kitchens. And you don’t wanna know some of the things I’ve seen.
Just trust the Ol’ Dave-Guy on this one, kids.
They had those huge bulk cereal dispensers in my college dorm cafeteria. Cereal was one of our mainstays, because you could be sure that it was relatively clean compared to some of the other culinary masterpieces that were being served in that hellhole.
We abandoned even the cereal the morning my friend was adding milk to his bowl of frosted flakes, and several cockroaches fleed from the depths of the cereal bowl to escape the deluge. I think I heard that those roaches went on to get degrees in communication from the Business College, and now work at Proctor and Gamble downtown.
Two stories:
Me, guest at a private home in northwest Thailand, tiny town, middle of nowhere. Plate of dried, flattened grasshoppers as entree. O-kay, I travel for new experiences…give me one of those 'hoppers.
Back home, local fish ‘n’ chip shop. Go in to order a piece of grilled fish and minimum chips, there’s the pet cat lying in the uncooked chips.
Scratching itself. Licking its balls. Gagging on furballs.
Guy behind the counter, noticing my horrified gagging: “Hey, don’t worry. We cook the chips, we cook the germs. No harm.”
Given the choice between the grasshoppers and the cat, give me the grasshoppers. They actually weren’t too bad.
Ok, remind me to never order gingerale anywhere again, just in case. That would make me rather sick, what with the caffeine in coke and all.
I once found a bunch of tiny little bugs in my frozen margarita at Chili’s. Bleh.
On the rocks for me from then on.
A group of friends and I head to the Applebees(sp) because it was close to the theatre. My friend Jim ordered the cheese sticks, when he gets them every thing is going OK. We’re finishing up with dinner and Jim grabs another cheese stick, starts to eat it and stops. He calls the waitress over and when she shows up he asked her if she wanted to see a magic trick. Jim then suspends his cheese stick over the table by the human hair that is inside the cheese. It was nasty as hell and we haven’t been back.
A few years ago, I was on a long bus ride from Georgia to Texas, and the bus stopped at Shoney’s. I hadn’t eaten there in years, but remembered how tasty the hashbrowns and “cheese” were. I scooped up some taters and went for the cheese ladle, but stopped short when I found an 8" long, perfectly straight, black hair floating right on top of the orange stuff. I immediately went to the servers and asked for more cheese, but they gave me a look like I had just crapped in their hats, and someone went to “fish it out”. I said pulling the hair out wasn’t good enough, I wanted DIFFERENT cheese. It was a long time before anyone switched the cheese tray, and by then I’d lost my appetite. I haven’t been to a Shoney’s since.
I’m sqeamish when it comes to food…if I find something icky in my food, I am done eating for the rest of the day.
One of the worst things for me is eating fastfood chicken sandwiches and finding slimy, snotty pockets of who-knows-what in the patty. That’s one reason I mostly eat vegetarian-style at restaurants, I’m too picky about how much fat, skin and gristle belongs in my meat and poultry!
I worked in a pizza restaurant (now defunct, thank goodness) that had a rat problem. There was a hole in the wall in the kitchen, about a foot in diameter, that the rats used as a Rat Highway of sorts. Of course, it didn’t help that there was a large bucket of fermenting grease sitting right next to the hole. (I think our fryer got cleaned out ONCE in the year and a half that I worked there.)
A friend and I went to the local International House of Flattened Breakfast Food[sup]TM[/sup] at about 1 in the morning. We ordered said Flattened Breakfast Food[sup]TM[/sup] with some extra butter. The waitress forgot the butter at first, but upon being reminded, she brought the little paper cup to us. As soon as she set it down on the table, a roach proceded to tip the cup over and walk out from under it. Now, I ask you. This was a big roach. Was it actually on our waitress? Did it crawl from her sleeve and stowaway on our butter? I think so. We both screamed, got our food for free, but left without touching a bite of it.
At my last job, we used to go pick up lunch for everybody in the place, so large orders were very common and hard to check. We always tipped pretty well at the one restaurant that we went to, so we expected everything to be in order. The girl that worked next to me ordered an Oriental Chicken Salad. When she opened the styrofoam container, a pretty good sized grasshopper jumped out of the container and onto her face. That is probably the only time I had the opportunity to catch someone falling in a dead faint, but missed horribly. We caught the grasshopper, put him back in the container and took it back to the restaurant. Not only did the manager NOT apologize, but he said, “Oh, it’s fresh lettuce. We just got it from the produce farm. You have to expect things like that with fresh food.” Ummm. No? I would expect you to wash it and clean it, you turkey!
Right now I’m working in South Station, which is smack dab in the middle of The Big Dig, which has turned Boston into a big hole. It sent all the city’s rodents and insects flocking for shelter. The whole station is infested with roaches…we have to wash every single thing that sits out overnight, just in case unexpected visitors showed up scrounging for food. Supposedly before the new management took over, it wasn’t uncommon for a roach to crawl onto the cash register while the cashier was ringing cstomers up. Yuck!
I remember going to a Mexican restaurant once and when our orders arrived, the refried beans were a cold glob on which the cheese had not even started to melt. Ever the optimist, I took a bite (gag) and they tasted as bad as they looked–old and stale. I asked to see the manager. He came to our table–IN SHORTS–and when I told him that the beans were old, he informed me that they should be just fine–they had cooked them only the day before.
Now when I worked fast food, I seem to remember that you weren’t even supposed to keep cooked food around longer than hour or so at the VERY longest–can you imagine telling someone, “We just made those burgers yesterday!”?
My SO was happily munching coleslaw at Folks, then chomped down on a acrylic fingernail. A very long, elaborately painted fingernail with skin attached to it. He managed to crack a tooth on the thing, and after his discovery, was so grossed out he couldn’t eat at all for two days.
Yeah, he sued 'em.
Yeah, he won the case.
No, we don’t eat there anymore.
One of my former coworkers was a diabetic, and a dumb one at that. He shot up one time in the kitchen by the food. I almost kicked his ass. Imagine if that needle had gotten stuck in the food.
I get the willies just thinking about it.
Yes, I have washed dishes in a Chinese restaurant…
Ther is a little cafe on US 54 in Orogrande, NM. the place is sort of a local legend, but shall remain nameless. The owner has quite a collection of “antiques” scavenged from the area, and most of it still has the original dirt on it. If not, there is an inch thick coating of dust on it. I hope the kitchen is cleaner than the dining room, but somehow I doubt it.
When I was fifteen, my second job was at KFC (still known as Kentucky Fried Chicken back then).
We used to cook chicken on these big racks. Well, in the middle of the dinner rush, o rack of chicken fell on the floor as the cooks were removing it from the cooker.
Yes, they served it.
If any of you have ever worked fast food, you know how nasty the floor can get in the back.
Yes, I have worked in a kitchen, and that’s probably why I was so grossed out when the waitron tried to serve me a bagel that fell on the floor. No such thing as a “10-second rule” for me when I’m not familiar with the floor the food fell on. And once again, you Americans have completely grossed me out with your huge cockroach and rat stories. 
On an easter sunday we were on a trip and we stopped for breakfast at a diner in albany, “gateway diner”, they served us a plate of hashbrowns w/ a live cockroach on it. i left immediately, got several other patrons 2 also.
We have a local restaurant with a western theme, there’s a huge buffalo hide hanging on the wall that I always avoid sitting next to because it looks dusty. Once the people I was with wanted to sit there 'cause it’s secluded. We hadn’t been there 5 minutes before FLEAS were all over us!
Once bit into a hamburger with a whole tooth in it. The manger said I shouldn’t worry 'cause the tooth was way to big to be human, so it must be a cow tooth. Yep, that sure made me feel better.