Fast Food & Other Restaurant Horrors - Subtle Disgust to Literally Dangerous Mishaps

[Tehshigelisok]

A few weeks ago I went to the Subway in town. It's in a gas station that had just gotten rebuilt from the ground up. I like the new store because it's far bigger and cleaner than the cramped dump that was there before. There was also enough room to add a drive-through window to the Subway.

I have found however, that every time I go there, there's one person running the whole store. One time, I went in, and the lady was taking an order on drive-thru. She had a list in front of her with about five subs on it. And the person who was ordering didn't seem to realize that they sell more than one kind of sub at a freaking Subway, so she had to prompt him on Every. Single. Ingredient.

"What kind of bread?"

"Six inch or footlong?"

"What kind of meat?"

"What kind of cheese?"

"What kind of sauce?"

"What toppings do you want on it?"

"...We have lettuce, tomato, onion, cucumber, peppers, blah blah blah..."

You'd think after a while he'd get the pattern, but she had to repeat this for a good three or four subs (I left halfway through the second one, but I could hear the order still going on as I went back to the gas station). It's like the guy ordering didn't retain a single bit of information from the first order.

 

[MerriedxReldnahc]

I've mentioned before that my usual Taco Bell is the weird Taco Bell, partly due to it's proximity to the nearby homeless camps, and I'm sure I mentioned the manager's daughter with her blue hair and MLP toys. (she actually looks older than her mom, and they're both huge) She takes up the seat closest to the registers and will yell shit at her mom who it trying to take people's orders ( rolling her eyes whenever her daughter says anything.)

Some other dude, who seemed a little slow, used to come in and do the same thing, he'd try and have a conversation with the staff about the social norms relating to hugging strangers.

In addition to the schizophrenic homeless black lady who steals plants and shits in the bushes (as opposed to the other schizophrenic homeless black lady who once asked my mom to let her move into our house. My mom declined. This lady is also the one that attacks people in Whole Foods.) we saw a schizophrenic homeless white lady yesterday that wandered around the building for a bit bugging people for change, before coming inside to use the bathroom. She starts yelling inside the stall in this oddly childlike voice before exiting and shouting through the building for someone named Michael.
It's not Taco Bell unless you get dinner and a show!

Except yesterday even the dinner was a little off. I usually get the chicken Power Bowl and pretend I'm being healthy, but the beans just did not look right. It's like when you leave the warmed beans out and they get a crust on top, then you try and mix them again and theres parts of the crust just chillin in your beans looking slimy. At least I think that's what happened. They looked sketchy and I didn't eat them, got an upset stomach anyway.

 

[Replicant Sasquatch]

Sometimes I just go into Taco Bell to steal the hot sauce packets cause it's the closest I can get to Nando's here in the States

 

[Donovan the Man]

Sometimes I just go into Taco Bell to steal the hot sauce packets cause it's the closest I can get to Nando's here in the States

Amazon has Taco Bell's sauces.

That's just the fire sauce but they have them all.

Edit: even better they have nando's sauce.

 

[Jinmen]

A long time ago I ordered a chicken whooper from Burgerking and when I bit into it I got a mouth full of "prickly" things. Turns out there was a dead cockroach under the bread and it had broken apart. The prickly things were its spiny legs.

Took me a long time til I was able to eat at BK again. Horrible experience.

 

[Replicant Sasquatch]

A long time ago I ordered a chicken whooper from Burgerking and when I bit into it I got a mouth full of "prickly" things. Turns out there was a dead cockroach under the bread and it had broken apart. The prickly things were its spiny legs.

Took me a long time til I was able to eat at BK again. Horrible experience.

Why are you ordering cockroaches on your burger if you can't even handle them?

 

[Deadwaste]

A long time ago I ordered a chicken whooper from Burgerking and when I bit into it I got a mouth full of "prickly" things. Turns out there was a dead cockroach under the bread and it had broken apart. The prickly things were its spiny legs.

as a guy who has eaten insects before, that sounds mildly appetizing

 

[vanilla_pepsi_head]

I got a bag of spring rolls from a local Asian place, noticed they tasted off like they had too much of some nasty spice or something, but ate them anyway because hungry and lazy. Got to the end and saw a massive dead earwig looking thing embedded in the one on the bottom. It was a good year or two before I could eat spring rolls again after that.

Finding a passed out/dead junkie in a Tim Hortons bathroom might have been a horror the first couple of times, but quickly becomes routine if you live in a large Canadian city. There is a video online of a known junkie being refused access to a Tim Hortons bathroom, then proceeding to shit on the floor and throw it at the person behind the counter. I once had a random crackhead outside a Tim Hortons offer me sexual favors if I bought her a doughnut (I declined that generous offer). Tim Hortons is alright, the people who hang out there aren't.

I never ate there but when I worked in a mall food court I got to see how fucking disgusting the Chinese place was. They'd store their cutting boards and utensils on the floor or in the mop bucket and didn't bother to refrigerate most of their rice and shit overnight. They let mice and cockroaches run rampant and didn't clean out the traps. Instead of taking the garbage out they'd let their giant bins of food scraps sit and fester in the back room for days. I never, not once, saw any of them wash their hands. Never saw any evidence of them changing the fryer oil either. If the egg rolls didn't sell they'd just throw them back in the deep fryer for a minute and put them back under the warmer the next morning. The sad part is they actually ordered in fresh ingredients every day and prepared almost everything by hand, the place could have been decent for mall food standards if they put in a basic amount of effort to maintain basic hygiene.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

I got a bag of spring rolls from a local Asian place, noticed they tasted off like they had too much of some nasty spice or something, but ate them anyway because hungry and lazy. Got to the end and saw a massive dead earwig looking thing embedded in the one on the bottom. It was a good year or two before I could eat spring rolls again after that.

Finding a passed out/dead junkie in a Tim Hortons bathroom might have been a horror the first couple of times, but quickly becomes routine if you live in a large Canadian city. There is a video online of a known junkie being refused access to a Tim Hortons bathroom, then proceeding to shit on the floor and throw it at the person behind the counter. I once had a random crackhead outside a Tim Hortons offer me sexual favors if I bought her a doughnut (I declined that generous offer). Tim Hortons is alright, the people who hang out there aren't.

I never ate there but when I worked in a mall food court I got to see how fucking disgusting the Chinese place was. They'd store their cutting boards and utensils on the floor or in the mop bucket and didn't bother to refrigerate most of their rice and shit overnight. They let mice and cockroaches run rampant and didn't clean out the traps. Instead of taking the garbage out they'd let their giant bins of food scraps sit and fester in the back room for days. I never, not once, saw any of them wash their hands. Never saw any evidence of them changing the fryer oil either. If the egg rolls didn't sell they'd just throw them back in the deep fryer for a minute and put them back under the warmer the next morning. The sad part is they actually ordered in fresh ingredients every day and prepared almost everything by hand, the place could have been decent for mall food standards if they put in a basic amount of effort to maintain basic hygiene.

Over here, it's usually the kebab vans and stores that have this reputation. Despite the "Food Hygiene Rating: 5" sticker, they have a layer of grease on everything and are always stiflingly hot. But when you're beerified there's often nowhere else to go. However, word of advice: don't.

When I was a student I had a friend who got a part time job in one to top up the student loan. Their job was to take suspect cuts of meat that all smelled a bit off, smear them together with a glue-like sauce and a blend of spices that probably contained sand, and impale them on the "elephant leg" that the person out front would chop them off as the drunks came in. I think they got away with it because the fact that 90% of the punters were off their faces meant they got just far enough away before chucking up that they'd ascribe said vomiting to their state of inebriation rather than any actual infection.

In the town I grew up in, this was usually exactly 150 paces from said kebab vans and there was a vaguely circular ring of Pavement Pizzas emanating from them.

 

[gREEEEEEEEEr]

One time I went to an Indian buffet where I've eaten previously and since. This one time I noticed that there was half a lemon in the rice, cooked with the rice for flavor I guess, and I thought it would be tasty to squeeze the lemon juice over the rice. So I took it and did. It was tasty, but then I spent all night throwing up. I blame it all on that lemon... in hindsight, it had probably been hanging around for weeks, if not months. The rice itself gets used, so it's reasonably fresh, but nobody's stupid enough to take the lemon (and I'm sure they probably never throw anything away) until the idiot me comes along and does. The moral of this story is don't go to a buffet and eat garnish that probably hasn't been replaced since the place opened.

Another time, I had some Chinese food which was some generic seafood stew on top of rice. It was fabulous, but later that night I broke out in hives. They started on my arms and pretty soon literally my whole body was covered in hives. Now, I'm no stranger to seafood: fish, shrimp, crab, lobster, oysters, mussels, crayfish, scallops, squid... I'm not allergic to anything, so I have no idea what could've caused it, but it must've been that food somehow. It didn't even make me sick, per se... I just had hives. The itching was something awful, but after a few hours I was fine.

 

[Kiwi Lime Pie]

I hope cafeteria horrors count.

For two consecutive summers, I worked in a large corporation's cafeterias as either a dishwasher or server.

At the cafeteria I worked at the first summer, I'd occasionally have ice cream for dessert during our lunch break and invariably had the runs a day or two later. I didn't put 2 + 2 together until I saw my coworkers cleaning out the machine one day and saw for myself just how disgusting it was on the inside when they had it open. It looked like it hadn't been cleaned out for quite some time ?. Needless to say, I had zero interest in having ice cream with my lunch for the remainder of that summer.

The next summer, I was assigned to a different location's cafeteria. Ironically enough, one of my responsibilities there was to help clean and sanitize the ice cream machine each Friday afternoon after closing.

 

[EH 110]

I hope cafeteria horrors count.

For two consecutive summers, I worked in a large corporation's cafeterias as either a dishwasher or server.

At the cafeteria I worked at the first summer, I'd occasionally have ice cream for dessert during our lunch break and invariably had the runs a day or two later. I didn't put 2 + 2 together until I saw my coworkers cleaning out the machine one day and saw for myself just how disgusting it was on the inside when they had it open. It looked like it hadn't been cleaned out for quite some time ?. Needless to say, I had zero interest in having ice cream with my lunch for the remainder of that summer.

The next summer, I was assigned to a different location's cafeteria. Ironically enough, one of my responsibilities there was to help clean and sanitize the ice cream machine each Friday afternoon after closing.

I've never worked in food service, but we had a soft serve machine at my first job. We took it apart and cleaned it every night.

 

[Botched Tit Job]

My fucking work cafeteria charges $7.50 for a shitty pre-made wrap and $3.50 for a slice of cheese pizza.

If you want a cup of tea, they sell a singular tea bag out of a Twinings box for $2.50.

The one reasonably priced thing I've found is a chocolate chip or blueberry muffin for $2.30 but even that is a little bit higher than it should be.

It's all highway robbery for shit that comes frozen and gets defrosted and/or heated up before being served. Should be illegal.

 

[GentlemanFaggot]

At someone's urging, went to a sketchy Chinese buffet a week ago. Found out what food poisoning feels like the next day and couldn't even keep water down until about ten hours later when the compulsive vomiting stopped. That was the worst day of my life.

Place has a pristine health record, oddly enough. Not a single citation when every other damn restaurant in the neighborhood has at least one finger-wagging misdemeanor. Suspicious!

 

[Kiwi Lime Pie]

Place has a pristine health record, oddly enough. Not a single citation when every other damn restaurant in the neighborhood has at least one finger-wagging misdemeanor. Suspicious!

Health records or inspection reports can be misleading, unfortunately. A restaurant I've been at in the past for group events supposedly had a slew of health violations during that time. Meanwhile, another restaurant with a decent health code reputation had bussers using the same rags to both wipe tables and wipe sweat off their brows ?.

Also, some inspectors with chips on their shoulders may look for every little and obscure violation they can find whereas others may pass a facility with few to no violations so long as they see nothing egregious.

 

[Chewy Suarez]

I’m not sure if this is at other McDonald’s, but my local one has the Sprite Tropical Remix flavor which is pretty good, but one time I asked for it with my meal and I was given this fucking light pink seltzer water. I took a sip and immediately spat that shit out. I honestly have no idea how fucking inept the workers were that day, I clearly said Sprite Tropical.

Also, Polish McDonald’s is covered in like one ton of grease and it all looks and tastes extremely soggy according to my sister. Considering it was in northeastern Poland (aka Polish redneck country) I’m not shocked by that.

 

[Adamska]

I’m not sure if this is at other McDonald’s, but my local one has the Sprite Tropical Remix flavor which is pretty good, but one time I asked for it with my meal and I was given this fucking light pink seltzer water. I took a sip and immediately spat that shit out. I honestly have no idea how fucking inept the workers were that day, I clearly said Sprite Tropical.

Don't think it's incompetence that day; every now and again a fast food joint just plain begins to run out out of some soda syrups and you can't get the soda you want. Taco Bell for example ran out of Baja Blast for me a couple days ago (which sucks, but I understand). Now usually the fast food people can tell that the syrup's low based on the coloring and tell you before you get it, but with Sprite? Lol good luck you have to taste it to figure it out.

 

[Crocketron]

Little Timmy needs to eat his spicy quesadilla, like half the world's cuisine is spicy. If you grow up and don't like mapo tofu (the real stuff made with sichuan peppercorns) or doro wat may you eat Aunt Linda's mayo based jello salad for every meal. Barring if you have like stomach ulcers or something, you have my condolences.

A true gentlemen will eat the spicy shit and turn their colon into no man's land.

 

[Jerri's Kid]

I have three food poisoning stories, but only one of these happened from a restaurant.

When I was a kid, my parents took me to a teppan grill I liked for my birthday. I decided to be adventurous and try the stir-fried squid. It tasted alright, but later that night when I was in bed, I woke up with horrible stomach pains. Immediately my mouth began to flood with water and I knew I had to puke, so I tried to climb out of my bunk bed to run to the toilet before that happened. Unfortunately, I didn't succeed, and because my younger brother's bunk bed was beneath mine and perpendicularly arranged, I ended up vomiting all over his chest and waking him up in the process. I spent the next few hours in the bathroom vomiting until nothing but bile came up, and since then I've always tried to be very careful about food that seems off to me.

A few years after that, I attended a week-long summer camp high in the mountains. People started getting violently ill, and by the time the week was half over at least a third of the camp was sick. Everywhere you looked there were trash cans filled with vomit and diarrhea outside the cabins, and the dining room was practically a ghost town by Friday. The girl across from me shat and vomited in her sleeping bag in the middle of the night and the whole cabin reeked for at least a day. Remembering my experience from the teppan grill, I desperately wanted to avoid getting sick so I lived off packaged goods like cereal. I'm still not sure what caused the food poisoning, but many years later my brother worked at that camp and it happened again. He said it was the eggs.

The third story happened in Mexico a few years later. My mother didn't want to eat out at restaurants for every meal, so she wanted to go to the local supermarket for breakfast and lunch foods. When we went inside, my nose was assaulted by the stench of various meats sitting out in the open. In the meat department there was a vat of murky liquid filled with hot dogs and flies were buzzing around it. My dumbass brother and father thought it was a good idea to buy some of them and spent the rest of the vacation praying to the porcelain god after eating them for lunch one day. I stuck with pre-packaged ramen instead.

 

[MalWart]

I got some second-hand stories from a friend who worked for a bar and grill chain:
- Cooks would often hide in the restrooms and do lines of cocaine
- One day, two of the cooks and a server went missing. My friend checked the entire restaurant for them, eventually searching the back of the building. He hears noises coming from a storage shed and sure enough the server was giving head to both cooks. Once he caught them, they fled the restaurant never to be seen again.