Restaurant horror stories

Me thinks the OP is asking for horror stories from the back of the house, not as a customer.

On the mild side of horror, I worked in a kitchen when I was in between college and high school. The cooks would take half drunk glasses of wine that came back from tables being cleared and pour them into a pot that was used to make a marinade. I guess the theory was that whatever might have been associated with whoever drank out of the glass would be killed by the alcohol and subsequent cooking. I guess it was thrifty. I saw a lot of things dropped on the floor, picked up, brushed off with the hand and used.

My son worked as a runner one summer in high school at a very well known seafood place here in NYC. The stories he came back with had me in stitches. Funny sh*t. Better that you never know or think about it as a customer.

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Yeah, you’re right… but crap is crap, and if it originates from the back of the house, it is also presented to the customer. So I am not sure that comments from both do not apply here.

I worked in a place that served baskets of rolls with dinner. When the trays came back to the kitchen, we’d empty the leftover rolls back into the warmer. The topmost drawer of the warmer had the unused rolls in it: that’s what we used if we served someone we knew or we wanted a snack.

Salad was served in big wooden bowls. Quartered lettuce heads set atop mixed greens that filled the bowl. We reused the bottom stuff over and over. Sometimes we had to pick random stuff out of it before it was re-served.

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My first job as a 16 year old was in the deli half of a restaurant. The owner told me when the deviled eggs developed a crust to sprinkle some water on top, mush it around a bit with your fingers and sprinkle more paprika on top. After the third night of this nonsense I chunked them all in the trash. Same thing with chicken, ham, tuna salad. Add water and stir it up. To this day I’m suspicious of deli salads. The only one I trust is Kroger plain chicken salad because it’s a top seller. High turnover.

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Ah, yes, An affluent relative came to take me to lunch. There was a greasy spoon coffee shop across the street. She arrived in her full length black diamond mink coat. We sat in a booth with cracked vinyl imitation leather seats. She ordered the “double hot dog”. When it came, there were only three halves. She asked where the fourth was. I almost shouted, 'DON’T ASK!" But she already had, and in a minute or so it arrived. I didn’t want to know where it had been.

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I posted about a recent one.

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Yes, my intention was back of the house horror stories. There certainly is a lot of bad food out there, but I was hoping to hear from the back of the house people with things they had to do that they knew were wrong, but management forced them to do to keep their jobs.

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ick!

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Uff, if there’s anything that ups my angst it’s the sugar “marinara” sauce. One crapper doesn’t always mean death. I take my boy to Famous Dave’s on his B-day.

Two things come to mind immediately from my years as a waitress.

  1. We were instructed to take butter served along side of bread baskets to scoop it into a big bin for the chefs to use for omelets. Yes even butter that was clearly used.
  2. The owner liked coffee with “crunch” and would argue with us when we didn’t include grinds in the coffee. Gross!!! Nobody else on earth wants grinds in their coffee.

I’ll think of more…

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My comments in another thread inspired this one, so let me have at it. There are so many, and I will post them as they come to mind. Keep in mind this was a sub shop, so if I am referring to meats or cheeses, they are large blocks in cold cut form. All stories are within the last year.

  1. Routinely pieces of ham and other meats were dropped on the floor. Our manager always instructed us to “wash” them off in the hand sink, cover in paper towels, and then put back into the deli case. We were instructed to use them for rude customers. You’d know if something was dropped on the floor when you arrived on shift and were told, “Don’t eat the pepperoni today.”

  2. Turkeys were opened in the hand sink. Aside from seeing the amount of slime, gunk, and water come out of these packages of “all natural turkey”, opening them where people wash their hands is a huge violation. I stopped eating cold cut turkey for this reason.

  3. One time, we were so busy that a piece of ham dropped on the floor and was sitting in the sink for hours. Several employees washed their hands over the ham during this time and it was still placed back in the case.

  4. Our manager was an extreme penny-pincher who one time tried to limit our use of cloth towels. She tried to limit it to five per shift and always told us to “wipe your hands on your apron, that’s what it is for.” Imagine the bacteria build up all day. When watching The Bear last week, I heard a character say, “Don’t wipe your hands on your apron” and I laughed so hard that my BF thought I was having an attack of some kind.

  5. Hanging under the counter were towels that were used to wipe both the slicer and also our knives. While dipped in sanitizer solution at the beginning of the day, they were not swapped out. So yeah, the same towel wiping meat and cheese fragments, mayo, etc all day long. These towels magically disappeared the day we had our annual visit from the township health inspector.

  6. We had a separate knife for tuna subs. A good thought, I guess. However, this knife too was not wiped and it used to rest underneath our bacon warmer. It dawned on me one day that not only is the bacteria on this knife probably at record levels, but we were incubating it by placing it under a f*cking warmer! I mentioned this and it was met with a shoulder shrug.

  7. Retribution against rude customers was actively encouraged. Our manager always said, “You can’t spit in their food but you can lose the salt shaker.” You called in an order and were an asshole? Guess who’s getting 10 days worth of sodium sprinkled on their sub!

I have more, I’m sure.

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Dang. Makes me think twice about eating out.

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Could you tell us the general vicinity of this place…

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Ho-lee shiite ballz. Glad I was never a fan of deli turkey. That place oughta be shut down.

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Monmouth County, NJ.

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And my comments about turkey are not really specific to this place alone. Both jobs I’ve had that involved dealing with cold cut turkey were vomit-inducing, especially the latter place. It truly is 100% all natural, no antibiotics added, blah blah blah, but its still gross. The packaging says “In broth”. My ass. It is practically gelatin.

And I don’t know what it is that has trained people to feel a certain way about “healthy choices”. While the turkey did only have 1 gram of fat per serving, there was enough sodium to embalm someone. And even a half sized sub would still be at least four servings, according to the packaging.

Same with the breads. Whole wheat has more carbs and calories than white. And wraps have more carbs and calories than either of the breads. So you come in thinking, “I’m going to be healthy and have turkey on whole wheat!” and its actually kind of hysterical. People would order tuna for the same reason, thinking its healthier than cold cuts. Well, actually a tuna sub has more fat and calories than an Italian loaded with awful cold cuts because of, you guessed it, all the mayo mixed in. Even though calorie counts are posted, people do not read. And I haven’t even gotten to cheese yet.

My advice: get tuna because you want tuna, not because you think its better for you.

Anyway, I veered off course.

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Funny you say that. I’ll continue my chain:

  1. Ah yes, we finally got a visit from the town health inspector. I was giddy on the inside wondering how badly we would fail. You see, no opened products (meats, cheese, sauces, dressings, etc) were ever dated/labeled in any way. Our manager’s argument was that we went through product so fast that it was unnecessary. And while yes, stuff rarely sat longer than a day, sometimes during prep and rushing around, stuff gets moved around or pushed to the back and not rotated. So the inspector comes in, and he’s making comments, “No date on this”, “How old is that?”, “Why is x like this?”, “Your walk-in fridge is falling apart”, and on and on and on. The inspection comes to an end and after seeing all of that, he simply says that we have a hand-sink in the back with no paper towel dispenser above it and if we add one, we would pass. And then he just passed us anyway. It makes you wonder when a place actually does fail just how bad it truly must be!
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Ah. The dreaded health inspection. We were always very proud of the fact that our inspector would eat in our shop. The exterminator did too. In our case, the customers didn’t always understand that the exterminator usually was there to prevent infestation not get rid of one.

The bane of our existence was the grease trap. We were a small operation and sometimes only had a few knives, cutting boards and slicer parts that needed to be washed. But our lines tied in to the “high end” restaurant next door and so whatever got dumped there impacted us. We couldn’t always afford to have the trap professionally pumped so saved large plastic containers to do it ourselves. It was the WORST JOB EVER!!! We could tell it was not all our waste by what we were cleaning out. The whole setup was probably not up to code but we couldn’t afford to do anything abut it. Especially in January.

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I’ve mentioned this elsewhere and it was maybe both a “back-house” problem and a “whole-house” problem. We were eating in a Mexican restaurant and one customer requested habaneros in his steak fajitas. The cooks didn’t know what would happen, apparently, so they complied.

When they brought out his smoking cast iron fajita plate, the vapors from the habaneros eventually caused the entire restaurant, staff and customers alike, to vacate for a while so they could air the place out. They had a “vornado” big fan so it didn’t take but maybe 10 minutes.

Luckily this was before we had kids, in our party it was just me/wife/her parents. But there sure were a lot of cryin’ eyes out in the parking lot.

More along what you’re asking about, a favorite Middle-Eastern place of my son and I got shut down completely, based on one county inspection. I was curious and looked up that review. It was crazy across the board, that they had so many viols after their prior annuals being all 95-97% for many years.

Cold to-be-served foods at too warm. Hot-to-be served foods at too cool temp. Refrig temps way too warm. All kinds of infractions. No change in management during that time, so far as I could tell. They just suddenly went from A+ to crap in one annual review.

I don’t know if it was a new inspector suddenly laying the hammer down or what(*). But they got it all fixed within the 2-week shutdown.

(*) Speaking of the “new inspector” problem - in the Army at a new duty station I was suddenly told I needed to do heath inspections of a food facility that served civilians we were bringing in daily and serving lunch to. I followed the guidelines and nearly shut the place down. The manager was pretty pissed at me but I asked, what happens when you don’t follow these guidelines? I gave him a week while I looked for local alternatives and within a week they were at 100%. Our business was apparently 75%+ of his lunch revenue.

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Customers always used to ask why our tuna salad was so good. I didn’t want to tell them that their’s could be as good if they used tuna packed in oil and as much extra heavy mayo and salt as we did. It’s not the same when you use water packed tuna with light mayo and Mrs Dash.

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