Bad Restaurant Experience
 

Another thread by Phrozen Lol

I think this could be an entertaining/funny conversation.

Have you had a bad experience at a restaurant? Know anyone who has? Do you send the food back if it’s not right, or do you just eat it thinking if you send it back, you might piss off the person making your food?

In 1974 I ate a plate of strawberry pancakes & heavy syrup that had a small but gross, crusty old pancake&syrup leftover spot, including a dead fly, UNDERNEATH the "fresh" pancakes, WHICH I didn't find UNTIL I was almost finished with my "fresh" cakes.

Yum, dirt AND extra protein. Not!

Apparently, it just wasn't the dishwasher's day.

They wanted to give me a complementary new plate of cakes, but I was understandably no longer hungry.

Another time, the same restaurant employed a waitress who left her job just after taking our order. Just quit, didnt say goodbye or even put in the orders of four tables. Since our table made a pretty large order, we sat a good 30 minutes without complaint . Unfortunately there were NO OTHER WAITRESSES in the restaurant during that time, so when we went in back to inquire only the cook, a dishwasher and a manager were there. Oops, they'd been too busy in back to notice no orders were coming thru plus their waitress had quit.

Hungry, that time we left hungry and I think we never went back.

^^^ The pancake story was so gross.

I have two stories. One of my coworkers told me a news story about a fast food worker who put his pubic hairs in a rude customer’s food. Apparently, the fast food worker did jail time for it or something? It happened in New York.

And then the same coworker told me she’ll never eat at Taco Bell again because she went to one where they weren’t wearing gloves while making the food.

When I’m in a restaurant, I generally never send my food back if it’s wrong. Even if it’s not what I ordered, I just don’t feel comfortable sending it back because I don’t know what kind of day the server or preparer might be having lol. If it has mayonnaise on it, ewwww! — then I don’t know what I’ll do at that point.

As a diner, or as a waitress? So many tales....!

Oh snap.. you’ve got both waitress and diner stories? Then you’ve really gotta post. 3-2-1 go! Lol

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Looking at this thread, I was somehow reminded of a post I remember allllll the way back from 2008. Tippiechick told us a story about how a waitress snatched a plate of crab legs from her pregnant hands. LOL

http://www.greekchat.com/gcforums/sh...gs#post1746973

.

An amusing one from my childhood:

I was on vacation with my parents, and we went to our first Waffle House. My mother asked the waitress if they served Egg Beaters, to which the young waitress replied, "Oh, no, Ma'am! We put them in the blender like everything else!"

And more recently:

About two years ago, we went out with three other couples to a restaurant in Valparaiso, near the school. It wasn't very crowded. The server was going around the table, asking everyone for their order. When he came to Linda, she described exactly what I was going to order, so when he came to me, I said, "I'll have what she's having!"

i doubt that I'll ever get the chance to say that again!

Y'all are going to think I'm out of my mind, because the restaurant in question is a New Orleans stalwart. It did manage to redeem itself, but it took 35+ years.

The restaurant: Commander's Palace.

When I was 8, my parents and I (who lived in New York) visited New Orleans. We went to dinner at Commander's. When I was a kid, I was super noise sensitive, and Commander's is noisy. So my parents proceeded to put away two martinis each, a bottle of wine, and a couple of rounds of after-dinner drinks. I was sitting there in tears. I begged my parents to let me step outside for a few minutes to get away from the noise - and they wouldn't let me. I asked them if one of them would step outside with me for a few - nope. (It's not like they couldn't have taken their drink outside with them!) They didn't care how I was doing, because they were plastered. I could understand their reluctance to let me step outside if we were in the French Quarter, but Commander's is in the Garden District, which is mostly residential. I swore then and there that I would never step foot in Commander's again as long as I lived.

Fast forward 35+ years. I moved to New Orleans, and I stuck to my guns about Commander's. Until ... one of my best friends wanted to take me to a three-martini lunch, and the only one she could find was at Commander's. (You can get up to 3 martinis for 25 cents apiece.) So we went and had an awesome lunch! Not only am I less noise sensitive now, but it's easier to deal with the ambient noise when you can actually drink alcohol. Plus, their turtle soup...!

There are two that stick out in my mind.

The first one was more recent...and it involves a Waffle House. I will be the first to admit that Waffle House and Taco Bell are sort of my guilty pleasures. I was off from work during the week and decided to go do some shopping about an hour from where I live, and I knew there was a waffle house in the city I was going to shop. So I stop there for a late breakfast before I shop. I had finished eating the staff was nice and listening to their conversations was sort of making me chuckle inside. Well I'll be damned if just as I push away from the counter I see a ROACH!!!! I didn't say anything to staff, but I certainly posted it on one of those review sites. If I had known how to contact that local health dept I would have done that too.

Second was further back but sticks out in my mind for its bad service overall and rude staff. There's a cheese place that is fairly popular they sell all sorts of cheeses and they have a small restaurant as well where you can get grilled cheese and a few other things. A friend of mine wanted to meet for lunch and her 9 year old was coming too, and asked if we could sit outside and I could bring my dog. No problem. At this point the dog was around the same age as the child, so I figured the dog would be pretty easy to handle. Well as we were chatting not really keeping to much track of time for our food to come, the dog is getting restless (the weather was mild but not hot at all). And my dog starts pacing and whining as time ticks away. One of the wait staff offers up some bread to keep my dog occupied (ok that's where the niceness ends).

Probably 10-15 minutes later mind you at this point its been about 30 minutes since we ordered food. The manager comes by and tells me that she's getting complaints from other customers that my dog is being disruptive, and the manager was a bit snippy about it too. I was a bit shocked so my friend jumps in and proceeds to tell the manager in a firm way that we've been waiting for at least 30+ minutes for our food, and perhaps if the food came out sooner we could eat and all of be on our way. I told my friend I was sorry, she said the dog wasn't bugging her at all. The managers attitude was what got her upset. I offered to just get food to go and my friend insisted we sit there and enjoy our meal at a normal pace. Mind you my dog was whining, she wasn't going up to people or jumping on tables, she was pacing near me and whining. And yes the restaurant also got a bad review when I got home while the food was good but not blow your socks off good, the service noooo! I never went there again even when one of my sorority sisters planned a dinner out at that place. I was like nope, not going.

Bad food is one thing, bad service, I won't tolerate. Especially as I grew up working in the restaurant world.

One time at a Peter Piper Pizza just as we sat down to eat a roach came running across the table. I wasn't sure if it came out of the box or from the table. We left.

:eek:

I saw an albino cockroach at a TGI Fridays once. Unbelievable. They should have shut that place down. Albino roaches? Lol

Back when youngsters carried a dime in their shoe incase they needed to make a call from a payphone, I walked into the popular local pizza joint. As I knelt down to remove a dime from my shoe to make a payphone call a roach crawled from under the store's floorboards next to my shoe and proceeded up the wall, eventually crawling behind the payphone. Had to continue making my call, as that was the only payphone I knew of in that area.

I'd never walked into or eaten at that pizza place before, and never ever ate there despite the fact they were open 35 additional years after that event.

I love traditional southern cooking and was excited to try a new restaurant that had a great-sounding southern-inspired menu. My friend and I both ordered vegetable plates. We thought they were pricey at $12 bucks, but whatever.


The food was good but when we got the bill each veggie plate was $16+. When I asked someone (the owner, in fact) about this, she told me there was an upcharge on certain vegetables. Actually, most of them. (And this was not mentioned on the menu). The only options that didn't carry the upcharge were mashed potatoes, grits, rice ... all the white starchy dishes.



Anything that was green or yellow or orange, ca-ching!

Omg Waffle House was our big thing in the military. We would look forward to it all year because there aren’t any where we live.

Unfortunately…the sanitation in them is usually questionable at best. The one in Harrisburg was overrun by flies the last time I attempted to stop there. That was my last WH visit. Like, they had actual dangling fly strips by the counter. I just turned around and left.

Honorable mention for that time I saw a roach crawl across the table at a Dennys…right after they delivered my food, too. I ordered some giant breakfast and couldn’t eat one bite.

Hell to the NAW!!!! Lmao!!!! This is effing, crazy nasty! You guys gotta see this!
https://youtu.be/qG9i22OaAbM

Wait… did they seriously offer her two value meals?

And $500. Then doubled it when she declined Lol! How does a food-service company like Micky D’s offer a value meal in exchange for mucus in a customer’s coffee? Sorry for the inconvenience, here’s a couple of value meals. Wtf?

Lol @ happy meal. It was a value meal they offered her. Happy meals are for kids.

😂 my bad. I don’t eat fast food so it all runs together to me.

I was the group leader for the English Court at the Texas Renaissance Festival (they did away with courts this year; Henry VIII and I will still be there!). After casting every year, we would meet for a celebratory dinner in an English/British themed restaurant or pub. We decided to go to the Hobbit Cafe in Houston. I made the group reservation 2 weeks in advance. The day before they called to confirm; I did so, no problem. They called again the day of; I confirmed. When I arrived ( a little early because that is just how I roll), they informed me that they could not do individual checks. No problem; as members came in, I told them, in case they needed to get cash from an ATM. We waited, and then a manager came over and asked to speak to me. He proceeded to lecture me on how to behave, and that they were short-staffed, and basically light into me. I hasten to add we were not loud, we were not rude, we were quietly waiting for our table. When I started to say I understood, he shouted "NO! You do not.", totally discounting the idea that I might have any experience in the industry. Meanwhile rowdy Astros fans were coming in and being seated. If you knew me, you'd know how absolutely ridiculous the idea that I don't know how to behave in a restaurant is (and it's not like a hamburger place is fine dining). SO - we conferenced, and decided that we wouldn't be giving them our custom. We went to Grace's, which although they have a stated policy of no individual checks, were more than happy to do it for us, and the food was FABULOUS. If you are in Houston, go to Grace's! https://gracesonkirby.com/

Glad you brought up McDonalds Restaurants. Anyone else recall the free-for-all Bad Restaurant Day that was McDonalds very first day of their very first TeenyBeany Happy Meal promotion?

Customers were ordering, then quickly throwing away, perfectly good Happy Meal food for the sake of greedily grabbing the Teeny Beany Toy and rapidly returning to the order lines for moremoremore Meals/Beanys.

Even driving into/near a McDonalds driveway entrance that day was an experience. And on TeenyBeany Day One, unfortunately, my Bank shared ONE ENTRANCE PATH FOR CARS with a McDonalds BUT they had two seperate parking lots.

At the McDonalds, too many customers in lines snaking outside the restaurant doors blocked car drive-in paths and mobbed any car that managed to squeeze thru, furiously knocking on its windows while screaming, "I NEED a Patty Platypus!!! Who has a Pinky Flamingo Bird??? Who wants to TRADE?!?!"

One frantic TeenyBeany customer not only knocked on my window while screaming, but followed my car to my parking spot AT THE BANK NEXT TO THE MCDONALDS while continuing to complain about her TeenyBeany Trade drama/dilemma. As I exited my car to go into the bank, she proceeded to yell at me for NOT having a TeenyBeany to trade and for NOT going into the McDonalds!

I may or may not have a bin of teeny beanies... I did eat the food though, and my kids did too.

Those Teeny Beany people scared the snot out of me. Of course, we had absolutely insane people going for the regular-sized ones too. We collected some Beanies but the psychos ruined that for most people.

Y’all got me over here cracking up at the teeny beany (never heard of it) stories Lol!!!

lololololol

So much this!

Exactly how on earth would you even keep them clean?

When I first saw a BeanieBaby it was Humphrey The Camel, and I thought, "who wants to buy a toy camel that has no humps?".

Totally unrelated, but we've been trying to declutter lately. I found a box of beanie babies & teeny beanies today, and immediately thought of y'all!

You kept them in the plastic bag they came in with the tags intact if you were doing it to collect them. Otherwise, they were kids toys and you cleaned them just like you did all the other stuffed animals.

I … send food back all the time? Not 100% of the time that it’s not perfect (just tonight, I scraped the unrequested ketchup (blecch) and mayonnaise (BLECCCCH) off of my Wendy’s drive-through burger and got on with my life), but much of the time that my order is wrong, especially in a seated restaurant, I politely send it back. It’s not rude to send your incorrect food back, it’s just rude to do it rudely.

I do suck it up if I just am not crazy about my meal or it’s just kind of mediocre, or if I made the mistake. If I forgot to make my special request, that’s on me. If I can fix it easily, I usually do (like just picking a big piece of bacon off a sandwich). But if I KNOW I said no bacon or asked for dressing on the side, and I have bacon or dressing, or if I asked for medium well and it’s rare*, or if I asked for broccoli and I got fries, I bring it to the server’s attention either when the food arrives or when they ask how everything is.

Note, I don’t punish the server by tipping less, as long as they take steps to fix the issue. They didn’t make the food (…although there are times they should have noticed the issue before bringing the plate to me). I also fully expect to pay for it if I ate it and/or didn’t comment on the issue in time for them to fix it. But … I often send it back if it’s wrong.

Also, I have had plenty of garden-variety bad restaurant experiences. A sampling: I absolutely have gotten food poisoning from restaurant food; I thought I was going to die because of some diner pancakes about 20 years ago, and once my sister and I both ordered the salmon and both threw it up about 18 hours later. I once was eating at the bar of a bar and grill when a fight broke out; the staff threw several people out and they kicked in the glass door, sending glass flying all over the restaurant. I have been out with a group and the server forgot a whole meal, leaving my diabetic mother with no food (45 minutes went by before the manager asked whether we wanted the food brought out or taken off the bill. Me: “Um, at this point, you should bring it out AND take it off the bill.”). Et cetera.

*Re rare: once I was in a restaurant on the outskirts of Paris, notable because I don’t speak much French, and the staff of the restaurant did not speak English. I received a hamburger that was extremely rare, and I was trying to figure out what to tell the server. Clearly, I did not make myself fully understood, because the lady took the burger away, and brought it back a few minutes later, still just as rare, but now with melted cheese :/ (I have plans to go to Paris for the Olympics, and I now know to request cuit or bien-cuit.)