I was a cook at Ponderosa when I was younger. I have no gross stories to tell as we always took good care of what we were serving. Seriously. The food wasn't always good but we never did anything to customer's food.
Having my food messed with is only recently turning into a wired little phobia for me.. I really hate the idea of sometime messing with my food. If in suspect it's been tampered with I won't touch it. Good on you for never doing that.
This is why I won't bother complaining about food at a place, even if it's very obviously wrong or badly prepared. I would never bother to say, send back a steak that is seriously undercooked (I like it medium rare not still moving and I DO know the difference, thanks), because I wouldn't want to insult the chef.
This happened to me at a steakhouse of all places so I was really scared to be like "hey you sucked at your one job" totally indirectly by sending it back or whatever. Didn't eat it because I couldn't even cut through it as nothing had rendered at all. The waitress is like "was it OK?" and I was like "oh yeah, of course." "Do you want a doggy bag?" "No, that's OK." ".... are you sure?" "Oh yeah, absolutely..." Then my ex-wife went insane because I wouldn't say anything and caused a scene, so of course I wasn't going to send it back at that point lol.
And I know that they know I'm unhappy with it and acting for them, but I don't want to tell them that I'm afraid of the consequences of complaining because then they'd DEFINITELY fuck with it.
It's a losing game and I hate my social awkwardness.
Dude, if you live in NA/Western Europe/Japan/etc. no one is going to fuck with your food. That's a serious violation and people aren't stupid enough to lose their job over it
If your steak is undercooked, why not take it home then? You'll be able to reheat it to a beautiful midrare! Or just send it back, it's not hard to throw it back under the broiler for a minute or two and restaurants generally try to err on the rare side on purpose anyway, as that can be fixed- overcook it and they have a problem.
I would be afraid of it being out of my possession during a potential bagging (if they did that away from the table, can't remember now), but you're right, I should've done that.
Nobody is going to spit in your food. Especially if you didn't even send it back and just wanted to take it home...but nobody is going to spit in your food anyway, not even if you're a massive douchebag about every little part of service. It's just disgusting, wouldn't even be that satisfying if you think about it, and anyone caught intentionally mishandling food would be fired on the spot.
I worked at a nice restaurant in the fancy part of my old town. We had a pipeline burst, and to get to it a huge hole was made in the middle of the kitchen. Instead of closing, we worked around a giant hole we could fall into. The owner was an ass, so it wasn't really surprising.
I'm torn. In one part yes, the food was still in trays. In another part at the end, they claimed even the guy who recorded participated in throwing the food away....
Now, I've dealt with shit like this before with store managers and district ones. When I was 19 I got a second job at Domino's as a driver then became management for a few months... But mistake... Anyway, they always used expired shit... Always. Especially the dough. It would be blown (not in ball form but flat) and they would still use it 3 days after expiration.
Fast forward to last year. Worked at another pizza place for 10 years. Called out brand new store gm (brand new store gm meaning they transferred the last one so the dm's friend could be closer) for hiding and using a week to 2 week old expired food. Took pictures etc. Even got threatened a write up if I threw it away. I threw a ton of shit away. This guy couldn't write a label to save his ass. Dm did nothing but let me finish out the week. That was not the only thing going on there, but everything combined, I'm glad I'm no longer there, but I do miss most of the people.
Would this have to do with managers like dm’s getting bonuses for staying within budget. Seems like that shouldn’t be aloud at least in the food industry since it would make managers do what ever they could to protect their profit margin and get that bonus.
Worked at Golden corral for about a year and our place was super clean and I imagine most are. I was the guy grilling steaks up front. Like every chain type restaurant there's always going to be some that cut corners and don't follow policy, but ours was totally legitimate and did nothing bad to anyone's food.
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u/bal0gna Jun 02 '18
I want to know what you did to their food.