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

.


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.