Would You Really Like Fries with That?

This is a forum for people who work in the restaurant/bar industry and is part of the BitterWaitress website. It's a place to vent for the working folks and an eye-opener for you civilians.

Some things I can recall from my own working past in the restaurant industry (CAUTION: THIS IS BOUND TO OFFEND SOME PEOPLE, MAYBE A LOT OF PEOPLE):

The lousiest tippers, without fail, make the most demands of your time as a food or drink server and have the shittiest attitudes - they would never tolerate being treated the way they treat others.

Many restaurant managers must go to secret Asshole School to hone the craft of being primo buttheads. If you are a customer waiting overlong for your food order and you can see that the restaurant is busy, do your own Asshole Survey: What is the manager doing at that moment? Is he/she digging in and taking food orders out to tables or bringing drinks or bussing tables or doing anything that remotely qualifies as "active duty?" No? What do you mean, he/she's parked on his/her butt at the cash register or way in the back? Your food is getting cold and your food server is slammed! Hello... Mr. Asshole, your customers are getting pissed...

Another major factor in slow food service that food servers are ALWAYS blamed for and almost always suffer for in the way of lousy tips is the cooks' slowness in getting out food orders. Many times, the cook is just slammed but many times, it is inexperience and not knowing how to budget time and how long different things take to cook that cause long delays in service to the customer. The food server has no control over that. It sucks when a cook puts up a partial plate or partial order and you have to wait for the rest of it so your entree might be cold by the time the side dishes make it to the plate or vice versa. Sometimes, the cook's service is so extremely substandard that it would be embarrassing to take that plate out to a customer so you have to make the cook start the whole thing over again. More delays.

This is an observation after years of being a food server and NOT a racial/ethnic comment but hey, let the chips fall or whatever... Black families on Sundays were always my favorite customers. It never mattered how many children were in the family, every single one was perfectly well-behaved and said "Please" and "thank you" and "May I..." and used "Ma'am" and "Sir" and showed respect to one another. Children behaving nicely in public... to each other... shocking, isn't it? One of the headaches of the food server universe is serving a large group that includes several children because it is almost inevitable that you will have crumbs and food droppings and wet messes under the table and the top of the table looks like a disaster zone. Not one crumb was ever detected under one of my black families' tables. And all the plates would be neatly stacked, waiting for me or the busboy to remove them. Oh man, they didn't have to tip me (but they always did, without fail) because I would have paid them to be my customers.

Food poisoning lurks everywhere in restaurants and a goodly portion of it if not all of it is 100% avoidable but for lazy employees who refuse to do their jobs. Here are just a few examples:

Ketchup Bottles (and other condiments) are ALWAYS refilled. This is NOT a problem for your health, as a customer, if the employees completely empty out the glass bottles or containers, sterilize the bottles by washing them out in scalding hot water then refill with brand new ketchup and only then pour back in the older ketchup to the top. This is not the way lazy employees work and chances are good that the bottles are never emptied, never sanitized, and new ketchup is used to "top off" the old. That means the remains of old ketchup stay in the bottle and ferment. Fermentation is caused by bacteria. Bacteria causes food poisoning. So, if your ketchup bottle is bubbling, don't open it. Don't touch it at all. In fact, you are better off bringing in your own ketchup.

Ice Cream Sundae fruit toppings: See above warning about ketchup bottles. Lazy employees will "top off" the big vats or dispensers of toppings rather than do it the right way. Most people don't think they can get food poisoning from something so cold like ice cream. It's not the ice cream that will have you puking all night and suffering diarrhea. It's what's on top of the ice cream.

And double down on the "topping off" warning when it comes to salad dressings. Knowing what I now know, I won't even eat salad in a restaurant anymore. I have seen vats of salad dressing with dried hardened old dressing crusting around the top of the container and I know that container hasn't been scrubbed out in days. So that tells me it's only been topped off in all those days since the last time it was my job to clean them all and refill the old on top of the new and not the other way around. In fact, if the manager wasn't watching me too closely, I'd dump the whole thing and make all fresh dressings.

Also, avoid eating any salad in any restaurant that uses open containers of the elements of the salad that are set out on the back counter. You can usually see this from where you sit as a customer. If each container does not have its lid or is covered and protected in some fashion, you can be 100% certain there's a lot more than just salad that's fallen into those containers. I've seen servers and busboys walk the length of the back counter with dripping wet filthy dishrags to wipe down that counter and they aren't careful around those open containers so a lot of customers are consuming dirty germy dishwater along with their salad greens. And that's not the only thing that gets into open containers of food.

Do you see your food server wash his/her hands inbetween visits to tables and the touching of food plates? They should be radically pro-active in defending your safety when it comes to food service. Most aren't.

The cleanest (best kept health standards) restaurant I've ever worked has been Coco's Restaurants in Southern California. I would feel safe eating in any of their establishments knowing how strict they are about cleanliness and the proper handling of anything that comes into contact with food. I'm sorry I can't say the same about that restaurant chain that rhymes with "Lenny's."