I wouldn’t recommend this. Even if the food is bad, not everyone will have the same reaction to it. It might very well be bad and he’d manage to gulp it down with no immediate affects. Just refuse to pay him.
Gonna list the name of this place? I don’t want to vomit in the parking lot!
Wait a second. The chef said he would knock off the cost of the dish, so what’s the problem? I also see no reason to accept the OP’s melodramatics at face value. I worked in restaurants a long time and saw more than one freeloader trying to scam free meals by saying perfectly good food was bad. The OP is obligated to pay for what he did eat.
And threw back up?
I think the idea is that the chef is still going to charge the customer for the other food that he ate there; food that the customer has vomited up in the parking lot because of the bad food.
If I go to Burger King and order a drink, fries and a burger and the fries are bad and make me vomit up my burger and drink, I’m not going to pay for any of it, even if only the fries were bad. Fuck that.
Edit: Bosstone beat me to it.
There are other things that make people throw up besides what they just ate. Maybe he had eleven or twelve margaritas. Maybe he was sick from something else.
Food poisoning doesn’t happen instantly. It takes a day or so.
I don’t know what happened, but I’m just saying my hard life experience in the restaurant biz taught me that it is entirely possible for customers to be either mistaken or full of shit. I’m not going to just take it as a given that this restaurant was wrong or that the meat was bad. It’s easy to blame the thing you just ate – post hoc ergo propter hoc – but that doesn’t always make it true.
And just as a general FYI to the thread at large – Most places aren’t going to quake in fear if you threaten to call the Health Department. The Health Department generally isn’t going to do anything because of one complaint. If they get a pattern, they may come check some temperatures and dates, but they’re not going to come running because some guy says he threw up in the parking lot.
I and my wife got food poisoning in a high class restaurant from bad clams. It was horrible. It also took a day before it showed. We bitched to the restaurant, but not immediately because we were too sick to deal with it. We went to a clinic and had proof. The restaurant manager denied it was his food, but it was the only food my wife and i shared. We went above him and talked to the main office. I believe he got canned. I felt badly, but all he to do was the right thing.
And food theoretically takes anywhere from several hours to a couple of days to fully traverse the digestive system, but I can trigger a pretty juicy BM on command by eating a particular spicy dish at a local restaurant. So I’m skeptical that food can’t affect someone almost immediately.
I doubt one bite though is going to give you food poisoning, which seemed to be the premise in the OP.
If you go to a restaurant, order three courses, and claim that one was “bad,” understand that “bad” has two meanings, and two different appropriate responses.
If “bad” means spoiled, rotten, contaminated, etc, then the appropriate response is to comp the guest’s entire meal. I would not comp the entire table unless the party was still not satisfied with my apology and reactions.
If “bad” means unpalatable, flavorless, unsatisfying, etc, then I would only comp that one dish. Just because you didn’t like something doesn’t mean you get the meal for free. I’m only giving you that dish for free because you are putting up a fuss about it.
But what I do with the guest’s check in either situation is only part of the story. In the first case, I am going to personally check the cook’s station to see if the product we are serving is indeed spoiled. In my restaurant, I have over 200 prep items to keep track of, and its not uncommon for a spoiled item to slip through the cracks. I rely on my cooks to watch out for that kind of thing, and I expect them to bring spoiled food to my attention. If the food is spoiled, or even questionable, then I will take full responsibility and apologize to the guest, and of course discipline the cook appropriately.
In the second case, I’m still going to inspect the food. Just because one person didn’t like something doesn’t mean others won’t, but I’m going to make my own judgment and decide if I should keep serving it. If a second guest complains about it, clearly I messed up somewhere, and the offending item will be 86’ed for the evening, unless I can correct the problem immediately.
Regardless of how I personally would react in either situation, consciously selling spoiled food is disgraceful, unethical, dangerous, and illegal. Any chef willingly doing so, and especially the one mentioned in the OP, is worth less than the cost of his toque.
Well, if you’re going to alter the premise, why the hell bother responding? The hypothetical is that the food did cause you to get so sick as to throw up.
As for restaurants: the whole thing is that the business is inherently in a position of power, and individual people have to fight to take that power back. No matter how often you’ve been scammed, all it takes is treating one non-scammer as a scammer as a scammer to piss them off enough to try to retaliate.
You don’t want to take the customer’s word? Fine. But check the food yourself. Do not automatically take the chef’s side.
It doesn’t have to be food poisoning to make you throw up. I once threw up at an airport because I saw a guy spit a loogie into a cup [of loogies]. Something can be so gross that it makes you vomit.
It seemed to me like it was a rhetorical hypothetical.
I’m not taking anybody’s side. That is my whole point. I’m not just automatically going to take this customer’s story at face value. It is possible that this chef intentionally served bad meat, but in my experience, it would be highly unlikely. In all my years in that business, I never saw that done. It would be suicide for the establishment and the career of the chef. Nothing is impossible, but I find it very implausible.
The OP stated the meat tasted rank, causing him to vomit. Did either of you read it?
I’m not going to automatically believe that you worked in the business. Just because you state you did I don’t see any reason to take your claim at face value.
I read it – but it could have been an instant reaction to the taste. Hell, I’ve SMELLED things that automatically made me gag. Didn’t mean they were bad.
As the OP stated, this is a hypothetical.
This is exactly what he is saying. The rank taste made him vomit. Just like if you glugged down a glass of spoiled milk and immediately vomited it up. Nowhere does he say he developed a case of food poisoning.
Oh yeah? Well I don’t see any reason to believe that you don’t actually believe that he worked in the business. I’m not going to take this at face value. 
In any event I don’t think the OP should have had to pay for any of it either.
Maybe the customer is full of it, but isn’t it still better business to just comp their meal and let them go away reasonably happy? As someone up-thread suggested, most restaurants can afford to give away the occasional free meal.
Not after his time in the parking lot he’s not.