Restaurant horror stories

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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I wish commercial grade mayo were readily available for private households. It makes a huge diff.

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(( Oh my…oh my oh my…what do I do? Do I actually share some of the things I have seen, experienced or actually done in my life? I guess it’s alright, I mean that’s why I used an alias when I signed up here, nobody knows it’s really me, so I guess I can share in safety ))

OK a few comments from experience, and by experience, I mean I have literally spent every year of my 52 years on this planet with some restaurant affiliation. I was actually conceived and born into the “business” at my father’s diner in Elizabeth NJ. His diner was located very close to Newark Airport and his client base, mostly truckers, was in the shadows of all the warehouses etc. that surround airports. It was a very dirty, grimy area (across the street was our competitor a Diner that also housed a strip club in the back, NO JOKE)

Rats were a problem; well, they were a problem if you were a 5-year-old kid playing around your father’s diner. I actually would feed them, I had no idea what “rats” were, there were just so many of them I figured they were like squirrels. I distinctly remember a rat running out from behind the counter where the flat top grill was and ran out into the “dining” area and the cook dropped his spatula and ran from behind the line and stomped the rat to death in front of every trucker in the place. Nobody batted an eye, nor dropped a spoon. Just business as usual at a greasy spoon diner.

My very first job was scraping chewed gum off the floor and from under the counter. Since I was only 5-ish at the time, I was the perfect height. The tool(s) for my trade, a kitchen spatula of course. (I’m sure it was washed…well I’m fairly sure) It was also at an early age I learned some entrepreneurial skills; you see I was paid $. 25 for each piece of gum I scraped up. I noticed a pack of gum from the vending machine cost $. 25 and contained 5 slices of gum. So, when nobody was around, I would take
$ .25 from my earnings, buy a pack of gum, chew it and stick it around the place so the following day I would get a minimum of $ 1.00 profit.

Later in life (you know when I was 8) my family purchased a full-service sit-down tablecloth “formal dining” restaurant. This was the 70’s and 80’s there were NO DUI laws and when people went out to dine, they went out to dine. 8pm reservations were not being flipped, those were the latest reservations because the entertainment started at 9pm and any table seated at 9pm were staying till 3am when we closed. (or later, nobody ever really checked when you closed. Routinely the party would go on till 4-5am with a limited crowd of regulars)

It was here and later in life that I really started to see things for what they are in the restaurant business.

@angela you are 110% correct about used butter being recycled. Either left over butter is scraped into a bucket and reused as “cooking butter” or melted and molded for re-use by customers. Not being sarcastic but you know when you go to a restaurant, and they have “fancy” butter in the shape of a rose etc., that’s how they re-use butter. They will melt used butter, pour it into molds, freeze and use tomorrow as rose butter patties. (or many other uses)

Same with pickles as I’ve previously mentioned. Cole slaw if it looks uneaten can go back int he container - also lemon wedges. Dear god if you are ever served a lemon in a yellow netting (they say to catch the pits) take the netting off and inspect the lemon. 50% of the time restaurants who use the netting are re-using lemons, the netting hides the fact the lemon has be previously squeezed.

ALL CONDIMENTS - ketchup - steak sauce anything that is served in a bottle is of UNKNOWN age or origins. 75 % of restaurant “marry” their condiments at the end of a shift. (Have 1 bottle of ketchup that is half empty? Take the lid off and stick it upside down on another half empty bottle to empty the contents. (The bottle you are emptying has probably been re-filled a dozen times before this marriage)
So, all condiments in restaurants are of completely unknown origins or dates. They are combined and mixed so many times there could be ketchup in bottles from the Nixon administration still in circulation.

@gcaggiano As he mentioned food handling is a problem everywhere. Nobody (rarely) washes their hands between handling meat vs. vegetables’. Knifes are not cleaned between uses, if anything they are swiped against those aprons Greg spoke of. In many kitchens there is a pot of boiling water behind the line. Pasta is half cooked in advance/prepped. It’s kept damp in the fridge and pre-portioned and just picked out of the fridge and dropped into the constant pot of boiling water to finish cooking to be served piping hot. Do you know what else that piping hot pot of boiling water is used for all night?

Cleaning knives. The most common way a cook will “sanitize” his knife behind a line is to drop it into the pot of boiling water for a few seconds to “sanitize” it. Cutting a piece of fish but only have your “red meat knife” just cut the fish, drop the knife in the boiling pot for 10 seconds, good as new!!

I worked at two chain restaurants in my life, I cooked at both and served at one as well. One was Ponderosa Steak House (Toms River Mall) and Chi-Chi’s Woodbridge NJ. I can honestly say the sanitary conditions of the chains were far worse than independent restaurants. In independent restaurant corners are certain cut, but generally it’s out of “small business” operations and budgets. They simply do not have the infostructure to provide a thorough sanitation process. Chains do have every single kind of regulation possible, and everyone just ignores them.

As stated in an independent restaurant people cut corners, but most are still adults and “within reason” in chains it’s mostly young people who just don’t give a f#ck. Chi-Chi’s the cooks would routinely smoke in the walk-in box, and they would "hide’ the evidence of their smoking somewhere in there.
At Ponderosa the kitchen was open, people could look right in, we used to do gross things just to see if we could prompt a complaint. We would stand behind the line, watching customers walk by with their trays etc. and we would stand there with our spatulas secured under our armpits waiting for a customer to react when we used it to flip a steak.

We would routinely put “things” in the fryers to see how they would hold up. I don’t know if you can contaminate cooking oil with plastics, but if you can, we might have poisoned someone. By things I mean someone brought a plastic action figure, we dropped it in the frier. A hairbrush, we dropped it in the fryer, you name it we tried to fry it. Have you ever watched the show; “How things are made” well I could have hosted; “How things are fried”.

I am not going to say what kind of restaurant it was so I can’t be called racist or anything for saying a specific ethnicity, however I was looking at a restaurant for sale at one time, and I was questioning their “numbers”. They were claiming to be making VERY good margins and I was questioning how they were able to make the margins they do, the answer I received was this: " you don’t understand, in your restaurant your kitchen has 5 garbage cans, ours have 1".

Lastly at my family’s restaurant when I was a kid, we were hosting a wedding. Towards the end of the night as we were preparing the wedding cake to bring out, someone dropped it in the kitchen. The entire 3 tier cake on the floor. There was no way to salvage it so we saved the pieces we could, then we went into our freezer. (we use to keep Pepperidge Farm frozen cakes for birthdays) the chef took out those cakes cut them to fit the remaining wedding cake, then took whip cream and emptied 5 bottles trying to recreate the icing etc. We went out to the DJ and said: “skip the bride cuts the cake stuff and just announce its cake time” we turned the lights down low, put the cake on a wheeled service cart and quickly paraded it around the room before bringing it back to the kitchen and servings everyone Pepperidge Farm frozen cake as the wedding cake. Nobody said a thing!

(Gratuitous pic of me in front of my father’s aforementioned diner circa 1978-ish)
Meadows

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Hi Natascha, how does the commercial grade mayo differ from store-bought or home-made? Offhand, I don’t think I’ve ever tried commercial stuff by itself (like licking a spoon of it so I could taste just the mayo) so I wouldn’t know it if it bit me.

I bet you can get it on line though I’m sure it probably only comes in commercial sized jars.

Therein lies the problem. Much as I love mayo, there’s only so much a person can use on a daily basis :wink:

Not @linguafood but can answer. Most restaurants use extra heavy mayo. It has extra egg yolks so it thicker and thus heavier.

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I think it contains more egg yolks, making for a richer product (?). I’m sure the restaurant biz peeps in the thread can answer this.

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Thanks and thanks also @MsBean. I think Duke’s claims their distinction is also extra egg yolks.

My fave.

I’m pretty sure my husband’s office gets delivery from one of these locations. 50/50 shot.

ps the tuna sub is popular.

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The condiments being consolidated: I was consolidating ketchups one night and one of the bottles exploded everywhere as I twisted the cap off. Guess it’s lucky that it wasn’t a customer. But to this day, I am very suspicious of all condiments sitting on the table. I prefer when they just give me a small amount in a little container thing.

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Not really a horror story but there is one average-type market/catering place that you all know where, in my personal experience, they do not tare the containers when they package the prepared food.

I saw the weights and measures guy at the county fair and I had to go tell him about it (something to do when you’re retired). He said, ‘you know, you’re the 3rd or 4th person to tell me that’. He was due to visit them in the coming week, but he told me that they have to wear a uniform when they inspect and that kind of ruins it in terms of catching them cheating.

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Interesting about the Dukes. I’m no longer in the biz so I don’t have any extra heavy mayo handy to do a comparison. I originally tried Dukes because so many folks on HO were fans. At that time I was trying to limit my sugar intake and it’s sugar free without chemical substitutes. Now I use it because it tastes good.

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I dunno if I can read this thread if I want to continue to eat out. :pensive:

Thank goodness I’m not a fan of deli meat and sandwiches to start, but this reminds me of all the buzz when Anthony Bourdain’s book first came out. I think he validated some of these recycling of certain foods. In the same vein, but not my story - a coworker from many jobs ago once told me that she had travelled to Russia for a school trip. While walking to the restroom at a restaurant, she happened to pass by the kitchen and could see one of the waiters was putting together a plate with some of the uneaten, leftover food from another patron’s plate. :woozy_face: I’m sure there are many examples of this elsewhere too.

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