Horrifying Restaurant Stories Shared By Health Inspectors And Food Service Workers
When people go out to a restaurant, they expect a certain level of quality that they won't find at home. However, behind the scenes, some restaurants are breaking health code violations and food safety rules in ways that will make you lose your appetite.
Now, health inspectors and other food service workers are sharing their gross, but unfortunately true, stories from the job. These anecdotes might make you rethink eating out.
A Restaurant Overrun With Roaches
Pest control is a major issue in the food service industry. While it can be hard to keep roaches and mice at bay, it is essential to ensure the environment is clean enough to prepare food. Here's a story from one inspector:
"[A restaurant was] so infested with cockroaches that when the manager greeted me at the host stand to take me to the kitchen, he had a roach crawl across his back right in front of me."
Yikes.
No, You Can't Serve Meat From A Dumpster
"A Chinese restaurant getting ready to open for lunch. I walked in and temped the items in the walk-in cooler – all were well above acceptable temperatures. The cooler had broken down in the night and was no longer functioning. They wanted to serve the food anyway. I had to embargo the entire cooler worth of food and stood there as they filled trash bag after trash bag with meat and took it to the dumpster. As I was leaving the location, I drove around to the back, and they had employees pulling it all out of the trash and dragging it back into the building. [I] had to stop them, make them return it to the dumpster, and pour straight bleach all over the food to ensure it could not be used."
Cleaning Is Good, But Not Like This
"I went into a Popeyes. They were cleaning when I walked in, and there was a guy with a pressurised hose blasting the floor, and the water was spraying everywhere.
The fine mist of grim floor water could be seen coating the food waiting in the pass and the prep tables. Everywhere in that tiny space was just getting blasted with floor goop."
You Mean We Have To Clean The Salad Bar?!
"I was a tradesman working on a hotel. The reason I was working on it was because a new owner was renovating/updating the hotel. Their restaurant had a salad bar. Every single member of the kitchen staff got fired when the new owner discovered that the salad bar hadn't been cleaned/sterilized in months; they just kept adding more food on top of the old stuff."
Even More Roaches
"I'm not an inspector but a cook. One very popular local restaurant has the worst roach infestation ever. If you picked up the ticket printer and tapped it on the table, you would have 40-60 baby roaches scatter. Roaches everywhere you look. They would fall from the ceiling or crawl onto the plate of food before the server could take it out. It was the most disgusting place. I quit, and it's still super popular and still buggy."
At Least It's Fresh!
"One of the news channels where I live does a weekly segment called 'restaurant report card.' It shows the good and bad DHEC reports of the week. There was one Chinese restaurant that had live chickens in the kitchen."
That definitely sounds like a major health violation. Maybe they were taking the whole "farm to table" idea a little too literally?
So A Bear Walks Into A Bar...
"My Mom used to be a health inspector. A bar had a bear chained outside, and the owners would bring it inside to hang out with the patrons sometimes."
We have so many questions. How did they even get a bear in the first place? Also, how did no one notice a bear was chained up outside a bar?!
So Many Health Violations
"I walked into a Mexican restaurant one time and saw some lady soaking some tripe in a mop sink. Saw that and told them to throw all of it in the dumpster and bleach it in front of me.
My boss had seen a restaurant defrosting raw shrimp in a mop sink with the mop draped over the faucet.
My other co-worker had to work a foul odor complaint where this Chinese buffet was closed for about a week without utilities. He walked in and found the food was still in the buffet line. He said the stench was so rotten that he immediately threw up upon opening the door. The food was stewing in its juices for a week in the Texas summer heat."
Who Wants Ice Cream? (Not Us.)
"Not a health inspector, but I worked at an ice cream shop when I was 15. My boss 'found' a mini fridge in an abandoned, closed-down elderly home. There was still food in there, with cottage cheese that expired 3 years prior to me opening it. She gave me two bottles of bleach and said, Go to town.'
Now I pleaded with her not to keep the fridge, not because I had to do the cleaning work on it, but because it was nasty, even if we did get rid of the mold that was literally eating the interior of the fridge. I didn't feel right putting food in there and selling that food to customers. Cleaned it anyway and put it out on the floor, but refused to put stuff in there; when people put stuff in it, I’d throw it away or move it (depending on what it was)."
Weird Smells Are Never A Good Sign
"Not a health inspector, but I deliver beer, so I see the backs of many restaurants on a day-to-day basis as we're dropping product in their storage areas. The worst was a buffet that had an inescapable smell of hot, rotten milk. Not sure how I even know what that smells like, but it was like they had been microwaving rotten milk for an hour and left it somewhere. I had to leave the delivery. My coworker was sick with a stuffy nose and did the delivery for me as I gagged outside. Talked to a couple of coworkers later that week, and they agreed that the place always has a weird smell."
Rodents Are Another Huge Problem
"I shut down a restaurant a while back, as there was a severe rodent infestation. I'm talking poop everywhere, in the utensil bins, on the food prep surfaces, just everywhere. Owners were brushing it aside as they worked. Live mice stuck to glue traps under sinks, etc."
If you're wondering, the answer is no, it wasn't as cute as the Pixar movie Ratatouille.
You'll Never Think About Soda The Same Way Again
"I was in the training program to be a state health inspector after I graduated from college. The majority of the inspections weren't memorable, and small stuff got written up, like temps being too low or high, not having gloves accessible, storing meat boxes on the ground, etc.
The two inspections that I remember being horrible were both at low-end Chinese places in strip malls. In one inspection, the wok chef had an overflowing ashtray right next to the meat bins. Rodent droppings, piles of dead flies behind the range, open doors to the outside, just nasty. We also had to check the soda machines, the hoses, and the guns. The soda gun line at one place was so caked with mold and funk that it was a miracle that soda could even get through. We couldn’t figure out how any previous inspector had missed that, or what happened. The soda gun was the worst because it ruined eating out and having a mixed drink. I’ll never be able to drink anything out of a soda gun ever again.
I got a better job offer after two months of that and ran out of that job."
Maybe Skip The Ice Cubes
"About seven or eight years ago, I worked briefly at a small, family-owned restaurant.
One day, when I was putting ice in a customer's drink and getting ready to serve it to them, I found little specks of mold floating in the glass. They had come from the ice maker.
I told the manager and showed her the mold. Her response was to shrug, dump out the water, and refill it from the same ice maker and the same tap, then walk away. The second glass had mold too.
I didn’t work there for very long, and I definitely didn’t get any drinks there after that. One of the biggest sources of contamination in restaurants is the ice maker. Think about it. How many lazy restaurant owners are willing to completely empty their ice maker and melt all the ice to clean it, even once a month? The answer is they don’t."
Unexplained Protein Is Not Something We Want To Encounter
"OK, so my dad was a health and hygiene officer in the air force back in the early '50s and was stationed in England. His job included inspecting kitchen and latrine facilities at bases, overseeing quarantine on troops returning home from Europe, and doing health inspections on said troops.
He and some fellow H&H officers were on leave in London and decided to have lunch at a pub that was advertising a soup and sandwich deal. They sit down to piping hot bowls of tomato soup and are talking and eating, when one of the guys says, 'Mmm, good soup, nice and meaty.'
Everyone stops talking as it sinks in that tomato soup should not have meat in it, and my dad reluctantly digs his spoon to the bottom of his bowl and comes up with several well-cooked cockroaches. Being trained in such things, they stormed into the kitchen and confirmed that the place had their soup heating on a back burner, uncovered and directly below a cold water pipe. The rising steam condenses on the pipe, makes it slippery, and causes whatever scurries across it to fall into the soup. They yelled at the owner and reported the place, but beyond that, they couldn't do much about the unexpected protein."
Even The Can Openers Aren't Safe
Here's a story from one inspector who visited a pizza place with multiple violations:
"Then I see it... The most disgusting can opener I've ever seen. To put it in perspective, mounted can openers are like the low-hanging fruit of every health inspector: they're almost always out of compliance, and writing one up will make you look like a Try-Hard jerk who's out to get the restaurant owner in trouble. They're usually not a big deal. Except this one. This one is absolutely caked in dried, vile, pizza sauce goop that has turned black with age. The blade itself is so dull and chipped that it is literally peeling metal filaments off into a mass next to the blade.
Every time this thing is used to open a new pizza sauce (which, by the way, is put into a cracked plastic container and covered with a trash bag to keep the loads of flies away), it deposits metal chips, flakes, filaments, whatever you wanna call it, into that sauce, and into the bellies of the customers."
Beware Of The Chicken Wings
"I picked up a case of wings to be dropped in the grease, but when I took the lid off, they smelled bad, and then when I saw the blood at the bottom was a dark brown instead of a bright red, I instantly started heading back to throw them out. My manager caught me on my way back there and said nothing was wrong with the wings. He sprayed water on them and put them in the grease. It was truly disgusting."
It's Bad If Even The Employees Are Leaving
"Not an inspector, but I worked in the dish pit of a pub. Directly above my workstation was a vent with a big plastic grating. Or, at least, I assumed it was plastic. You couldn't really see it for the green, moldy crud that coated the whole thing. That was my walking-away point. I promised myself that if they ever asked me to clean that, I needed the job less than I needed to not do that."
No, No, No, No
"Not an inspector, but the Chinese place across my street got shut down because they were caught putting the leftover foods onto new plates and re-serving."
The thought of eating a stranger's leftovers has to be one of the worst things we've ever heard.
Some Perspective
"A friend of mine is the director of health in a small Massachusetts city. He explains that cultural differences can play a big part in restaurant food handling practices. He's seen just off the boat, Chinese workers drop loads of cooked rice on the floor and pick it up in front of him, intending to still use it. These people he interacts with come from very poor areas, and the thought of throwing out that rice would seem absurd."
While that is definitely some important context, at the end of the day, people preparing food need to follow the correct procedures.
The Restaurant That Only Had Rotten Food
"[I had to visit a] restaurant that was always serving rotten food. I am not sure how many times I had to revisit that place, and they always had the same violations for moldy and rotten food."
When they are repeat offenders, you know it's really, really bad.
Just Slap Some Paint On It
"My dad's last girlfriend was a health inspector, and you would be SHOCKED at the number of restaurants that would rather paint their walls to cover up the dirt and grime than actually do regular cleanings. She doesn't eat at restaurants anymore."
Hmmm... we're definitely going to start tracking which restaurants are "closed for painting" from now on.
A Layer Of Mold?
"When I was going to Culinary school, our sanitation and nutrition instructor was a health inspector. He would tell us horror stories about some of the worst places he had been to.One was for a pizza shop that he was inspecting. The guy making the pizza kept going from the line to the walk-in to get pizza sauce. When he inspected the walk-in, he found a 5-gallon bucket sitting on the floor with the lid halfway off. He picked the lid up and found the sauce, as well as a 3-inch layer of fuzzy mold on top that the cook had just folded over to get to the sauce."
This Seems Like It Was Covered In Food Safety 101
"I once worked at a family-owned pizza joint where I watched a kid individually blow bags open to fill them with cookies for a catering order. As in he was putting the bags to his mouth and puffing a blast of air into them to prepare them for cookie insertion."
Don't Turn Your Garage Into A Butchershop
"Former city employee. I used to oversee code enforcement. I got a call from one of my inspectors that he swore a dead body was in a garage. Turns out the lady living in the condo was a street food vendor, and they killed a pig and were aging/drying the pork in the garage, and the drippings were seeping out under the garage door. There was a car in the garage that they had just covered with cardboard, but it had been there for years and had built up a thick layer of dirt and meat juice. There were buckets of rendered fat that, when instructed to dispose of, they pushed back because that's what they use to make tamales. Needless to say, that stuff wasn't fresh."
Well, That Was Definitely A Memorable Dinner
"A dim sum spot in my hometown had a rat fall out of the ceiling and land on a customer's shoulder while eating."
At that point, there really isn't anything the restaurant can do to try to save face. The rat exposed them, and they probably lost a lot of customers in the process.
If You Notice Bumpy Paint, Run
"There was a restaurant that had super greasy walls due to not turning on their ventilation system. They also had a cockroach problem. The cockroaches got stuck in that layer of dusty grease. After they got cited for excessively soiled walls and a roach problem, their solution was to paint directly over the grease and bugs, leaving a bumpy pitted layer of black paint."
Oh Dear, It's A... Deer
"Got a complaint that a restaurant was holding a deer in their walk-in cooler. I find said whole deer- hooves and fur and all. He said he got it from the mall. Uh. I ask the owner for a receipt (benefit of the doubt here), and he gives me a police report to collect roadkill. He wanted to clean the thing in his restaurant (ticks and all) and bring the meat home."
We're Going To Rethink Eating At Buffets
"There was a buffet that was closed by the department. The staff and management had a severe language barrier between themselves and the inspectors. Inspectors took pictures of the conditions over recurring inspections and over the months you could see the food on the floor get trampled and decompose without being moved. Old pans of food were poured into the new ones, and the roach infestation extended to the dining room under the tables and buffet steam tables. The two walk in coolers went down repeatedly and it stank like death. Many times the place was cited since the operators couldn't identify foods (gray rotten meat, moldy foods, spines.)"
Probably Not The Best Place To Wash Out The Garbage
"I'm not an inspector, but I delivered pizzas for a couple of months for a big chain...not the game but the one with the red roof. Came in after a delivery one day to find a manager using a hose to clean out a garbage can. Not totally abnormal, but the gross part was that he had the garbage can propped on the wing prep station."
The Prep Table Is Also A Changing Table
"So my mom is a health inspector and was inspecting a donut shop in California, and saw someone changing a diaper on the dough prep table. Their excuse was, 'What?! We're not open yet!'"
This has to be the first time we've heard of a diaper being changed in a restaurant kitchen.
Be Wary Of Ground Meat
"I am both a former chef and a former private health inspector. I've seen some crazy stuff, but there is little worse than supermarket meat departments. I will not buy meat that has been ground in the market, because the employees almost never know how to take down and clean the grinder. I would regularly go in, show them how to take it apart, and make them smell the "gasket" of old meat that had never been cleaned out from between the parts."
Mistake Number One Was Serving The Inspector A Roach
"My mother was a health inspector some years back. She was known as Close 'Em Down Kathy (not her real name, but you get the drift).
She went to a Chinese restaurant one day to pick up lunch, brought it back to her office, opened up the bag, and found a live cockroach staring back at her. She immediately stormed back to the restaurant, shoved the bag in their face, and said, 'I didn't order the cockroach.'
She ordered an inspection on the restaurant, found out they kept their cooked chickens hung on a metal rack, in the alley, ABOVE THE DUMPSTER. They were shut down pretty quickly."
Even Olive Garden Failed
"When I worked at Olive Garden, our cooks were so irresponsible that they would thaw the chicken breasts on top of the ovens and just use them throughout the day. Management seemed pretty oblivious."
No, Olive Garden! Even with the unlimited breadsticks, we will have to rethink eating there again.
Inspect Your Meats At The Deli
"Not a restaurant but I worked at a deli as a teenager and the owner used to just scrape mould off the meats and keep them for sale. Once they dropped a whole tray of sliced Berliner on the floor, picked it and put it back on display."
Ew... More Dumpster Diving For Meat
"Not a health inspector, but I used to work at a grocery store next to a Chinese restaurant. They got shut down after they were caught on camera taking our expired meat out of our dumpster and taking it into their restaurant."
This Is What Happens When The Employees Refuse To Clean
"One restaurant I went to had poor management and was very disorganized.
This was supposed to be a nicer-than-average trendy spot in a downtown area.
Their poor management and lack of holding people accountable were what caused their issues.
The dishwashers did not properly sweep, causing their mops to be filled with food debris. They did not properly clean or dry their mops or empty their mop buckets. This caused the restaurant to be infested with masses of fruit flies. It was blamed on the servers not cleaning the drink station properly. The drink station was great, and the nozzles were cleaned every night.
The chefs were responsible for cleaning their kitchen area. They thought they were above this and did a poor job. Lots of leftover food, grease, and random food mess in their kitchen and cooking stations.
The restaurant closed at night, and no one cleaned the customer seating area until the morning. Hours of dropped food and mess left to fester and dry before it was taken care of."
More Money, Mold Problems
"I was just an employee in a restaurant. Decided I was going to clean the shelving in the walk-in one day. The shelving structure itself was metal, with the shelves being plastic inserts to make cleaning easier. I start removing the plastic shelves, and there's mold everywhere. Management even threw a fit when I told them about it, and that it had to be cleaned because it would cost them money in labor."
Rat Kings Don't Belong In Restaurants
"I'm not a health inspector, but I worked construction in a kitchen that had been shut down by health inspectors. Have any of you ever heard of a 'rat king'? I hadn't, till I found two of them in the ducting above the stove."
Yeah, if you don't know what a "rat king" is, don't search it up. Just trust us.
Greasy Floors Are Not A Good Sign
"I was a Muzak technician. I had to replace the microphone over the grill at this restaurant. The floor where the cooks were had so much grease that it was like an ice rink. There were loose fries, lettuce, and other food on the floor."
If the floors are this bad, it's hard to imagine how gross the rest of the restaurant was.
When Your Restaurant Is Described As A 'Horror Movie'
"There was an Asian restaurant in my hometown that got shut down.
Approximately 30 State Food Law violations, including: •Cooked chicken stored at room temp, five boxes deep, melting on the floor •Food prepped in a bowl that was held above a garbage can •Crab rangoons stuffed on the dirty drain board of the dish machine •Food stored in toilet rooms •Cockroaches at the dish machine •Employees handling ready-to-eat food with bare hands •Employees reusing single-use gloves; after handling raw meat, or preparing food after handling cleaning supplies •Fly-strips over food prep area •An open can of vegetables covered in mold-like growth •Rodent droppings under dry storage racks •Food stored under sewage lines, under leaking ceiling, under leaking condenser in cooler
That list is a mix of what I found in the local news article and the actual records of the violations. One of the news articles described the basement as 'a scene from a horror movie.'"
Emily McWilliams
