Sorry to hear that, but yeah. There are certain Broadway Pizza locales that I do not frequent. They are a franchise, not a true chain so the quality varies from place to place. Irritating, but then, all I get there is the pizza.
I’ve had food poisoning twice. Once it was a local, fancy supermarket chicken salad at a place that bragged about their homemade meat salads. Used to be that they had reason to brag. This time the homemade mayonnaise tried to kill me. As soon as I bit into the sandwich, I knew it was trouble. I tried to spit it all out but wasn’t successful until two hours later when I went on the surprise quick weight-loss plan.
A second bad experience was a scallop appetizer at a seafood restaurant in Monterey, CA near the Aquarium. Less than five minutes after eating it, I felt like I was in trouble. I tried to sick up, but it’s something I can’t do deliberately. After that, I felt okay. Until the next day when I got out to my post at Laguna Seca Raceway. So I trudged up the hill to the plastic outhouse and barely made it there in time. Whew! I did not disgrace myself. Why are overalls such a pain to remove when you are in a hurry? 
I still love scallops. It took me a while to start trusting mayonnaise again.
Depends on how you define a restaurant. If you include my high school cafeteria, then the pizza they served was the worst thing I’ve ever had at a restaurant. It was oily. The cheese was slimy and had the consistency of snot. The crust was soggy. The topping was supposedly pepperoni, but looked like small meat colored cubes that tasted like rubbery salt. Nastiest stuff ever. In an actual restaurant it was sushi at a local Japanese restaurant. They put so much wasabi (the fake stuff, not real horseradish) in it that it tasted like wasabi with just barely a hint of rice and fish. Even at that, that pizza I remember from high school was at least 10 times nastier.
In my unprofessional opinion, but as a fanatical lover of great sushi, that’s likely a sign of a bad sushi restaurant, or at best, perhaps an OK sushi restaurant that let substandard sea urchin get on their menu.
I’m generally revolted by a lot of weird seafood, but I’ll eat anything at a really good sushi restaurant where the chef is obviously expert and the presentation and flavours are superb. In my experience, sea urchin is most often served in a roll, unlike the rest of the sushi which is almost invariably in the nigiri style. Which I believe allows them to mix it with appropriate ingredients in the roll. But sometimes when my favourite sushi place has what they judge to be really superb sea urchin, they’ll serve it nigiri style, with just the right amount of wasabi underpinning it on a hand-molded bit of rice, and brushed only with soy sauce. The other thing I enjoy at my fave sushi bar that I otherwise wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot barge pole is eel, which I think is blowtorch seared (not raw) and topped with a deeply flavourful thick dark sauce.
When I went to high school, the food was the green beans with catfood tasting meatloaf, gummy shells with sauce, occasional appallingly bad pizza. All cooked right there in the school. And all of it was terrible. (and it was a small village full of Eye-Talianos who should have been better cooks!). When I had late lunch, I only got 20 minutes, and everything was gone except jello and lettuce wedges! So I guess I was lucky, lol.
I found that the fish in Budapest was fantastic. Apparently they catch it in Lake Balaton, so it’s pretty fresh. And it’s a welcome change from the endless variations on gulyas/porkolt/paprikash that everything else in Hungary seems to be. Not that it’s bad, but there was definitely a sort of paprika-centric character to a lot of dishes there.
I can believe it. I once had barbecue in Belton, TX that was up there for the worst I’ve ever had. Tasted like it had been baked in the oven with barbecue sauce on it, then kept in a crockpot. Very little smoke flavor, really watery, not very flavorful overall. It was bad. And in Central Texas, no less. I can’t imagine how that catering outfit stayed in business with such bad barbecue- there’s plenty of competition around there.
I can believe that there are terrible Mexican/Tex-Mex places out there too, although I don’t understand how they stay in business.
Why is that? I’ve had Chinese food in the UK, the US and Hungary, and strangely it was pretty much the same in all three. I was totally expecting it to be different, and that I’d get a Anglo-Chinese spin on traditional Chinese dishes, or a Hungaro-Chinese spin on them. But nope, they were nearly identical to the bog-standard US Chinese places. Not even like the more authentic ones either.
That’s funny. Five plus years there and I’ve eaten fish maybe a couple dozen times. It was fine, especially for a landlocked country surrounded by landlocked countries. The freshwater fish was decent. I enjoyed the zander/pike-perch whatever it was called. And the fish soups were quite tasty, but they also had that paprika-onion base that a lot of Hungarian food has. The river fish from the Tisza were quite nice, too.
I’m sure I’ve had some bad school cafeteria meals, but the only one I can remember is that in elementary school, every 2 weeks on Wednesday they had hamburgers. Which were just a slice of ham between two slices of bread. They could have been worse had they had mayo or other stuff on it, but it sticks in my memory because it was tolerable enough to actually eat, but bad enough that it is memorable as false advertising.
That is a sad memory. It sounds like some of the sandwiches I was allowed to make for my school lunch because allergies. Can I eat a single slice of bologna and margarine on white bread for five days a week? I did throughout elementary school. Then I started earning money by babysitting, which allowed me to occasionally buy a school lunch. It was an improvement.
I have a similar false advertising story.
My high school had 3 lunch lines that lead to different things (presumably to relieve congestion). There was the standard “Different meal a day” line, there was a pizza line (which at least to me seemed to serve all the pizzas that nobody had bought the previous day at local pizza places, as they tasted like day old pizza warmed over) and a “nacho” line. The “nachos” were literally potato wedges served with those cheap single serving nacho cheese cups you find at supermarkets. Literally the only reason you’d ever go to the nacho line was because if the main lunch line was 10 minutes long and you needed to eat quickly because you wanted to hang with friends who brought their own lunches, as that line had maybe 4 people in it at a time max?
The mention of horrible high school cafeterias reminded me of one place I used to work. There was a cafeteria that served quite a large office building. The first few times I went there I thought I just had bad luck with my choices, but it soon became clear that it was pretty uniformly awful. I remember in the early days thinking it was nice that they had curried chicken salad, because my previous experience with the stuff was from an upscale deli that had absolutely fantastic chicken salads – dill chicken salad, curried chicken salad, and curried mango with cashew chicken salad – all wonderful. Not this stuff. It was like dried-out chicken sprinkled with curry and rehydrated with Miracle Whip. Another time I had a made-to-order sandwich. By that time I had low expectations but remember thinking, with the huge food volume that this place processes, at least the bread will be fresh. The bread was stale.
The cafeteria was so bad that after a while, by order of management, the whole place was completely revamped, and I imagine some sackings took place. The new, improved cafeteria was actually not too bad, and the best thing about it was that they allowed in a few major fast-food vendors who operated concession kiosks in competition with the in-house cafeteria. So you could get, for instance, pretty decent pizza.
A man I dated in college loved to tell the story about when he went to a “genuine” Chinese restaurant, and decided that for 99 cents, he would order an appetizer he’d never had before, and that was fish lips. That’s correct, fish lips. They brought out a platter of these THINGS that he said looked and tasted like gelatinous rubber bands, but it was worth 99 cents (in the 1980s) to say he’d tried fish lips.
Reminds me of my first time going to a Korean restaurant. I bought a Groupon (remember Groupon?) for $20 worth of food for $10 at a place in Tacoma’s Korean neighborhood, because it was close to where I worked at the time, and went in without having seen a menu. The menu was written in Korean first with poor English translations and I wasn’t familiar with anything on the menu. I ordered what I now know is a dolsot bibimbap (the menu called it “steamed rice with vegetable and assorted seafood in a stone pot”), and the “assorted seafood” wound up consisting of fish eggs, eel, and octopus tentacles. One of the bancheon they served alongside it was a plate of small fried anchovies that I initially thought was some kind of vegetable until I realized they had eyes.
Didn’t care much for the octopus, but overall it was tasty. I learned to order the bibimbap with beef the next time I went there, though.
I’ve had Swedish fish lips. Not bad.
I once worked in a place that had a cafeteria like that. Large building, cafeteria in the basement. I soon learned that the daily special was anything but special, as more often than not, it was unidentifiable glop.
I did find that the soup and sandwich deal was perfectly fine for lunch. True, the sandwiches were made off-premises and brought in, and the soup was invariably Campbell’s, but those were much more edible and tasty (and recognizeable) than a plate of glop.
This “Foxtrot” comic is a classic. At the time, I worked with a man whose wife was a high school cafeteria worker, so they could totally relate (although that school’s food wasn’t THAT bad).
On the other hand, recognizable glop can be delicious.
Unless it is coloured blue. Then people will not eat it.
I’d also add Indian food for that too. Imagine normal Indian food. Then put that Indian food into a bucket of salt and serve. Well, that was my experience of one in Hildesheim, but I’d normally never go to such a place except some Brits who didn’t go back to the UK craved a curry.
You’ve just reminded me of Currywurst, as experienced from Berlin street carts at least. Simply dire, and aptly named.