Dirty Restaurant Secrets

Times are hard and even restaurants are penny pinching. But are these restaurant tricks valid or are they just cheating you, the customer? Ben Widdicombe told all in his Slashfood article 10 Dirty Little Restaurant Secrets:

10. Using Cabbage in Place of Seaweed

Says a former maître d' at an expensive Chinese restaurant known for its celebrity clientele: "The owner figured his customers knew nothing about Chinese food (he was right) and was a genius at saving money. A specialty supplier used to provide edible seaweed for the popular seaweed appetizer, but when that got too expensive the boss began experimenting.

"The 'seaweed' on the menu ended up becoming thin strips of cabbage leaf, deep-fried, and then rolled in equal amounts of salt and sugar. It's possible even cardboard would taste good if prepared like that, but the dish remained a bestseller."

7. Topping Pitchers of Beer with Seltzer Water

Don't think the fiddling is restricted to top-shelf liquors, either. "In sports bars that sell pitchers of beers, the thing to do is to top the pitchers off with seltzer after the table has ordered like the third one," a source says. "The drunker the guys, the more seltzer they get." [...]

4. Serving Rotten Meat

A steakhouse employee in New York says that sometimes not all the meat is as fresh as it should be. "It's an old trick to keep the steak that's past its prime and wait until somebody orders it well done or medium-well," the insider says. "The more you cook the meat, the more you disguise its flavor. When I'm eating out I never order anything higher than medium rare, because I know how the kitchen gets rid of bad meat."

Link

Care to share your own food service experience?


I worked two summers at a "gourmet" (LOL) restaurant while in college. Let's see: food that had been stepped in was served, the rats nest in the oven caught fire so the rats moved to under the refrigerator, the vegetable server guy sweated into the food like a waterfall, the waiters would tell us which customers were nice or bad and the customer got "extras" (though the wait staff was also hated by the cooks and vice versa), rotting stuff was chopped up and spiced, pepper was often cigarette ashes....and on and on.
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My wife has her first kitchen job out of culinary school, and everything she tells me makes me sad about eating out. This is one of the better restaurants in town, but she's seen things dropped on the floor rinsed off, things picked out of the garbage can (at least it's all food garbage...), re-used slimy lettuce that's been sitting in a tub for a week for salads, microwaving $100 lobsters and plenty more I can't think of right now.

Nothing really obscene, but still...
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I don't really have a gross out comment, but I recently went to a restaurant that just went all non-smoking (due to PA law, believe me they were peeved). Their business has been hit big time. The meals are still filling, but their much smaller. Condiments and napkins are no longer on the table and you can no longer get free refills.s

Imagine not having napkins on the table in a diner.

Talk about cutting costs!
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A previous employer of mine had lunch at a chain of restaurants called The Pickle Barrel (I have another story about that place), and he was eating the coleslaw but bit down on something hard. He took it out of his mouth, and it looked like what he thought was a tooth. He called the waiter, and the waiter called the manager. He showed the manager it, who kept asking to see it (probably to "take it off his hands"), and he said "Oh no, that's just sand. Sometimes sand gets in the cabbage and makes a cabbage stone". A man at the table beside him says "I'm a dentist, how about I have a look at it"?

His response was "Yep! It's a tooth, and it's one that should have seen a dentist A LONG time ago"! The manager offered to get him a new serving coleslaw, but my boss said no thanks, he had lost his appetite.
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A friend of mine who's a former employee of a restaurant, with the initials "DQ", claimed that at one time any hamburger patties that were cooked during the day and not used were ground up for the next day chili. I'm not sure how disgusting that is but I'm sure some of those patties had to be sitting around a while or overcooked. I wonder if Wendy's does the same thing.
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The retirement home I worked for only brewed decaf coffee. We'd pretend that we had both regular & decaf, but it was all the same. I guess safer for the residents who really couldn't handle caffeine.
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When working as a busyboy long ago, the owner would yell at us if we didn't re-use lemon wedges and butter pats that were 'not too badly damaged'
I now ensure those items are too damaged for re-use wherever I go.

Oh- and the rinsing off of items that hit the kitchen floor was pretty common stuff- if there was the time or inclination to do so.
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I worked at a grocery store deli in the late '80s, and the deli manager grew up in the depression. She'd proudly tell us how her family ate "everything on the pig but the squeal."

One day, I was told to prepare the chickens for the roaster/spit thingie. I grabbed the case of chicken out of the cooler, and on opening it, was bowled over by the smell. It was a week outdated, and turning GREEN. The deli manager told me to wash it off in cold water and proceed.

I told her I wouldn't. She could do it herself if she wanted it done.

When I got home from work, I called and reported it to the health department.

Also, don't buy the cubes of cheese and pepperoni sticks. They just pare the mold off the bigger chunks and repackage it.

The sandwich spread made in the deli is leftover from the ends of meat chunks that are too small to slice. We always left out the head cheese and souse. That part's not too bad, but in order to make it look more pink and fresh, we were instructed to put in a couple boxes of cherry Jell-O powder...

I've got many, MANY more stories about grocery store delis and bakeries that would make you puke.
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I worked at a DQ for almost 10 years from HS thru college and The Chili came frozen in a jug.
I never messed with peoples food no matter how much of a jerk they were.

Grilled chicken comes pre-cooked and frozen, all they do is "boost" it in a microwave.
They "boost" all of the sandwiches to make the bun (which was toasted way earlier in the day) warm and melt cheese.
The gravy for the chicken strips comes as a Mix that you just pour into water, it is then held in a warmer ALL DAY. Along with the chili and the BBQ pork.

There's plenty more i could tell but i'll just leave it at that.
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I worked at a very upscale restaurant. No bread reusage, no chutney reusuage, no crazy digging food out of the garbage. It was all very clean, organized, and the food was made with care. The WORST thing that we did, was since we were poor waitstaff, if a diner didn't finish their steak or something, we'd cut the eaten on part off and slice it up and finish it for them. Sad, but we were hungry. We looked forward to the older guys with the arm candy. They ordered big, but the girls never ate too much.
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Test the cleanliness of your table -- you will be surprised. Check some actual results here: http://www.tabletesters.com. If you are a Facebook member, please join the group!
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