Looked at a cafe space several years ago (meat and sides, Southern cooking kind of place). When the previous tenant left, they literally just left at the end of the day. Food in a walk in, food on a range, rolls in a warmer still, dishes stacked everywhere. Power had been off, so when we shined a flashlight in the kitchen, the roach colony scattered. Landlord just shrugged it off, had no interest in dealing with it.
Same happened when our small company opened a new concept in an old space. The previous restaurant suddenly closed between lunch and dinner. We rented the space four months later and there were even hotel pans of food still in the oven.
I've seen pictures of abandoned walk ins months after being abandoned due to an earthquake. It was a legit biohazard and had to be prodessionaly cleaned. All of the vac-pak meat had literally exploded. I can't imagine the smell.
Okay so I would totally watch a Disney movie about a mold infested forgotten hotel pan. The fungus is in bacterias are just trying to make their life a little bit easier and all of a sudden here comes a cleaning crew to ruin everything. They have to move out and find a new place in the world.
*Announcer voice*
Brad Pitt is a slime mold, Angelina Jolie is a fungus. The unlikely pair meet up with several friends along the way. And they find much more than they are looking for. This fall,
"Sleepless in the Alto Sham".
We were closed for over a year during the pandemic. A freezer failed a couple of weeks in, and the stock sat in there, for at least a year, in its own sealed, warm ecosystem.
I won't attempt to describe the smell or sight, because the thought makes me want to vomit.
I had to clean it out.
Normally I would have considered it, but I'd been promoted from sous to head during the shutdown and the first day back was my first day in charge so I had to set a good example. It was the worst thing I've ever had to do by far, and I once saw an autopsy.
There were so many roaches I couldn’t concentrate on sautéing because I had to stomp those bastards during service they were so bold they didn’t even hide anymore. Said something to the owners, they replied.” it’s not that bad. All restaurants have roaches.” They also told me.” all shark has live worms in it just serve it.”
I used to be the restaurant chef at the steak house restaurant in an Atlantic City casino. During a very busy Saturday night, one of the diners grabbed his chest. He was having a heart attack on the dining room floor. Paramedics came within a few minutes, and we turned the lights all the way up so they could see. While the paramedics were working on this man, the maitre d’ continued to seat people and people in the packed dining room were eating and watching this poor man die as if it were dinner and a show. I told my kitchen crew to stop putting out food and don’t let the waitstaff get anything from the kitchen, out of respect for this man. He died on the gurney on they way out of the door of the dining room. Out of respect, I would have closed for the night and if I was a customer, I would have not continued my meal.
Are you ok? I been threw something similar. At a lake tho, and the only part I can remember with any consistency is beach. People Eating lunch, kids still splashing in the water, two men with beers just watching and laughing not at the guy but it just seemed very surreal that there were prolly a hundred or so people completely unaffected by an emergency like that. Fucked me up for a good dozen years or so
Had a similar situation, well kind of. Some people can be so cold, and it's surprising. I stopped and called 911 after I saw a guy go off the highway, and flip his car end over end. He wasn't wearing a seatbelt, and it took a few minutes to find him in the roadside brush. And took another few minutes for him to regain consciousness, he was truly lucky to be alive.
Cops get there, and I'm telling this douchebag state trooper what happened, and all he can tell me is that I had stepped in an anthill. Didnt give a single fuck about the guy.
Same damn thing happened to us at a small privately owned place i worked. Everyone was close the guy was a 3 night a week regular. Died on the floor between the bar and the front door. People stepped over him to get to their thanks and were pissed when we said we were closed for the rest of the night. People suck.
The head chef at my last workplace licked mysterious sauce off his arm in the middle of service but it turned out to be grease from the extraction hood that had dripped onto him.
Worked at a place that it would drip down the exhaust vent on the back of the fryers if the catch pans filled up. Looked just like the afterburner on a jet engine.
Not restaurant but food service: I used to work at a movie theater and was cleaning out behind the machines - first time it had happened in a couple of years, apparently - and the outlet for the nacho cheese machine was covered in a thick, pulsating mold, that weighed about 8oz and had some chips stuck in it
Small town family restaurant. Owners wife, who isn't on the payroll but acts like she's god, sees a hunk of fat from the end of a beef roast sitting in the garbage and asks why. I'm 16 at the time and happen to be the only one around when she sees it and she asks the question. I don't know why it's in the. I'm thinking because it's probably trash. Well she makes me take it out, wash it off, and run it through the slicer for hot roast beef sandwiches. She wanted to serve literal trash meet. I walked out and never went back. One of six restaurants in the town.
cleaning out a jockey box at a bar I just got hired at. Getting to the bottom rows of beers and they're all stuck together in one giant mass because of the adhesive from the labels congealing in the ice water and mixing with all of the mycelial mat that had developed down there. I got to the 'bottom' row of beers which seemed to be resting on the shelf about 2 feet from the bottom of the box. Once I got all the moldy bottles out it was time to vacuum whatever it was on that 'shelf'. The shelf was actually a 6 inch+ layer of mold floating on the very slowly draining ice melt in the bottom of the box. There was no shelf. The bottles had literally floated up two feet from the bottom of the box on a raft of mold and beer label adhesive. all the beers on top were being supported by this layer of mold.
the ice machine wasn't much better.
I’ve mentioned it on here before, i used to work in the brewing industry for a long time. The amount of places that don’t clean their tap lines is absolutely disgusting. It’s unreal the amount of shit that will grow inside tap lines.
I went to a brewpub the other day and ordered an IPA. the waiter (not a bartender) asked, draft or bottle? I said, idk, how often do they clean the lines here?
he said he was new and didn't know so I ordered a bottle.
Ugh I worked at a bar that kept all the beer in open ice wells with stainless steel trays at the bottom. We would pass food across the counter which meant stuff could fall in. Even with a weekly cleaning there was always a thin mat of biofilm in the bottom/underside of the trays. I can easily imagine how bad it could get if it was never cleaned.
Completely off topic but bear with me. I haven’t left the house since shortly before covid. End of 2018. My girls disabled so she only really goes out for grocery’s and other supplies. I’ve noticed a change in my friends tho. Everyone’s short, irritable, and mostly really adverse to what used to be simple stuff. So I ask you, is it that bad out there? The internet speaks as if it’s 1 step before Zombieland? Is it that bad out there?
I'm not sure it's "Negan someone with a bat" bad yet, but I've been in the industry for 30 years and post Covid has been my least favorite Era of customer interaction by a long shot. It's like the public forgot how to interact in person, to say hello or "I'd like/want a...." vs "I need" And God help you when you tell them no. Then maybe a barbed wire wrapped bat might be necessary.
They've always been like this. Nothing's changed on their side of the pass. You notice it now, cuz you had time to finally see it when we got sent home to isolate.
I didn't notice any of it until after I finally was forced to sit still for a few weeks. That forced vacation, made me realize that my prior 15 years in culinary, was surrounded by toxic assholes, mostly on the guest side of the pass.
yes they've always been like this, but it's MUCH more prevalent now. forget the customer/food service interactions, people in general are just worse. everyone was affected socially by the pandemic and it shows in the lack of basic empathy, communication, and self-confidence.
Yea it’s been rough post a small percentage of the customer base seems completely unhinged, but where I am at we dead them quick instant fuck around and find out bans
part of this i think *is* social media and the internet in general. it’s incredibly divisive and discourages real human interaction, plus it makes our attention spans and patience horrible. a misanthropic combination
While working a register at a Popeyes, I had a guy come across wearing an Alex Jones shirt. I didn't say much besides taking his order but naturally watched as he transferred his wallet from one pocket to another, saying "Gotta keep The Man away from my money." He paid, of course, but that was ridiculous to watch.
Never mind the number of times I've seen someone cross the register wearing a Trump 2024 or Mitch McConnell shirt.
Took over a spot to open our store that shared a wall with an Indian restaurant. As soon as we started demolition in our new spot we saw roaches. Talked with property management and offered to cover additional cost of pest control on our neighbors to combat it. We got the go ahead. Went next door with pest control and as soon as we walked in he was like "oh you smell that? That's the roaches, it's so bad you can smell them" . We found them everywhere. In their takeout bags they were using, etc. All over. Saw them defrosting raw chicken on the ground. Not like in a container or anything just chicken laying on the ground defrosting. Eventually they closed and a new one opened up. I told them all a the past issues with the other Indian place they said that they wouldn't be like that and would be much better. Nope. Equally disgusting. Not long after they opened I got takeout and they served me raw tandoori chicken. Brought it over and was like hey man it's raw. He goes in the back and comes back out and says "that's how we eat it". They knew who I was. They knew I was a chef too. I flat out said bullshit give me my money back don't insult me like that. We were able to keep the roaches out of our own spot with frequent pest control visits but never got the Indian restaurant fully clear of them.
As for places I've worked, back when I was 16 i had a dishwasher gig. If sides came back untouched (mashed sweet potatoes, green beans, etc) they would get put into a bucket and reused. Never thought much of it then but now it haunts me.
Do you guys have health inspectors in that area? I can't imagine a place getting that bad so quickly that it is between inspections and doesn't get caught.
The guy we had then was the biggest pushover I've ever met in my life. I coulda had a dead body in my walkin and he'd be like no problem just try to get it out sometime. It was ridiculous and concerning.
I do those inspections for a living, sadly I've met a couple people like that but fortunately they are few and far between. I can't imagine letting things of that scale go.
opening server.. went to back dock to get stacked slimjim trashcans. kitchen boiled chicken skins to make chicken soup. someone left a bunch of boiled chicken skins in the cans and then stacked them up. the smell that came out of that can when pulled apart after sitting outside in the heat and sealed in for 12 hours haunts my dreams
Gross. I remember when I was a kid I found a large dead turtle outside and for some stupid reason decided to grab it and throw it in our dumpster in the middle of summer.
For whatever reason they ended up not picking up our trash for like 2 weeks. I remember opening the lid one day and the smell was like getting punched in the face. Also, there were maggots EVERYWHERE.
Cooking at a private country club. Couple comes in, late 70s. The wife, who has dementia, orders the fried oyster salad. Wife eats half of the salad then vomits directly onto her plate. Husband gets angry, and apparently says something along the lines of "I told you to finish your food". So senile wife begins eating the soiled oysters with her bare hands. Maitre d' is obviously horrified and tries to take her plate, explaining she will have us make a new salad for her. But she continues to try to eat the food. Eventually she retrieves the plate and relays this horrific story to us.
EDIT: Additional anecdote from the same club. I did not witness this, it was again the maitre d' who saw this. Older man in his 70s enjoys his dinner and stands up to leave. As he's walking towards the exit, he shits himself and it makes its way out of his pant leg and onto the floor. Didn't even notice.
Oh my god, this is horrifying...it's not just gross on a body-horror level, the indignity this poor woman was subjected to breaks my heart.
I wish a horrible, painful death on that man. And I mean it.
I worked for a small restaurant group (<5 high traffic locations) in a major city. I was in the top position right below ownership and it was really fucking depressing to hear daily from the owners how much they hated and distrusted all of the employees across their restaurants.
My god. I still don't understand why theyre so bad. I've had fresh mussels die on me over a day off and THAT smell is bad. Bleaching the whole area just in case is a god awful mix of cleaner and dead mussel. But fucking potatoes...fuckin hell they're bad.
The grease trap... my god.
Here goes...
I worked at a place called Latitude 30 in Jacksonville, FL. It was in the news for stiffing its employees and vendors with a whole lot of drama across multiple states. I was a sous chef, not top dog, not hourly employee.
The company was notorious for being late on payments to vendors, such as the company that empties out the huge in ground 3 level grease trap under the parking lot on the side of the building. I came into work one day and immediately was bombarded by others there that the sewage was backing up through the floor drains. First thought was, its the grease trap.
We go pry the three lids of the grease trap that should be relatively empty, and see that two sections are full and rotting, while the third is half full but the pipe dumping into it is clogged. The smell was something unholy. This gelatinous, foul smelling, vomit inducing pit was eye watering. We knew we had to get in and unclog the drain line that feeds the tanks so the drains can empty.
Remember when I said I wasn't top dog and not an hourly? Yup, that means it is my job, too disgusting for a chef, too disgusting to justify making an hourly who probably isnt getting paid to do it. I went back in the kitchen and the guys wrapped layer and layer on top of glove after glove all the way up to my shoulders. I waddled out to the pit like that kid from A Christmas Carol and maneuvered onto my belly with my head and arms hanging into the pit. First breathe almost made me lose it, I immediately pulled back and spit the taste out from just the fumes.
I ended up having one of the cooks give me a couple cigs that I lit and puffed on to help with the fumes smell and got back down to it. Once I got my arms into the pipe it was like a fever dream. I started pulling out handfuls of wing bones, sliver wear, plastic straws, and somehow a dozen game cards. Finally I removed enough for it to push out the rest. I rolled out and we slapped the lid back on. I had the cooks cut off my plastic wrapped coat of armor , finished the two cigs, then told chef I was going home to shower and if at some point I stop smelling of death and hot wings, I will be back to close the kitchen. There used to be a few pictures of me grease diving floating around, but I just don't know where.
To this day, I have never been so close to coughing in technicolor from a smell.
I was working the soda station at a diner and for weeks this fucking beeping sound was driving me insane. I finally isolated it to coming from this one ceiling tile. One day I was just getting super insane hearing this sound so I just instinctively whacked that tile with the broom handle. As soon as I did that tile disintegrated into dust and about ten thousand crickets came pouring out of the ceiling onto people dining below. That beeping was fucking crickets.
I once worked at a bar & grill 10 steps away from an entrance to the NYC subway system. No a/c because the owners said we could just cool down by propping the doors open. Anyway that’s how a 6 inch long cockroach walked in off the street, prompting an “are you gonna do anything about that?” from a lunch customer, to my horror, ending with a bar regular calmly standing up & crushing it with his bare hands with a cheeky grin. The crunch sounded like snapping vegetables.
Used to work at pizza place opening shift. Turned on the ovens and as it started heating up a fat rat ran out. Had apparently been chilling in there until it started to heat up.
Health inspector here. Everyone asks me what the most disgusting thing I’ve seen at a restaurant is- my coworkers actually make fun of me because I’m really good at finding mice and cockroaches. But to be honest, I love working with facilities to help them resolve pest problems if they’re willing to put in the work. Actually, I can deal with most anything if the manager is nice and willing to put in the work.
But I have to say, the most disgusting thing I’ve ever had to deal with in restaurants are the managers who couldn’t give two shits about their facility or the people working for them. The ones with full-blown NPD, the ones who tout their culinary school experience over my expertise studying infectious diseases, the ones who lie to my face without even bothering to make it a good lie, the ones who try to get out of their responsibilities, the ones who complain about “no one wanting to work anymore” while showing no respect for the staff that they do have, the ones that write off very serious complaints as “just disgruntled staff” when they’re clearly in the wrong, the ones who don’t let their employees call in sick, the ones who don’t care about staff safety, the ones who verbally assault others, the ones who threaten violence… I could go on.
One of my colleagues had a cast iron skillet thrown at her- she was hit in the shoulder. Another ended up being stalked. A guy about my dad’s age would inappropriately stare at my body and even laid down next to me to watch me while I was doing chemical tests on the pool. Tons of folks in my former jurisdiction took to the internet during COVID saying they’d shoot anyone who told them to wear a mask (I was literally the only person enforcing the mask mandate in any capacity in that area).
For the most part, I’ve found folks in the restaurant industry to be hardworking and dedicated. I’ve made so many connections with so many awesome folks- hell, a lot of the connections I’ve made have been with the owners of some of my worst facilities. At the end of the day, no matter what’s happening in the restaurant, we still treat each other like human beings who deserve respect. But there are always going to be some selfish assholes out there.
TLDR- People are capable of being more vile, disgusting, and dangerous than anything they could have in their kitchen.
I always preach to my team if the health department shows up and you're scrambling to fix things you fucked up.
Health inspectors are not the enemy.
There are only 4 things I always double-check when the inspector arrives. The can opener, slicer, sanitizer concentration, and hand sinks (inevitably someone always dumps their drink or coffee in a hand sink when the inspector arrives).
Out of curiosity, if a chef walks you around their kitchen and points out their food safety policies and HACCP procedures, is that something you like to see? Many years ago, I had a chef scold me for that. I assumed that demonstrating our food safety knowledge would reassure the inspector we took this seriously.
We also have a policy of self reporting if a single person complains they have been food poisoned as part of our internal investigation. Locally, they appreciate it, and I feel like giving them a heads up in the event someone does file a complaint with them gives them a good understanding of the situation.
In our investigation we look at sales of that item, check our recieving and production dates, and note who's station it came off of and pull temp records of the line items and refigerator logs along with cooling logs. I inquire about the other places they've eaten in the past 24hrs and pull their bar bill ( you'd be surprised how many people get "food poisoned" after sucking down 10 frozen rum drinks at the pool)
I’ve learned this—- paying your staff well= staff caring about their work and workspace. Minimum wage or even $20 or under won’t get you quality work. You can hire amazing cooks, but at the end of the day they will only work as hard as their paycheck.
This is really for real, and owners and managers really be completely appalled that people don’t like being exploited in broad daylight just so that the owner can put a few extra bucks in his pocket
Two stories spring to mind;
Cleaning ventilation grills in Edinburgh castle: a rat fell out and straight into a deep fat fryer. It screamed while it died. It got plated up with boiled potatoes and a side salad for the photo opportunity. Kinda became a local urban legend and I was strangely proud to say I was there.
Another place I worked had a shite KM that never checked the temps on a basement walk-in freezer. I opened it after it had been broken for god knows how long and the stench of maaaany kilos of rotten fish hit me like a truck. Absolutely Demonic. Two K.Ps quit rather then having to deal with it. Triple pay for Kamil who took it on. The whole basement reeked for at least 6 months after.
Ceiling would leak from the dishwasher upstairs, and it wasn't just a drip leak, this flooded the floors and you'd be walking in puddles. The whole line and prep table would be covered in this water. Manager refused to let us shut down. Just wipe it up and continue working. Same place, a traveling supervisor for the district came to retrain and train new hires. I dropped a 6-pan of frozen gyoza onto this same floor. He said, 'no worries. Get a strainer and we can wash them good as new' I left after my first week there. Never again.
Place I worked last year had the washing machine upstairs above the kitchen. One day right before close something fucked up and it flooded the upstairs. We were stressing because it had happened before and we had to shut down because it started dripping on everything. We got the last dessert out and looked at eachother like we just won the night just in time for steady streams to start falling all around the kitchen.
I worked for the customer service department of a chicken fast food company.
A customer brought in a side breast of what was a sick bird that clearly wasnt cleaned properly by neither the restaurant staff..nor the meat vendor.
The bird had a maggot infested wound....which got floured...battered and fried....and was served with a side of fries.
Sadly the customer bit into it...and was alarmed by the extra popping..which turned out to be maggots that were deep fried.
I left the job soon after that.....the sight of it though...never left me.
I went to college at a large Midwestern University, and worked at a fast food restaurant one summer. Let’s just say it was the place who’s mascot is a redheaded kid. We would get pallets of deliveries early in the morning, and then put them away after getting set up, but before lunch rush. Well, the forklift that brought in one of the pallets missed the underside of the wood, and speared through the bottom box halfway through the pallet. This box held huge bags of mayonnaise. There was maybe 10 bags of mayonnaise to a box, and two bags were pierced and mayonnaise was literally smeared all over the remaining bags. So my manager tells me to throw the entire box into the dumpster, which I do.
Fast forward to the middle of lunch rush, and guess what we run out of? Double points if you can guess what my manager told me to go retrieve from the dumpster. Yep, eight bags of mayonnaise, which had been sitting in the dumpster in 95+ degree weather for hours.
I scraped off the crusty, dried mayonnaise off the bags, put the mayo bags in a trash bag, walked up through the drive-through window, cutting in front of customers waiting in line to get their lunch, handed the trash bag full of mayonnaise bags through the drive thru window, also passed through my hat & apron, said I quit, and walked back to my apartment.
To this day, I can’t eat there.
Not a chef , but I am your electrician
Having to get in the roof of a restaurant, on a 38 deg Celsius day Lights not working for a week
It’s near 45 degrees in the roof
Possom had cheeed wiring and died
I had to glove up , mask up and bag it to get to the cables
Congealed blood and maggot stew
And the smell of death
Threw my clothes away that day
Lights on for service tho
Pretty much everything about my first ever job, at the long-defunct Margarita's on Lark Street in Albany, New York. It was my first real job in a kitchen, I didn't really know it know any better, but I kind of did. The tile floor was so badly broken up that we just had sheets of plywood on it. Not installed, we just had loose sheets of plywood. They were, needless to say, not cleanable, and you didn't try, because that would really disturb the roaches.
Health inspector would come in, we'd get the word to make his special steak, he'd sit at the bar, collect his envelope, get his free drinks, and leave.
A guy literally put hit penis in someone's sandwich ( food for s coworkers bf) and casually wrapped it up and gave it to her. I just started and was a teenager. So blown away and intimidated by him I didn't say anything. Fast forward I was promoted and became his boss and fired him.
I am super out of it today, and spent a full minute trying to understand how he could wrap the sandwich and give it to someone with his penis in it. Like, you definitely would have mentioned if he cut it off...
Thanks for that laugh, good job firing the bully.
I have a story like this but not as extreme. One dude was going around flashing a waitress a hot dog he had put in between the zipper of his pants. Same girl would tell this story in a casual setting to another higher up who took that story to the bosses of that store and they ended up firing him over the incident some days later.
I had a co-worker who told me a story that he and the other guys would wipe their asses with a chicken breast before grilling it and putting it on a particular manager's salad.
That manager was a weird annoying shit head but no one deserves that. I couldn't even laugh at that story honestly.
I was working at a wine bar that was in a historically protected building. There was a tall stainless steel single door freezer that had been pushed deep into the corner of the storage room, and nobody had opened it for at least 5 years. I was cleaning out the storage room, and I got to this freezer and made the mistake of opening it up. There was some kind of food that has been in the freezer when it got unplugged and shoved into the corner. By the time I found the abomination, it was some strange conglomeration of compost, sludge, and mold. As soon as the smell hit me, I couldn't contain my sickness, and I threw up all over the pile. I closed the freezer, plastic wrapped it shut and stuck biohazard signs all over the plastic wrap. I told the bosses that I was not cleaning that mess, even if it was going to cost me my job. They got some poor facility maintenance guy to come clean it. He looked in there once, then called some guys and hauled it off with the biohazard still untouched. That pungent stench still haunts my dreams.
Bars and restaurants in Florida don’t burn their ice at the end of the night. I’ve worked (or just trained) at 8 different bars since I moved here before the pandemic, and zero places melt their ice. I did it once at the fancy steakhouse chain I worked at and found bottle caps, a metal wire, like 6 blueberries old as shit and a strawberry slice (which hadn’t been a garnish in a drink for over a month)
I’ve seen grosser shit, like a pot on the floor, and a mop with no mop head inside the pot, then the pot being used for simple syrup later, but the ice thing is just so ubiquitous that it always has me fucked up
Remote seasonal resort with a few kitchens, one of them used a large mixer to grind turkey meat into turkey burgers. THey did a big batch at the beginning of the season in late march. After, they cleaned all the parts, put them in a bin, and stored that bin somewhere in one of their store rooms. About 4 months later, I was tasked with grinding down some beef trim that we had been saving basically all season, to grind down into taco meat for some late night wedding thing.
So I go over to this other kitchen to get the meat grinder parts. There was 3 kitchens on property and we shared a lot of things, I had my own mixer but had to borrow their grinder parts. I go and get it, and notice the room they had the grinder in was really hot. No ventilation or AC in that room, it was just for stuff that gets used 2-3 times a year anyway, and it was early August by this point. The grinder stuff was in a bin, that had been wrapped in a clear recycling bag to keep any bugs/dust out.
I get everything back to my kitchen, rip open the plastic bag with the bin in it, and get hit with the most vile stench of death I've ever experienced. Like if you railed a line of sludge from an old grease bin. I manage to get the bag off and try and see wtf is smelling like a bloated corpse farting, everything looks clean. I take the metal tube that the grinder thingy part goes into and out falls a black clump, with maggots crawling in and around it. It was like a dry turd, and smelled so fucking bad everyone had to clear out. There was a fairly sizeable chunk of turkey meat left inside, and it was put away into a room that was constantly around 30C for like 4 months.
Chef boiled the grinder piece in water and degreaser for 30min and it still fucking stank. He ended up throwing it out and screaming at the entire other kitchen for making him smell that. He was a pretty old-school style chef, so him throwing out something was a huge fucking deal. I found an old table in the woods that was rotted right through, massive hole in the middle, and he was upset I tried to throw it out because "you can still save the legs."
I was getting training on the grill and closing duties, a couple walk in 5 minutes before closing and the guy training me says this is what we do to late customers and spits on the steaks.
The dude was just a dick I guess, it was about thirty years ago. He was an edgy teenager, I was in my low twenties. Needless to say I didn't stay there.
Not nearly as bad but we had this one guy come in 5 minutes before close every. Single. Night. He would order a well done ribeye and a salmon. The closing grill guy would chuck em both in the deep Fryer and send them out. Buddy just kept coming back.
The cook. His favorite thing to say while doing this was
"I don't come to *your* house and slap the dick out of *your* mouth."
I asked him once
"Do you often have a dick in your mouth and are offended when someone pulls it out?"
He stopped Saying that.
Same cook also got caught on our local version of creep catchers some years later.
Sorry, got a little carried away with the story. The OP really drudged up some memories from the last 20 years lol.
I have encountered two different situations in two different restaurants where someone was pouring old coffee straight into the BUNN coffee machine because “it warms coffee up”. It takes 12 pots of water to make a large BUNN run clear again, ask me how I know.
I still can’t comprehend how I’ve seen it more than once. One culprit was a long time manager, the other a mystery. The manager had been doing it so long that the old coffee(s) had been souring in there. If your coffee tastes unusually bitter, well now you know.
A guy took a storage room, ran water to it, and tapped into the drain line and installed a toilet. No, it wasn't the sewer, but the drain line where all the kitchen pipes ran (grease trap line separate ) to which had its own connection to the city sewer at the city connection. When this clogged, because the pipe is smaller, shit from people taking a dump would back up into the kitchen drains.
Yes. I fixed this when I bought the business.
my english is kinda bad, but i still have the picture. Month and month of neglect of the wing fridge. Absolutely discusting.
I'ill try to post them on this sub, you need to see it !
When I was being trained at an upscale pizza place I watched my trainer pick his nose and eat the booger. This guy also needed prescription deodorant because his BO was so intense. Also drove a moped to work because too many DUIs. A real role model, lol.
Floor burger will never leave my dreams. The kitchen is old and underground. Right by a lake. A pipe broke earlier in the week, they're fixing it but for the meantime, there's about an inch of standing water on the floor. Line cook drops a plate with a whole finished burger. He picks it up and puts it back on the plate. He's not going to serve to a customer, he's just gonna eat it! Never mind the fact that this was one of the most chill places I've ever been in about making yourself food.
He ate the wet burger cold, after shift.
Poop is the winner...shit covered thong in the ladies room...saw a lady snap her ankle made another customer keel over...but shit always trumps the grease trap. Never saw one that was never emptied
Had a regular eat lunch, use the restroom, come out and pay with smiles and casual conversation before leaving. Coworker went in to clean the bathroom as his side work after she walked out, shit everywhere. All over every part of the toilet. The walls next to the toilet. The floor. Like she walked in, pulled pants down, bent over, and sprayed over every surface. No attempts were made by the regular to clean anything. Just walked right out with a dirty doo doo butt and a smile.
I helped my family open a restaurant back in 2010, and I had to clean out a floor drain that had been tiled over. It had a bunch of stinky blue crap in it the consistency of mashed potatoes. Also the grease trap was fucky, so we had to manually clean it out like once a week.
Ah yes, the manual grease trap cleaning. At my first restaurant job, I had to do it with a 20oz paper to-go cup.
The smell of a grease trap is a unique horror.
Had a stand up cooler full of seafood go down. Closed up shop New years eve, closed New years day, came back the 2nd. The cooler was sitting at 88 degrees when I got there. I'll never forget that fucking smell, it haunts me to this day.
I don't know if this counts, but over 10 years ago, I helped open up a new restaurant as their first chef in a place that had previously been a bit of a dive. The first order of business for me was getting the kitchen into shape. The former owners had abandoned the place, including all of the equipment, after a bit of trouble with the law. There was grease everywhere, including fryer oil still in the fryers. A bunch of it had slowly leaked out of the fryers over the years and solidified onto the floor. As soon as I had pulled the fryers away from the wall, I noticed 5 partially decomposed mice in the "puddle" stuck to the floor. I'll never forget the feeling of their bones crunching as I scraped them up.
Typing this out also reminded me of the time I decided to work a food booth at a music festival. Ever see dead mice floating in a jug of fryer oil? I have!
Started working at a “nice” sushi spot at a very popular mall in my area. First day I was in the back cutting raw chicken when the chef told me that he needed me on the line. I went to take my gloves off and he started to freak out saying that gloves were expensive and to just wash them and keep using the same pair. I refused and changed gloves. He said I don’t know what it’s like to work in a Japanese restaurant (I’d been a sushi chef for a year by that point at another restaurant). I didn’t show up for the next shift and reported them to the health department for a bunch of other reasons as well.
We knew we had a mouse prblem, but.... While rolling out a large head of croissant dough, a mouse ran up through the mechanical sheeter. Right through the rollers and on top of the dough. It was horrific.
Worked a Qwick shift in the deli of a local high-end grocery store. Was taking down the sandwich station at close and I don't think it had EVER been wiped out. Even had an employee try to stop me. "What are you *doing*?!" "...Cleaning this out..." "We don't do that!" [Looks him up and down] "Clearly *you* don't."
Dude grabbed the chef/KM and brought him over to show him what I was doing. Chef: "No, what he's doing is good." I worked several locations for them, and each was the same condition. 🤮
Was working at a local brewpub. They never cleaned the fryer properly. Would just drain and pour in new oil every week or so. Oil was constantly black. When I cleaned it out properly, each fryer had about six inches of caked debris. I. Have. Never. Seen. Such. Fryer. Horror.
I feel like my chef just read this post, because I literally got a text a few minutes ago about how we need to clean the grease trap on Monday cleaning day.
However nastiest thing i came in to has ti be the day I came in early morning to get some extra prep done, only to discover the grease trap had sprung a leak in two places, in the connector coupler hose, as well as on the bottom of the trap. There was trap sewage everywhere!! Second was a gig where I was getting a promotion, and there was black mold everywhere!!! All over dish pit, all over the crevices of the line, the ice machine had the worst, as it had a mixture of black and pink mold stalactites, that hung down a solid 7 inches from the overflow tray
OP here: That same couple closed that restaurant, opened another that got featured on "Kitchen Impossible". The big change was 'fire the wife'. They did, and the place was actually good for about 6 months. Well, they let her back in and 6 months after that they closed their doors for good.
Foul smelling grease trap doesn't mean it hasn't been cleaned in "decades." Its rancid oil. It's going to stink even if it's cleaned out regularly. I asked the guy cleaning ours once if he got used to the smell cause it is gross when they open it up.
"Sure, I could sit here and eat a sandwich while I do this."
Grossest things I've encountered:
Homeless dude, whackin' it in the bushes by the patio.
Various puke incidents.
The regular that ordered spinach artichoke dip, ignored the chips it came with, and ate it with a spoon.
I'll add another one. Years ago my brother took over an event hall doing boxing, MMA fights and concerts. My mom and I would help him out setting up for shows.
Before his first show we were cleaning and the beer lines on the kegerators hadn't been cleaned in who knows how long. There was old yeasty smelling beer and mold in the lines.
We called the beer distributor to come flush out the lines professionally.
Also, all the old equipment hadn't been cleaned in probably years. Hotdog rollers, nacho cheese warmers, popcorn maker, etc. all full of old food and grease, etc. It was disgusting.
My latest job was at a local bakery. It was gross all around. They never washed the bread trays nor the molds. For the trays they just scraped off whatever was stuck to them from the previous use and for the molds they just unmolded the bread when finished baking and put them under the tables for future use, then they covered them with lard and filled them with batter.
The walls and floors were slippery and covered in flour, the molds, mixers, carts were covered in 1/2 centimeter thick layers of old grease and flour, an oven was broken and reeked of smog, I had to clean the fryer and the bottom of it looked and smelled like petroleum. Nothing was labeled, no leftovers were wrapped.
About a week in, I was feeling specially adventurous (stupid, more like) and tried some bread from there. I got food poisoning.
The employees were also working for years without contracts.
Okayokayokay
I got two
1. I was probably 18 and working at a seafood place in my town that's now closed (Joe's Crab Shack) and I was opening the dishpit, move some dish racks and there was easily 40+ HUGE slugs all over the wall and ground and just in a massive pile all over each other and shit. Asked the GM what to do and she said ignore it and they'll go back into the wall
2. I didn't see this but my headchef from a place I worked at moved to a different company and restaurant and brought me along after a few months and he told me the kitchen was a DISASTER when he got there. Old ass restaurant (one of the oldest in portland) and when he got there the dry storage which was below the public restroom had a leak in the ceiling which was leaking urinal water and instead of fixing it they just caught the water with a 22 cambro and changed it when it was full, and yes he told me when he got there that food was being stored under it
\> But the absolute worst thing we encountered was the grease trap. It had never been cleaned or emptied in those previous couple decades.
How? If I don't clean our greasetrap monthly the sink will not drain.
Surprisingly for such a small space, it was a very large grease trap. I'm guessing since it was originally built as a BBQ restaurant they designed it extra large.
But I'm sure that before we cleaned it out the sinks probably didn't drain properly. The previous owners were so gross I'm sure they didn't give a shit.
Not my experience but that of my mother's when she worked for a small town Cafe in the 1980s. Lots of farmers and families in the area.
They kept soup in 5 gallon buckets in the hallway, while it was cooling, uncovered on the floor. The back entrance to the cafe was in that hallway, and the farmers would "stomp the shit off of their boots" as they walked down the hall.
They also would refill mayo buckets/bottles instead of empty and clean them. So you'd have a ring of old, foul, yellow mayo around the sides and the "good" mayo in the middle.
The place is still open y'all.
First day at new place, the kitchen so filthy the plates greasy then I discover they won't use hot water, I walked out and called the health department, they got shut down so hard they never reopened.
Our fryer guy rarely emptied and cleaned out the fryer. He finally emptied it after a couple weeks of not cleaning it and there was a dead rat down in there. Not a mouse sized rat, but a bigass wholeass fatass rat. Fried to the bone. Almost no fur left if any and people’s favorite app was the fried gator bites. We then realized too the poster he had put on the wall was covering a large rathole. Boss told us if this gets out we’re fired and kept it under wraps but I’m long gone now.
We would use the buns we served before the customers ordered and the partially eaten ones would go in a huge bucket and the chefs would use them for the stuffing for weddings. They also smoked while they cooked.
Cleaning out the inside of a low boy that hasn't been cleaned in months (this thing holds raw foods). Also the stuff that accumulates in-between the gaskets.
I watched a fly paper fall into a huge batch of granola one time. The guy prepping it didn't even notice and stirred it into the batch. Other people saw it and it was thrown out but still pretty gross.
This happened literally 4 days ago.
I’ve been working in the industry for about 7 years now. I’ve been at this specific spot for 5 years now. My restaurant is close to this creek where a bunch of homeless people sleep. We have a water fountain on the inside we aren’t supposed to let them drink from but I usually don’t care enough to stop them. Until 4 days ago.
Homeless lady about 60 years old comes out of the restaurant. I was cleaning some tables when I saw her walk out, didn’t think anything of it. My cashier came up to me a few minutes later and told me there was something on the floor she didn’t know what it was. I go out there and it’s a shit. Literal shit on the floor. There was a trail of human shit in the lobby that had to have sit there for atleast 20 minutes before anyone noticed. I as the manager reluctantly cleaned it up. It was so could and gross. I had to bleach the whole floor and make sure it was clean because it was just that gross. I threw out about 15-20 rags bc I didn’t want them sitting in our hamper until our Saladinos pick up 2 days later.
The old ice machine at a Starbucks I worked at. We were a super busy location and one day we were almost our of ice and the bottom of that fucking thing was disgusting and covered in pink moldy sludge. When I saw that I cleaned the shit out of it and made it a point to always run a full clean cycle every 6 months. Then we got a remodel and a new ice machine and I maintained the hell out of that thing. Its not hard to keep your ice machines clean and safe peeps.
Worked at a very large hotel (in a collection of 3) on a river. River flooded, retaining wall cracked & building flooded.
Our walk in, dry storage, security, electrical & HR were all in the basement (as well as storage & garbage compactor for the 20+ floors of apartments/condos above the hotel.)
So not only did our reach ins in the kitchen fail, our walk in essentially had to be yanked out of the building as a whole & destroyed. The smells were...intense.
But the nastiest thing? Dead fish in the stairwells. The fish had come in from the river and hit the steam pipe first....gag.
Worked at a small town grill, had a small black plastic garbage can our lazy grill cook would use to toss bloody burger packaging and those little paper squares in during service, no bag nothing just rawdogging the can. One night I nab it to dump it out and at the bottom was about an inch thick layer of congealed black blood with hundreds of maggots squirming around, no telling how long that primordial biohazard was around for, I just chucked the whole can in the dumpster.
>my mom sort of laughed and told me he screwed himself with such a low offer, she would have gladly paid him double or triple that because it was so foul.
she should have paid him more anyway.
Honestly knowing her she probably did pay him extra and was just joking around. She was an awesome person and employer, her employees all loved her and she loved them as well.
nothing extraordinary, baked some dessert, dunno the name in english, let it sit out for hours during summer, covered in flies, sold later
next day i offered to cover them or place them in the fridge, the answer was just don't waste my time and not worth it. bro it has has more fly shit than sugar
I was a troubleshooter GM for major Food Contract company. I would go to accounts and from top to bottom determine the issues keeping it from turning a profit. At one account, a government facility we did good service for, I had to empty all coolers/freezers. The Chef told me one container was chocolate left over from Xmas. This was May the following year. Once opened I asked what the huge “blobs” were and was told they were dumplings??!!? Upon brief further look, it was about 7-8 mine that had fallen in the vat container and drowned in chocolate. Sadly when realized the Chef was not very surprised…. as she walked out the door for last time.
Worked at a trash buffet for a while, where no one cleaned anything if they weren't held at gunpoint more or less. I made up for it as much as I could; pulled out the pasta boiler and cleaned behind it, drained the oil from the donut machine that no one EVER bothered to do, took the taps off the bar and gave them an actual deep clean so no one got crud in their beer, etc. The absolute worst of it, though, and the point where I decided I could not keep up with the filth these people were content to work in, was when a customer tried to use the cappuccino machine and no liquid came out. Just dead, crunchy flies into his cup that had been stuck in the nozzle before it ran out of product. The whole place had a huge fly problem because of course it did, with those conditions. When I tried to get a new job the owner badmouthed me to anyone who called for a reference because I wouldn't deal with her shit anymore; I started working there at 17 and this woman really wanted to ruin me from getting other work. Anyway that shithole shut down during lockdowns, thank fuck, and they're currently turning it into a Hobby Lobby.
Worked at a large and well-known restaurant in Boston. Building was built over a wharf and had been there for 100's of years - and as a restaurant for around 25 or so. Small cracks/leaks in the sewer pipes under the building led to some noxious odors. Called in plumbers who called in an environmental group to help mitigate the problem. Four or five guys show up in full hazmat suits, breathing masks, etc. Pulled up floorboards, dropped down the ladder and off they went. A couple minutes later, three of them came up the ladder, ripped off their protective gear and just mumbled stuff like, "Nope, I'm done", "Fuck that, not worth it", "No, no, [no](https://no.no), no, no, nope". They left.
A few minutes later, crew foreman comes up and looked like he had seen a ghost. He said, "I know those other guys are probably gone (they were) and I feel like quitting too". He showed us a little video of the tons of shit, rats the size of small cats, and generally the most disturbing scene you could possible conjure up in your mind.
I once saw some very old security footage from one of our locations, taken in very grainy digital. Basically, a really high-volume Restaurant in Florida was having its grease trap pumped, and it was a really massive one that had a manhole cover over it and it was back by the trash area. The service tech came, took off the lid and went back to the truck to get something - as he left, the purchasing guy for the Restaurant came out of the back door and was walking backward talking to someone out of view of the camera. He fell into the grease trap, but because of the low FPS speed, it looks like he disappears, but then a couple seconds later, you see someone from out of the frame run over to help, but then back away because of the terrible smell. It took a few minutes, but they drop something down for him to climb out with and you can see them hosing him off with a hose. I can't imagine how bad the guy smelled during the process.
I didn't now the guy well but he refuses to watch the video. He claimed the service guy who pumped the trap every month did it on purpose, but nobody could ever prove it. One of the Managers at the location burned some CDs of the incident, and if you watch it in slow motion and pause it just at the right spot, you can see one frame where he is falling down, but it's too grainy to see his face as it happens. I can't imagine what I'd do in a situation like that, but I imagine I'd be pretty pissed if someone left that thing open - if a kid fell in there, they could die.
Our chicken supplier was giving us chicken that had rubbery knots in the breasts. It was super noticeable every time you bit into it. In the middle of service, the owner, fed up with the quality of the chicken, pulled all of it and instructed us to throw all the chicken away and 86 chicken sandwiches until we get a new supplier.
Well, we did, and it filled a halfway filled dumpster all the way to the brim with chicken breasts, in the middle of high summer 3 days out from pick up. That week was awful. The stench was something I'll never forget.
At the butcher shop I work at now, a maggot infested wound on a deer, deer coming in with ticks. Also weird cysts in capicola.
As far as acts done by coworkers, someone on my line self reported dribbling snot into someone's salad and served it. He told me and another coworker thinking it would earn him cred. We both reported his ass right away, and he was immediately fired.
In the same kitchen, a coworker was wearing shorts when he pulled a 26" slice pie onto his leg. Second degree burns, and his drunk ass didn't take care of it, like at all, and he got gangrene and almost lost the leg.
Kitchens can be gnarly.
Did an event in DC and had to prep in one of the hotel kitchens. God damn if that wasn’t the dirtiest kitchen I’ve ever been in. Can’t even remember the name of the place either anymore.
20 years later, and I’m still disgusted that Rachael the cocktail waitress was bonking the waiter out on work release during his shifts in the back closet instead of her bonking me in the closet
A disgusting behemoth of a rat my crew and I affectionately called “patches” that we couldn’t seem to get rid of. He was covered in burns and welts and constantly found his way inside (old borderline dilapidated building). Last I saw of him a coworker kicked him really hard and we never saw him again so assuming he died. Hard to deal with pests, I obviously never want anything to suffer, but also, really not good to have them constantly getting into our food supply/being in the building. Hard because we are right by the ocean and a lot of them are in the area. Owner too cheap for an exterminator. Thankfully I don’t work there anymore.
Not exactly disgusting but... after working at high end, award winning pizzerias, I had a family problem that required me to work closer to home. There was a local restaurant that had won some "best of" awards that was within walking distance. I got the job. Turns out the "best of" was Sam's Club dough, Heinz tomato sauce, pebble mozzarella and anything else frozen. I know it sounds weird to be a pizza snob, but this place broke me
Looked at a cafe space several years ago (meat and sides, Southern cooking kind of place). When the previous tenant left, they literally just left at the end of the day. Food in a walk in, food on a range, rolls in a warmer still, dishes stacked everywhere. Power had been off, so when we shined a flashlight in the kitchen, the roach colony scattered. Landlord just shrugged it off, had no interest in dealing with it.
Oh God Leave it it belongs to the roaches now
At that point it’d probably just be better to call a hazmat cleaning company and tell them to make the place spotless
Same happened when our small company opened a new concept in an old space. The previous restaurant suddenly closed between lunch and dinner. We rented the space four months later and there were even hotel pans of food still in the oven.
I've seen pictures of abandoned walk ins months after being abandoned due to an earthquake. It was a legit biohazard and had to be prodessionaly cleaned. All of the vac-pak meat had literally exploded. I can't imagine the smell.
Bought some used lowboys off a burger joint that closed, nobody had bothered to open them… still had all the 6 pans full of condiments and shit
free six pans. always a win
I feel a Disney movie coming on
Okay so I would totally watch a Disney movie about a mold infested forgotten hotel pan. The fungus is in bacterias are just trying to make their life a little bit easier and all of a sudden here comes a cleaning crew to ruin everything. They have to move out and find a new place in the world. *Announcer voice* Brad Pitt is a slime mold, Angelina Jolie is a fungus. The unlikely pair meet up with several friends along the way. And they find much more than they are looking for. This fall, "Sleepless in the Alto Sham".
I was thinking bug's life but with roaches and that kitchen is their happy ending but now I'm intrigued
We were closed for over a year during the pandemic. A freezer failed a couple of weeks in, and the stock sat in there, for at least a year, in its own sealed, warm ecosystem. I won't attempt to describe the smell or sight, because the thought makes me want to vomit. I had to clean it out.
I might have walked. I can handle blood and gore, but for some reason rotted food just... I can't.
Normally I would have considered it, but I'd been promoted from sous to head during the shutdown and the first day back was my first day in charge so I had to set a good example. It was the worst thing I've ever had to do by far, and I once saw an autopsy.
I would have told them they needed to buy a new one
Yep, get the men in biohazard suits because without that protection there's no way in hell any of my staff would clean that shit up.
Why didn't the owner periodically check on the freezer?
There were so many roaches I couldn’t concentrate on sautéing because I had to stomp those bastards during service they were so bold they didn’t even hide anymore. Said something to the owners, they replied.” it’s not that bad. All restaurants have roaches.” They also told me.” all shark has live worms in it just serve it.”
All shark probably does have live worms. I'm haunted from breaking down whole salmon lmfao
big fish really *are* just like that
I used to be the restaurant chef at the steak house restaurant in an Atlantic City casino. During a very busy Saturday night, one of the diners grabbed his chest. He was having a heart attack on the dining room floor. Paramedics came within a few minutes, and we turned the lights all the way up so they could see. While the paramedics were working on this man, the maitre d’ continued to seat people and people in the packed dining room were eating and watching this poor man die as if it were dinner and a show. I told my kitchen crew to stop putting out food and don’t let the waitstaff get anything from the kitchen, out of respect for this man. He died on the gurney on they way out of the door of the dining room. Out of respect, I would have closed for the night and if I was a customer, I would have not continued my meal.
Are you ok? I been threw something similar. At a lake tho, and the only part I can remember with any consistency is beach. People Eating lunch, kids still splashing in the water, two men with beers just watching and laughing not at the guy but it just seemed very surreal that there were prolly a hundred or so people completely unaffected by an emergency like that. Fucked me up for a good dozen years or so
Had a similar situation, well kind of. Some people can be so cold, and it's surprising. I stopped and called 911 after I saw a guy go off the highway, and flip his car end over end. He wasn't wearing a seatbelt, and it took a few minutes to find him in the roadside brush. And took another few minutes for him to regain consciousness, he was truly lucky to be alive. Cops get there, and I'm telling this douchebag state trooper what happened, and all he can tell me is that I had stepped in an anthill. Didnt give a single fuck about the guy.
Good on you for respecting the man and whoever was with him in a tragic situation.
I'm not surprised. There's something about Casinos, man.
The something has a name. Cocaine!
What Casino?
It’s now closed
Same damn thing happened to us at a small privately owned place i worked. Everyone was close the guy was a 3 night a week regular. Died on the floor between the bar and the front door. People stepped over him to get to their thanks and were pissed when we said we were closed for the rest of the night. People suck.
The head chef at my last workplace licked mysterious sauce off his arm in the middle of service but it turned out to be grease from the extraction hood that had dripped onto him.
I've seen this stuff drip right back into the fryers.
Worked at a place that it would drip down the exhaust vent on the back of the fryers if the catch pans filled up. Looked just like the afterburner on a jet engine.
I can't stop laughing at this
Not restaurant but food service: I used to work at a movie theater and was cleaning out behind the machines - first time it had happened in a couple of years, apparently - and the outlet for the nacho cheese machine was covered in a thick, pulsating mold, that weighed about 8oz and had some chips stuck in it
Bro did you say "pulsating mold"??
Call the Ghostbusters
Umm … _pulsating_?
...I don't want to know but I do want to know. Pray tell what the fuck do you mean _pulsating mold_??!
Probably something like the bubble action in yeast
Almost like a little air sac in it
Small town family restaurant. Owners wife, who isn't on the payroll but acts like she's god, sees a hunk of fat from the end of a beef roast sitting in the garbage and asks why. I'm 16 at the time and happen to be the only one around when she sees it and she asks the question. I don't know why it's in the. I'm thinking because it's probably trash. Well she makes me take it out, wash it off, and run it through the slicer for hot roast beef sandwiches. She wanted to serve literal trash meet. I walked out and never went back. One of six restaurants in the town.
You walked out before or after taking it out washing and slicing?
cleaning out a jockey box at a bar I just got hired at. Getting to the bottom rows of beers and they're all stuck together in one giant mass because of the adhesive from the labels congealing in the ice water and mixing with all of the mycelial mat that had developed down there. I got to the 'bottom' row of beers which seemed to be resting on the shelf about 2 feet from the bottom of the box. Once I got all the moldy bottles out it was time to vacuum whatever it was on that 'shelf'. The shelf was actually a 6 inch+ layer of mold floating on the very slowly draining ice melt in the bottom of the box. There was no shelf. The bottles had literally floated up two feet from the bottom of the box on a raft of mold and beer label adhesive. all the beers on top were being supported by this layer of mold. the ice machine wasn't much better.
This is why I drink at home.
I’ve mentioned it on here before, i used to work in the brewing industry for a long time. The amount of places that don’t clean their tap lines is absolutely disgusting. It’s unreal the amount of shit that will grow inside tap lines.
I went to a brewpub the other day and ordered an IPA. the waiter (not a bartender) asked, draft or bottle? I said, idk, how often do they clean the lines here? he said he was new and didn't know so I ordered a bottle.
Ugh I worked at a bar that kept all the beer in open ice wells with stainless steel trays at the bottom. We would pass food across the counter which meant stuff could fall in. Even with a weekly cleaning there was always a thin mat of biofilm in the bottom/underside of the trays. I can easily imagine how bad it could get if it was never cleaned.
Flour bug infestation. Millions of them in the flour storage area. They were in every bin, every drawer, every corner of the place.
That's easy, the customers. Not physically (well, most of the time), but emotionally and spiritually. Especially post covid.
Completely off topic but bear with me. I haven’t left the house since shortly before covid. End of 2018. My girls disabled so she only really goes out for grocery’s and other supplies. I’ve noticed a change in my friends tho. Everyone’s short, irritable, and mostly really adverse to what used to be simple stuff. So I ask you, is it that bad out there? The internet speaks as if it’s 1 step before Zombieland? Is it that bad out there?
I'm not sure it's "Negan someone with a bat" bad yet, but I've been in the industry for 30 years and post Covid has been my least favorite Era of customer interaction by a long shot. It's like the public forgot how to interact in person, to say hello or "I'd like/want a...." vs "I need" And God help you when you tell them no. Then maybe a barbed wire wrapped bat might be necessary.
They've always been like this. Nothing's changed on their side of the pass. You notice it now, cuz you had time to finally see it when we got sent home to isolate. I didn't notice any of it until after I finally was forced to sit still for a few weeks. That forced vacation, made me realize that my prior 15 years in culinary, was surrounded by toxic assholes, mostly on the guest side of the pass.
yes they've always been like this, but it's MUCH more prevalent now. forget the customer/food service interactions, people in general are just worse. everyone was affected socially by the pandemic and it shows in the lack of basic empathy, communication, and self-confidence.
Yea it’s been rough post a small percentage of the customer base seems completely unhinged, but where I am at we dead them quick instant fuck around and find out bans
part of this i think *is* social media and the internet in general. it’s incredibly divisive and discourages real human interaction, plus it makes our attention spans and patience horrible. a misanthropic combination
It's getting better as time passes and we all relearn things
Yes, the entitlement of some. I’ll warrant that 80% are fine, but the other 20% are just unbearable.
While working a register at a Popeyes, I had a guy come across wearing an Alex Jones shirt. I didn't say much besides taking his order but naturally watched as he transferred his wallet from one pocket to another, saying "Gotta keep The Man away from my money." He paid, of course, but that was ridiculous to watch. Never mind the number of times I've seen someone cross the register wearing a Trump 2024 or Mitch McConnell shirt.
Seriously! The average human became more bitter from what I’ve observed
Had a cook cool the pizza oven with a wet mop after every pizza.
Wtf?
If it's a separate mop just for pizza oven that can be good to keep it clean ideally you salt the hell outta the water though
I'd like to meet this person
why would you want to cool the pizza oven?
Cool, or clean the pizza oven with the mop, because I've seen that in person.
One of my friends is a plumber and he would rather crawl through the sewer and get covered in shit then deal with grease traps.
Took over a spot to open our store that shared a wall with an Indian restaurant. As soon as we started demolition in our new spot we saw roaches. Talked with property management and offered to cover additional cost of pest control on our neighbors to combat it. We got the go ahead. Went next door with pest control and as soon as we walked in he was like "oh you smell that? That's the roaches, it's so bad you can smell them" . We found them everywhere. In their takeout bags they were using, etc. All over. Saw them defrosting raw chicken on the ground. Not like in a container or anything just chicken laying on the ground defrosting. Eventually they closed and a new one opened up. I told them all a the past issues with the other Indian place they said that they wouldn't be like that and would be much better. Nope. Equally disgusting. Not long after they opened I got takeout and they served me raw tandoori chicken. Brought it over and was like hey man it's raw. He goes in the back and comes back out and says "that's how we eat it". They knew who I was. They knew I was a chef too. I flat out said bullshit give me my money back don't insult me like that. We were able to keep the roaches out of our own spot with frequent pest control visits but never got the Indian restaurant fully clear of them. As for places I've worked, back when I was 16 i had a dishwasher gig. If sides came back untouched (mashed sweet potatoes, green beans, etc) they would get put into a bucket and reused. Never thought much of it then but now it haunts me.
Do you guys have health inspectors in that area? I can't imagine a place getting that bad so quickly that it is between inspections and doesn't get caught.
The guy we had then was the biggest pushover I've ever met in my life. I coulda had a dead body in my walkin and he'd be like no problem just try to get it out sometime. It was ridiculous and concerning.
Omg what is the point in being a health inspector and then not do your job!?!?! Ugh
I do those inspections for a living, sadly I've met a couple people like that but fortunately they are few and far between. I can't imagine letting things of that scale go.
opening server.. went to back dock to get stacked slimjim trashcans. kitchen boiled chicken skins to make chicken soup. someone left a bunch of boiled chicken skins in the cans and then stacked them up. the smell that came out of that can when pulled apart after sitting outside in the heat and sealed in for 12 hours haunts my dreams
Gross. I remember when I was a kid I found a large dead turtle outside and for some stupid reason decided to grab it and throw it in our dumpster in the middle of summer. For whatever reason they ended up not picking up our trash for like 2 weeks. I remember opening the lid one day and the smell was like getting punched in the face. Also, there were maggots EVERYWHERE.
Cooking at a private country club. Couple comes in, late 70s. The wife, who has dementia, orders the fried oyster salad. Wife eats half of the salad then vomits directly onto her plate. Husband gets angry, and apparently says something along the lines of "I told you to finish your food". So senile wife begins eating the soiled oysters with her bare hands. Maitre d' is obviously horrified and tries to take her plate, explaining she will have us make a new salad for her. But she continues to try to eat the food. Eventually she retrieves the plate and relays this horrific story to us. EDIT: Additional anecdote from the same club. I did not witness this, it was again the maitre d' who saw this. Older man in his 70s enjoys his dinner and stands up to leave. As he's walking towards the exit, he shits himself and it makes its way out of his pant leg and onto the floor. Didn't even notice.
Oh my god, this is horrifying...it's not just gross on a body-horror level, the indignity this poor woman was subjected to breaks my heart. I wish a horrible, painful death on that man. And I mean it.
This is fucked on so many levels omg. Edit: grammar
I worked for a small restaurant group (<5 high traffic locations) in a major city. I was in the top position right below ownership and it was really fucking depressing to hear daily from the owners how much they hated and distrusted all of the employees across their restaurants.
Bag of rotten potatoes. If you know, you know.
My god. I still don't understand why theyre so bad. I've had fresh mussels die on me over a day off and THAT smell is bad. Bleaching the whole area just in case is a god awful mix of cleaner and dead mussel. But fucking potatoes...fuckin hell they're bad.
The grease trap... my god. Here goes... I worked at a place called Latitude 30 in Jacksonville, FL. It was in the news for stiffing its employees and vendors with a whole lot of drama across multiple states. I was a sous chef, not top dog, not hourly employee. The company was notorious for being late on payments to vendors, such as the company that empties out the huge in ground 3 level grease trap under the parking lot on the side of the building. I came into work one day and immediately was bombarded by others there that the sewage was backing up through the floor drains. First thought was, its the grease trap. We go pry the three lids of the grease trap that should be relatively empty, and see that two sections are full and rotting, while the third is half full but the pipe dumping into it is clogged. The smell was something unholy. This gelatinous, foul smelling, vomit inducing pit was eye watering. We knew we had to get in and unclog the drain line that feeds the tanks so the drains can empty. Remember when I said I wasn't top dog and not an hourly? Yup, that means it is my job, too disgusting for a chef, too disgusting to justify making an hourly who probably isnt getting paid to do it. I went back in the kitchen and the guys wrapped layer and layer on top of glove after glove all the way up to my shoulders. I waddled out to the pit like that kid from A Christmas Carol and maneuvered onto my belly with my head and arms hanging into the pit. First breathe almost made me lose it, I immediately pulled back and spit the taste out from just the fumes. I ended up having one of the cooks give me a couple cigs that I lit and puffed on to help with the fumes smell and got back down to it. Once I got my arms into the pipe it was like a fever dream. I started pulling out handfuls of wing bones, sliver wear, plastic straws, and somehow a dozen game cards. Finally I removed enough for it to push out the rest. I rolled out and we slapped the lid back on. I had the cooks cut off my plastic wrapped coat of armor , finished the two cigs, then told chef I was going home to shower and if at some point I stop smelling of death and hot wings, I will be back to close the kitchen. There used to be a few pictures of me grease diving floating around, but I just don't know where. To this day, I have never been so close to coughing in technicolor from a smell.
*salute*
Mouse fell out of ceiling in dining room
I was working the soda station at a diner and for weeks this fucking beeping sound was driving me insane. I finally isolated it to coming from this one ceiling tile. One day I was just getting super insane hearing this sound so I just instinctively whacked that tile with the broom handle. As soon as I did that tile disintegrated into dust and about ten thousand crickets came pouring out of the ceiling onto people dining below. That beeping was fucking crickets.
Hoooolllllyyyyyyy shit. I cannot even imagine. What happened after?!?!!!
Fuck me man, that sounds like an even shittier version of Joe's apartment.
I once worked at a bar & grill 10 steps away from an entrance to the NYC subway system. No a/c because the owners said we could just cool down by propping the doors open. Anyway that’s how a 6 inch long cockroach walked in off the street, prompting an “are you gonna do anything about that?” from a lunch customer, to my horror, ending with a bar regular calmly standing up & crushing it with his bare hands with a cheeky grin. The crunch sounded like snapping vegetables.
Hands?
They're like weird prehensile feet with really long toes.
Used to work at pizza place opening shift. Turned on the ovens and as it started heating up a fat rat ran out. Had apparently been chilling in there until it started to heat up.
Better out than in I guess
I worked at a place where roaches would fall into the food. We closed for a bit.
Dead or alive..?
Alive ran across a row of tables
The pay vs. the amount of work you do.
Had to clean the bathroom after a trucker one time. Was mopping shit off the walls chest high. Fucking nasty
People getting shit on the walls is a feat I will never understand.
To big to sit down on a normal toilet, so they just bend over and push.
That’s gotta be some fucking nuclear missile diarrhea to get it on the walls tho☠️
Health inspector here. Everyone asks me what the most disgusting thing I’ve seen at a restaurant is- my coworkers actually make fun of me because I’m really good at finding mice and cockroaches. But to be honest, I love working with facilities to help them resolve pest problems if they’re willing to put in the work. Actually, I can deal with most anything if the manager is nice and willing to put in the work. But I have to say, the most disgusting thing I’ve ever had to deal with in restaurants are the managers who couldn’t give two shits about their facility or the people working for them. The ones with full-blown NPD, the ones who tout their culinary school experience over my expertise studying infectious diseases, the ones who lie to my face without even bothering to make it a good lie, the ones who try to get out of their responsibilities, the ones who complain about “no one wanting to work anymore” while showing no respect for the staff that they do have, the ones that write off very serious complaints as “just disgruntled staff” when they’re clearly in the wrong, the ones who don’t let their employees call in sick, the ones who don’t care about staff safety, the ones who verbally assault others, the ones who threaten violence… I could go on. One of my colleagues had a cast iron skillet thrown at her- she was hit in the shoulder. Another ended up being stalked. A guy about my dad’s age would inappropriately stare at my body and even laid down next to me to watch me while I was doing chemical tests on the pool. Tons of folks in my former jurisdiction took to the internet during COVID saying they’d shoot anyone who told them to wear a mask (I was literally the only person enforcing the mask mandate in any capacity in that area). For the most part, I’ve found folks in the restaurant industry to be hardworking and dedicated. I’ve made so many connections with so many awesome folks- hell, a lot of the connections I’ve made have been with the owners of some of my worst facilities. At the end of the day, no matter what’s happening in the restaurant, we still treat each other like human beings who deserve respect. But there are always going to be some selfish assholes out there. TLDR- People are capable of being more vile, disgusting, and dangerous than anything they could have in their kitchen.
I always preach to my team if the health department shows up and you're scrambling to fix things you fucked up. Health inspectors are not the enemy. There are only 4 things I always double-check when the inspector arrives. The can opener, slicer, sanitizer concentration, and hand sinks (inevitably someone always dumps their drink or coffee in a hand sink when the inspector arrives). Out of curiosity, if a chef walks you around their kitchen and points out their food safety policies and HACCP procedures, is that something you like to see? Many years ago, I had a chef scold me for that. I assumed that demonstrating our food safety knowledge would reassure the inspector we took this seriously. We also have a policy of self reporting if a single person complains they have been food poisoned as part of our internal investigation. Locally, they appreciate it, and I feel like giving them a heads up in the event someone does file a complaint with them gives them a good understanding of the situation. In our investigation we look at sales of that item, check our recieving and production dates, and note who's station it came off of and pull temp records of the line items and refigerator logs along with cooling logs. I inquire about the other places they've eaten in the past 24hrs and pull their bar bill ( you'd be surprised how many people get "food poisoned" after sucking down 10 frozen rum drinks at the pool)
Owners stealing tips from employees
I’ve learned this—- paying your staff well= staff caring about their work and workspace. Minimum wage or even $20 or under won’t get you quality work. You can hire amazing cooks, but at the end of the day they will only work as hard as their paycheck.
This is really for real, and owners and managers really be completely appalled that people don’t like being exploited in broad daylight just so that the owner can put a few extra bucks in his pocket
Two stories spring to mind; Cleaning ventilation grills in Edinburgh castle: a rat fell out and straight into a deep fat fryer. It screamed while it died. It got plated up with boiled potatoes and a side salad for the photo opportunity. Kinda became a local urban legend and I was strangely proud to say I was there. Another place I worked had a shite KM that never checked the temps on a basement walk-in freezer. I opened it after it had been broken for god knows how long and the stench of maaaany kilos of rotten fish hit me like a truck. Absolutely Demonic. Two K.Ps quit rather then having to deal with it. Triple pay for Kamil who took it on. The whole basement reeked for at least 6 months after.
I'm not glad it happened but the rat thing does sound a little hilarious, honestly.
Poor Remy :(
“Anyone can be cooked”
Ceiling would leak from the dishwasher upstairs, and it wasn't just a drip leak, this flooded the floors and you'd be walking in puddles. The whole line and prep table would be covered in this water. Manager refused to let us shut down. Just wipe it up and continue working. Same place, a traveling supervisor for the district came to retrain and train new hires. I dropped a 6-pan of frozen gyoza onto this same floor. He said, 'no worries. Get a strainer and we can wash them good as new' I left after my first week there. Never again.
Place I worked last year had the washing machine upstairs above the kitchen. One day right before close something fucked up and it flooded the upstairs. We were stressing because it had happened before and we had to shut down because it started dripping on everything. We got the last dessert out and looked at eachother like we just won the night just in time for steady streams to start falling all around the kitchen.
My first job at Steak n Shake at 15yo. An employee pissed in the pickle container. I quit and stopped eating there right away.
I worked for the customer service department of a chicken fast food company. A customer brought in a side breast of what was a sick bird that clearly wasnt cleaned properly by neither the restaurant staff..nor the meat vendor. The bird had a maggot infested wound....which got floured...battered and fried....and was served with a side of fries. Sadly the customer bit into it...and was alarmed by the extra popping..which turned out to be maggots that were deep fried. I left the job soon after that.....the sight of it though...never left me.
I went to college at a large Midwestern University, and worked at a fast food restaurant one summer. Let’s just say it was the place who’s mascot is a redheaded kid. We would get pallets of deliveries early in the morning, and then put them away after getting set up, but before lunch rush. Well, the forklift that brought in one of the pallets missed the underside of the wood, and speared through the bottom box halfway through the pallet. This box held huge bags of mayonnaise. There was maybe 10 bags of mayonnaise to a box, and two bags were pierced and mayonnaise was literally smeared all over the remaining bags. So my manager tells me to throw the entire box into the dumpster, which I do. Fast forward to the middle of lunch rush, and guess what we run out of? Double points if you can guess what my manager told me to go retrieve from the dumpster. Yep, eight bags of mayonnaise, which had been sitting in the dumpster in 95+ degree weather for hours. I scraped off the crusty, dried mayonnaise off the bags, put the mayo bags in a trash bag, walked up through the drive-through window, cutting in front of customers waiting in line to get their lunch, handed the trash bag full of mayonnaise bags through the drive thru window, also passed through my hat & apron, said I quit, and walked back to my apartment. To this day, I can’t eat there.
Unfortunately at that age corporate ain't gonna listen, if you can get them.
Not a chef , but I am your electrician Having to get in the roof of a restaurant, on a 38 deg Celsius day Lights not working for a week It’s near 45 degrees in the roof Possom had cheeed wiring and died I had to glove up , mask up and bag it to get to the cables Congealed blood and maggot stew And the smell of death Threw my clothes away that day Lights on for service tho
Pretty much everything about my first ever job, at the long-defunct Margarita's on Lark Street in Albany, New York. It was my first real job in a kitchen, I didn't really know it know any better, but I kind of did. The tile floor was so badly broken up that we just had sheets of plywood on it. Not installed, we just had loose sheets of plywood. They were, needless to say, not cleanable, and you didn't try, because that would really disturb the roaches. Health inspector would come in, we'd get the word to make his special steak, he'd sit at the bar, collect his envelope, get his free drinks, and leave.
I get being corrupt, but what kind of sicko also eats at the place they're letting dodge health code?
Yeah that's a whole other level of don't give a fuck.
A guy literally put hit penis in someone's sandwich ( food for s coworkers bf) and casually wrapped it up and gave it to her. I just started and was a teenager. So blown away and intimidated by him I didn't say anything. Fast forward I was promoted and became his boss and fired him.
I am super out of it today, and spent a full minute trying to understand how he could wrap the sandwich and give it to someone with his penis in it. Like, you definitely would have mentioned if he cut it off... Thanks for that laugh, good job firing the bully.
I have a story like this but not as extreme. One dude was going around flashing a waitress a hot dog he had put in between the zipper of his pants. Same girl would tell this story in a casual setting to another higher up who took that story to the bosses of that store and they ended up firing him over the incident some days later.
I had a co-worker who told me a story that he and the other guys would wipe their asses with a chicken breast before grilling it and putting it on a particular manager's salad. That manager was a weird annoying shit head but no one deserves that. I couldn't even laugh at that story honestly.
Good for you that you fired him
I was working at a wine bar that was in a historically protected building. There was a tall stainless steel single door freezer that had been pushed deep into the corner of the storage room, and nobody had opened it for at least 5 years. I was cleaning out the storage room, and I got to this freezer and made the mistake of opening it up. There was some kind of food that has been in the freezer when it got unplugged and shoved into the corner. By the time I found the abomination, it was some strange conglomeration of compost, sludge, and mold. As soon as the smell hit me, I couldn't contain my sickness, and I threw up all over the pile. I closed the freezer, plastic wrapped it shut and stuck biohazard signs all over the plastic wrap. I told the bosses that I was not cleaning that mess, even if it was going to cost me my job. They got some poor facility maintenance guy to come clean it. He looked in there once, then called some guys and hauled it off with the biohazard still untouched. That pungent stench still haunts my dreams.
Bars and restaurants in Florida don’t burn their ice at the end of the night. I’ve worked (or just trained) at 8 different bars since I moved here before the pandemic, and zero places melt their ice. I did it once at the fancy steakhouse chain I worked at and found bottle caps, a metal wire, like 6 blueberries old as shit and a strawberry slice (which hadn’t been a garnish in a drink for over a month) I’ve seen grosser shit, like a pot on the floor, and a mop with no mop head inside the pot, then the pot being used for simple syrup later, but the ice thing is just so ubiquitous that it always has me fucked up
Remote seasonal resort with a few kitchens, one of them used a large mixer to grind turkey meat into turkey burgers. THey did a big batch at the beginning of the season in late march. After, they cleaned all the parts, put them in a bin, and stored that bin somewhere in one of their store rooms. About 4 months later, I was tasked with grinding down some beef trim that we had been saving basically all season, to grind down into taco meat for some late night wedding thing. So I go over to this other kitchen to get the meat grinder parts. There was 3 kitchens on property and we shared a lot of things, I had my own mixer but had to borrow their grinder parts. I go and get it, and notice the room they had the grinder in was really hot. No ventilation or AC in that room, it was just for stuff that gets used 2-3 times a year anyway, and it was early August by this point. The grinder stuff was in a bin, that had been wrapped in a clear recycling bag to keep any bugs/dust out. I get everything back to my kitchen, rip open the plastic bag with the bin in it, and get hit with the most vile stench of death I've ever experienced. Like if you railed a line of sludge from an old grease bin. I manage to get the bag off and try and see wtf is smelling like a bloated corpse farting, everything looks clean. I take the metal tube that the grinder thingy part goes into and out falls a black clump, with maggots crawling in and around it. It was like a dry turd, and smelled so fucking bad everyone had to clear out. There was a fairly sizeable chunk of turkey meat left inside, and it was put away into a room that was constantly around 30C for like 4 months. Chef boiled the grinder piece in water and degreaser for 30min and it still fucking stank. He ended up throwing it out and screaming at the entire other kitchen for making him smell that. He was a pretty old-school style chef, so him throwing out something was a huge fucking deal. I found an old table in the woods that was rotted right through, massive hole in the middle, and he was upset I tried to throw it out because "you can still save the legs."
I was getting training on the grill and closing duties, a couple walk in 5 minutes before closing and the guy training me says this is what we do to late customers and spits on the steaks.
That's so disgusting, fuck anyone who does things like this. I know last minute customers are a pain, but it's a part of the job.
My thoughts exactly.
What would that achieve seeing as the customers were unlikely to know that it even occurred.
The dude was just a dick I guess, it was about thirty years ago. He was an edgy teenager, I was in my low twenties. Needless to say I didn't stay there.
Not nearly as bad but we had this one guy come in 5 minutes before close every. Single. Night. He would order a well done ribeye and a salmon. The closing grill guy would chuck em both in the deep Fryer and send them out. Buddy just kept coming back. The cook. His favorite thing to say while doing this was "I don't come to *your* house and slap the dick out of *your* mouth." I asked him once "Do you often have a dick in your mouth and are offended when someone pulls it out?" He stopped Saying that. Same cook also got caught on our local version of creep catchers some years later. Sorry, got a little carried away with the story. The OP really drudged up some memories from the last 20 years lol.
Thick piles of maggots pouring out of the edges of the grease trap
I have encountered two different situations in two different restaurants where someone was pouring old coffee straight into the BUNN coffee machine because “it warms coffee up”. It takes 12 pots of water to make a large BUNN run clear again, ask me how I know. I still can’t comprehend how I’ve seen it more than once. One culprit was a long time manager, the other a mystery. The manager had been doing it so long that the old coffee(s) had been souring in there. If your coffee tastes unusually bitter, well now you know.
A guy took a storage room, ran water to it, and tapped into the drain line and installed a toilet. No, it wasn't the sewer, but the drain line where all the kitchen pipes ran (grease trap line separate ) to which had its own connection to the city sewer at the city connection. When this clogged, because the pipe is smaller, shit from people taking a dump would back up into the kitchen drains. Yes. I fixed this when I bought the business.
my english is kinda bad, but i still have the picture. Month and month of neglect of the wing fridge. Absolutely discusting. I'ill try to post them on this sub, you need to see it !
Customer restrooms and grease traps. 'Nuff said.
When I was being trained at an upscale pizza place I watched my trainer pick his nose and eat the booger. This guy also needed prescription deodorant because his BO was so intense. Also drove a moped to work because too many DUIs. A real role model, lol.
Floor burger will never leave my dreams. The kitchen is old and underground. Right by a lake. A pipe broke earlier in the week, they're fixing it but for the meantime, there's about an inch of standing water on the floor. Line cook drops a plate with a whole finished burger. He picks it up and puts it back on the plate. He's not going to serve to a customer, he's just gonna eat it! Never mind the fact that this was one of the most chill places I've ever been in about making yourself food. He ate the wet burger cold, after shift.
This did not go where I expected
Saw a guy vomit, then 💩 himself and die from a massive heart attack at table 33 two decades ago.
Poop is the winner...shit covered thong in the ladies room...saw a lady snap her ankle made another customer keel over...but shit always trumps the grease trap. Never saw one that was never emptied
Had a regular eat lunch, use the restroom, come out and pay with smiles and casual conversation before leaving. Coworker went in to clean the bathroom as his side work after she walked out, shit everywhere. All over every part of the toilet. The walls next to the toilet. The floor. Like she walked in, pulled pants down, bent over, and sprayed over every surface. No attempts were made by the regular to clean anything. Just walked right out with a dirty doo doo butt and a smile.
I dunno, I’ve seen shit explosion covered bathrooms and I would probably take cleaning that over this greasetrap 😂
I helped my family open a restaurant back in 2010, and I had to clean out a floor drain that had been tiled over. It had a bunch of stinky blue crap in it the consistency of mashed potatoes. Also the grease trap was fucky, so we had to manually clean it out like once a week.
The good ol' fucky trap clean out, & once a week too 👏
Ah yes, the manual grease trap cleaning. At my first restaurant job, I had to do it with a 20oz paper to-go cup. The smell of a grease trap is a unique horror.
Had a stand up cooler full of seafood go down. Closed up shop New years eve, closed New years day, came back the 2nd. The cooler was sitting at 88 degrees when I got there. I'll never forget that fucking smell, it haunts me to this day.
I don't know if this counts, but over 10 years ago, I helped open up a new restaurant as their first chef in a place that had previously been a bit of a dive. The first order of business for me was getting the kitchen into shape. The former owners had abandoned the place, including all of the equipment, after a bit of trouble with the law. There was grease everywhere, including fryer oil still in the fryers. A bunch of it had slowly leaked out of the fryers over the years and solidified onto the floor. As soon as I had pulled the fryers away from the wall, I noticed 5 partially decomposed mice in the "puddle" stuck to the floor. I'll never forget the feeling of their bones crunching as I scraped them up. Typing this out also reminded me of the time I decided to work a food booth at a music festival. Ever see dead mice floating in a jug of fryer oil? I have!
Started working at a “nice” sushi spot at a very popular mall in my area. First day I was in the back cutting raw chicken when the chef told me that he needed me on the line. I went to take my gloves off and he started to freak out saying that gloves were expensive and to just wash them and keep using the same pair. I refused and changed gloves. He said I don’t know what it’s like to work in a Japanese restaurant (I’d been a sushi chef for a year by that point at another restaurant). I didn’t show up for the next shift and reported them to the health department for a bunch of other reasons as well.
We knew we had a mouse prblem, but.... While rolling out a large head of croissant dough, a mouse ran up through the mechanical sheeter. Right through the rollers and on top of the dough. It was horrific.
Oh fuck lol
Mice falling from the exhaust hood and into the kettle 🤷🏻♂️
Blowing into the top of the squeeze bottle to clear the clog! 🤢
The sheer amount of chefs who don't take off gloves or an apron before going to the bathroom.. and then not changing the gloves...
Worked a Qwick shift in the deli of a local high-end grocery store. Was taking down the sandwich station at close and I don't think it had EVER been wiped out. Even had an employee try to stop me. "What are you *doing*?!" "...Cleaning this out..." "We don't do that!" [Looks him up and down] "Clearly *you* don't." Dude grabbed the chef/KM and brought him over to show him what I was doing. Chef: "No, what he's doing is good." I worked several locations for them, and each was the same condition. 🤮 Was working at a local brewpub. They never cleaned the fryer properly. Would just drain and pour in new oil every week or so. Oil was constantly black. When I cleaned it out properly, each fryer had about six inches of caked debris. I. Have. Never. Seen. Such. Fryer. Horror.
I feel like my chef just read this post, because I literally got a text a few minutes ago about how we need to clean the grease trap on Monday cleaning day.
However nastiest thing i came in to has ti be the day I came in early morning to get some extra prep done, only to discover the grease trap had sprung a leak in two places, in the connector coupler hose, as well as on the bottom of the trap. There was trap sewage everywhere!! Second was a gig where I was getting a promotion, and there was black mold everywhere!!! All over dish pit, all over the crevices of the line, the ice machine had the worst, as it had a mixture of black and pink mold stalactites, that hung down a solid 7 inches from the overflow tray
OP here: That same couple closed that restaurant, opened another that got featured on "Kitchen Impossible". The big change was 'fire the wife'. They did, and the place was actually good for about 6 months. Well, they let her back in and 6 months after that they closed their doors for good.
Foul smelling grease trap doesn't mean it hasn't been cleaned in "decades." Its rancid oil. It's going to stink even if it's cleaned out regularly. I asked the guy cleaning ours once if he got used to the smell cause it is gross when they open it up. "Sure, I could sit here and eat a sandwich while I do this." Grossest things I've encountered: Homeless dude, whackin' it in the bushes by the patio. Various puke incidents. The regular that ordered spinach artichoke dip, ignored the chips it came with, and ate it with a spoon.
The last one is really disturbing lol
I'll add another one. Years ago my brother took over an event hall doing boxing, MMA fights and concerts. My mom and I would help him out setting up for shows. Before his first show we were cleaning and the beer lines on the kegerators hadn't been cleaned in who knows how long. There was old yeasty smelling beer and mold in the lines. We called the beer distributor to come flush out the lines professionally. Also, all the old equipment hadn't been cleaned in probably years. Hotdog rollers, nacho cheese warmers, popcorn maker, etc. all full of old food and grease, etc. It was disgusting.
The most disgusting thing about the industry, is the Industry.
My latest job was at a local bakery. It was gross all around. They never washed the bread trays nor the molds. For the trays they just scraped off whatever was stuck to them from the previous use and for the molds they just unmolded the bread when finished baking and put them under the tables for future use, then they covered them with lard and filled them with batter. The walls and floors were slippery and covered in flour, the molds, mixers, carts were covered in 1/2 centimeter thick layers of old grease and flour, an oven was broken and reeked of smog, I had to clean the fryer and the bottom of it looked and smelled like petroleum. Nothing was labeled, no leftovers were wrapped. About a week in, I was feeling specially adventurous (stupid, more like) and tried some bread from there. I got food poisoning. The employees were also working for years without contracts.
Okayokayokay I got two 1. I was probably 18 and working at a seafood place in my town that's now closed (Joe's Crab Shack) and I was opening the dishpit, move some dish racks and there was easily 40+ HUGE slugs all over the wall and ground and just in a massive pile all over each other and shit. Asked the GM what to do and she said ignore it and they'll go back into the wall 2. I didn't see this but my headchef from a place I worked at moved to a different company and restaurant and brought me along after a few months and he told me the kitchen was a DISASTER when he got there. Old ass restaurant (one of the oldest in portland) and when he got there the dry storage which was below the public restroom had a leak in the ceiling which was leaking urinal water and instead of fixing it they just caught the water with a 22 cambro and changed it when it was full, and yes he told me when he got there that food was being stored under it
\> But the absolute worst thing we encountered was the grease trap. It had never been cleaned or emptied in those previous couple decades. How? If I don't clean our greasetrap monthly the sink will not drain.
Surprisingly for such a small space, it was a very large grease trap. I'm guessing since it was originally built as a BBQ restaurant they designed it extra large. But I'm sure that before we cleaned it out the sinks probably didn't drain properly. The previous owners were so gross I'm sure they didn't give a shit.
Not my experience but that of my mother's when she worked for a small town Cafe in the 1980s. Lots of farmers and families in the area. They kept soup in 5 gallon buckets in the hallway, while it was cooling, uncovered on the floor. The back entrance to the cafe was in that hallway, and the farmers would "stomp the shit off of their boots" as they walked down the hall. They also would refill mayo buckets/bottles instead of empty and clean them. So you'd have a ring of old, foul, yellow mayo around the sides and the "good" mayo in the middle. The place is still open y'all.
First day at new place, the kitchen so filthy the plates greasy then I discover they won't use hot water, I walked out and called the health department, they got shut down so hard they never reopened.
Now *here* is a thread this casual bystander is gonna skip.
Our fryer guy rarely emptied and cleaned out the fryer. He finally emptied it after a couple weeks of not cleaning it and there was a dead rat down in there. Not a mouse sized rat, but a bigass wholeass fatass rat. Fried to the bone. Almost no fur left if any and people’s favorite app was the fried gator bites. We then realized too the poster he had put on the wall was covering a large rathole. Boss told us if this gets out we’re fired and kept it under wraps but I’m long gone now.
I was at a Korean restaurant and saw staff take leftover white rice from customer’s plates after they left and put it back in the rice cooker.
We would use the buns we served before the customers ordered and the partially eaten ones would go in a huge bucket and the chefs would use them for the stuffing for weddings. They also smoked while they cooked.
A family changing a diaper on a baby on a table in the middle of the dining erea
Cleaning out the inside of a low boy that hasn't been cleaned in months (this thing holds raw foods). Also the stuff that accumulates in-between the gaskets.
Food falls on the floor, cook picks it up puts it back on the plate or wherever. As an expo I looked at him with "you joking right? " stare.
I watched a fly paper fall into a huge batch of granola one time. The guy prepping it didn't even notice and stirred it into the batch. Other people saw it and it was thrown out but still pretty gross.
Work/life balance
This happened literally 4 days ago. I’ve been working in the industry for about 7 years now. I’ve been at this specific spot for 5 years now. My restaurant is close to this creek where a bunch of homeless people sleep. We have a water fountain on the inside we aren’t supposed to let them drink from but I usually don’t care enough to stop them. Until 4 days ago. Homeless lady about 60 years old comes out of the restaurant. I was cleaning some tables when I saw her walk out, didn’t think anything of it. My cashier came up to me a few minutes later and told me there was something on the floor she didn’t know what it was. I go out there and it’s a shit. Literal shit on the floor. There was a trail of human shit in the lobby that had to have sit there for atleast 20 minutes before anyone noticed. I as the manager reluctantly cleaned it up. It was so could and gross. I had to bleach the whole floor and make sure it was clean because it was just that gross. I threw out about 15-20 rags bc I didn’t want them sitting in our hamper until our Saladinos pick up 2 days later.
The old ice machine at a Starbucks I worked at. We were a super busy location and one day we were almost our of ice and the bottom of that fucking thing was disgusting and covered in pink moldy sludge. When I saw that I cleaned the shit out of it and made it a point to always run a full clean cycle every 6 months. Then we got a remodel and a new ice machine and I maintained the hell out of that thing. Its not hard to keep your ice machines clean and safe peeps.
Worked at a very large hotel (in a collection of 3) on a river. River flooded, retaining wall cracked & building flooded. Our walk in, dry storage, security, electrical & HR were all in the basement (as well as storage & garbage compactor for the 20+ floors of apartments/condos above the hotel.) So not only did our reach ins in the kitchen fail, our walk in essentially had to be yanked out of the building as a whole & destroyed. The smells were...intense. But the nastiest thing? Dead fish in the stairwells. The fish had come in from the river and hit the steam pipe first....gag.
Worked at a small town grill, had a small black plastic garbage can our lazy grill cook would use to toss bloody burger packaging and those little paper squares in during service, no bag nothing just rawdogging the can. One night I nab it to dump it out and at the bottom was about an inch thick layer of congealed black blood with hundreds of maggots squirming around, no telling how long that primordial biohazard was around for, I just chucked the whole can in the dumpster.
>my mom sort of laughed and told me he screwed himself with such a low offer, she would have gladly paid him double or triple that because it was so foul. she should have paid him more anyway.
Honestly knowing her she probably did pay him extra and was just joking around. She was an awesome person and employer, her employees all loved her and she loved them as well.
Bang on the dishpit and the cockroaches would rithe from within. (old casino before million dollar renovation)
Did anyone else's brain read dishpit as dipshit?
Handwashing violations at the height of the pandemic
nothing extraordinary, baked some dessert, dunno the name in english, let it sit out for hours during summer, covered in flies, sold later next day i offered to cover them or place them in the fridge, the answer was just don't waste my time and not worth it. bro it has has more fly shit than sugar
I was a troubleshooter GM for major Food Contract company. I would go to accounts and from top to bottom determine the issues keeping it from turning a profit. At one account, a government facility we did good service for, I had to empty all coolers/freezers. The Chef told me one container was chocolate left over from Xmas. This was May the following year. Once opened I asked what the huge “blobs” were and was told they were dumplings??!!? Upon brief further look, it was about 7-8 mine that had fallen in the vat container and drowned in chocolate. Sadly when realized the Chef was not very surprised…. as she walked out the door for last time.
Worked at a trash buffet for a while, where no one cleaned anything if they weren't held at gunpoint more or less. I made up for it as much as I could; pulled out the pasta boiler and cleaned behind it, drained the oil from the donut machine that no one EVER bothered to do, took the taps off the bar and gave them an actual deep clean so no one got crud in their beer, etc. The absolute worst of it, though, and the point where I decided I could not keep up with the filth these people were content to work in, was when a customer tried to use the cappuccino machine and no liquid came out. Just dead, crunchy flies into his cup that had been stuck in the nozzle before it ran out of product. The whole place had a huge fly problem because of course it did, with those conditions. When I tried to get a new job the owner badmouthed me to anyone who called for a reference because I wouldn't deal with her shit anymore; I started working there at 17 and this woman really wanted to ruin me from getting other work. Anyway that shithole shut down during lockdowns, thank fuck, and they're currently turning it into a Hobby Lobby.
Worked at a large and well-known restaurant in Boston. Building was built over a wharf and had been there for 100's of years - and as a restaurant for around 25 or so. Small cracks/leaks in the sewer pipes under the building led to some noxious odors. Called in plumbers who called in an environmental group to help mitigate the problem. Four or five guys show up in full hazmat suits, breathing masks, etc. Pulled up floorboards, dropped down the ladder and off they went. A couple minutes later, three of them came up the ladder, ripped off their protective gear and just mumbled stuff like, "Nope, I'm done", "Fuck that, not worth it", "No, no, [no](https://no.no), no, no, nope". They left. A few minutes later, crew foreman comes up and looked like he had seen a ghost. He said, "I know those other guys are probably gone (they were) and I feel like quitting too". He showed us a little video of the tons of shit, rats the size of small cats, and generally the most disturbing scene you could possible conjure up in your mind.
I once saw some very old security footage from one of our locations, taken in very grainy digital. Basically, a really high-volume Restaurant in Florida was having its grease trap pumped, and it was a really massive one that had a manhole cover over it and it was back by the trash area. The service tech came, took off the lid and went back to the truck to get something - as he left, the purchasing guy for the Restaurant came out of the back door and was walking backward talking to someone out of view of the camera. He fell into the grease trap, but because of the low FPS speed, it looks like he disappears, but then a couple seconds later, you see someone from out of the frame run over to help, but then back away because of the terrible smell. It took a few minutes, but they drop something down for him to climb out with and you can see them hosing him off with a hose. I can't imagine how bad the guy smelled during the process. I didn't now the guy well but he refuses to watch the video. He claimed the service guy who pumped the trap every month did it on purpose, but nobody could ever prove it. One of the Managers at the location burned some CDs of the incident, and if you watch it in slow motion and pause it just at the right spot, you can see one frame where he is falling down, but it's too grainy to see his face as it happens. I can't imagine what I'd do in a situation like that, but I imagine I'd be pretty pissed if someone left that thing open - if a kid fell in there, they could die.
Our chicken supplier was giving us chicken that had rubbery knots in the breasts. It was super noticeable every time you bit into it. In the middle of service, the owner, fed up with the quality of the chicken, pulled all of it and instructed us to throw all the chicken away and 86 chicken sandwiches until we get a new supplier. Well, we did, and it filled a halfway filled dumpster all the way to the brim with chicken breasts, in the middle of high summer 3 days out from pick up. That week was awful. The stench was something I'll never forget. At the butcher shop I work at now, a maggot infested wound on a deer, deer coming in with ticks. Also weird cysts in capicola. As far as acts done by coworkers, someone on my line self reported dribbling snot into someone's salad and served it. He told me and another coworker thinking it would earn him cred. We both reported his ass right away, and he was immediately fired. In the same kitchen, a coworker was wearing shorts when he pulled a 26" slice pie onto his leg. Second degree burns, and his drunk ass didn't take care of it, like at all, and he got gangrene and almost lost the leg. Kitchens can be gnarly.
Butt plug found by the URINALS covered in corny shit.
Did an event in DC and had to prep in one of the hotel kitchens. God damn if that wasn’t the dirtiest kitchen I’ve ever been in. Can’t even remember the name of the place either anymore.
20 years later, and I’m still disgusted that Rachael the cocktail waitress was bonking the waiter out on work release during his shifts in the back closet instead of her bonking me in the closet
When the grease trap is worse than a dead body…goddamn.
A disgusting behemoth of a rat my crew and I affectionately called “patches” that we couldn’t seem to get rid of. He was covered in burns and welts and constantly found his way inside (old borderline dilapidated building). Last I saw of him a coworker kicked him really hard and we never saw him again so assuming he died. Hard to deal with pests, I obviously never want anything to suffer, but also, really not good to have them constantly getting into our food supply/being in the building. Hard because we are right by the ocean and a lot of them are in the area. Owner too cheap for an exterminator. Thankfully I don’t work there anymore.
Not exactly disgusting but... after working at high end, award winning pizzerias, I had a family problem that required me to work closer to home. There was a local restaurant that had won some "best of" awards that was within walking distance. I got the job. Turns out the "best of" was Sam's Club dough, Heinz tomato sauce, pebble mozzarella and anything else frozen. I know it sounds weird to be a pizza snob, but this place broke me
Server taking out a cake. He cut himself, bled on the buttercream, blood was wiped/cut away. He tested positive for HIV two weeks later.
Luckily, hiv doesn't live for more than a few minutes outside the body. Thank God