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Fragmented posted:Even with all that i still don't see how you could gently caress up bad enough to give someone food poisoning it's all precooked food. Seafood and tuna setups getting old in the coolers and having their dates changed when nobody's looking because EEEEWWW MAKING THOSE MAKES YOUR HANDS SMELL FISHY SOMEONE ELSE WILL DO IT TOMORROW, and lazy employees not FIFOing when they refill the bain containers.
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Aug 24, 2015 22:09
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We killed a rat with the broken torch (read: flamethrower) that we used for the creme brulee
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Aug 24, 2015 23:25
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Also the dish sink got clogged and I yelled at the owner for trying to use the bathroom plunger on it.
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Aug 24, 2015 23:33
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I worked in a smallish restaurant inside a hotel for about six months back when I was 16. Everyone was loving everyone except for me because I was the only one under 25. "Jerry" was a front desk manager at night. He was greasy, disgusting and gay. Only reason I bring up that last bit is because it was all he could talk about. I mention a date I went on, he'd tell me how much better "fag loving" is. Someone would mention some nice food they had, he'd talk about how he'd love to try it if he wasn't always choking on his boyfriend's dick. No matter what, he could somehow relate it to banging dudes. He comes in one night crying. We ask him what's going on and he relays a story about how his ex broke into his house and murdered his boyfriend with a hammer... 12 hours ago. The general manager give him the night off but he stays through his shift at the desk, blubbering and taking 30 minute smoke breaks. No matter what, he refused to leave. Some time passes and he starts coming into the kitchen. All the staff would hang out in any given area but the chef tells me he only comes by when I'm working. "Jerry" is 45, only 50% of his teeth, smells like a hot/wet foot and has a bloated stomach or liver visible even when wearing a sweater. He comes by and keeps asking me to make him desserts. I could give them away all day but I don't want to give the wrong impression so I charge him (less than employee discount, though). I didn't mind that he was trying to flirt but I'm 16, straight and have given him no signs that I'm interested. His next boyfriend breaks up with him for reasons that change depending on who is in the room. He's even more upset than when the last one was murdered. He begins to drink on the job, for free because he can get the bartender coke. Twice we find him passed out in the walk-in freezer after knocking over everything. Once he was without a shirt. The manager tells us to put everything back in the bins and get ready to serve them. I refuse but they threaten to fire me. The drinking continues and he gets fired for calling a guest a oval office. He shows up two weeks later because he rented the suite and was going to throw everyone a party. What a nice guy, right? He puts in a big room service order to be delivered 30 minutes before we got off work. I'm busy so I send the new busboy to deliver the cart with the promise he could keep the tip. 10 minutes later he comes back, pale and silent and calls the general manager to "assist a guest complaint in the suite". Manager goes up and comes back down with Jerry in a hotel bathrobe and shoves him out into the street. A little bit later the busboy tells me what happened: Jerry had the door propped open with a slipper and when he brought the cart in Jerry was naked facing the headboard and on all fours. He said, "Hey, Inzombiac, I hoped it was you." Bus boy stammered and briskly walked out and made sure the door was closed. When the manager gets in, Jerry is still naked but now on his knees just inside the room. (Phone posting. Sorry for any weird formatting.)
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Aug 25, 2015 02:49
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FOH manager was dating a server and the owners made him fire her the day before they fired him. Tha's frigid cold.
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Aug 25, 2015 05:23
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Astrofig posted:A woman once returned a can of green beans to the store I worked at because she opened it up and found a grasshopper inside. A whole one. And not one of those little two-inch long ones, either---this thing was almost six and disgusting to look at. This little old man came up to me one night and asked me how much a single banana would cost. I weighed it and said $0.30. Then, he placed a spider the size of an apricot onto the conveyor and asked how much that would be. I guess he found it in the bananas? Whatever, it was free.
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Aug 25, 2015 19:07
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Novum posted:FOH manager was dating a server and the owners made him fire her the day before they fired him. Tha's frigid cold. Haha drat, that might be the most brutal thing I've read in this thread.
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Aug 25, 2015 21:17
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chad radwell has a new favorite as of 15:40 on Sep 13, 2015 |
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Aug 26, 2015 00:05
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My first food service job was at Disneyworld, and I'm happy to day that it was a very clean and delicious experience! But now I work at an upscale grocery store, and it is so much worse. One night, I was working in the meat department, and at the end of every night we would have to take all the meat out of the display case and into the cooler in the back. This was my first time closing in this department, I didn't particularly know what I was doing, and of course i dropped a whole loving pan of salmon and some other fancy cooked seafoods on the dirty floor. Other guy I was working with: what did you drop? Me: I think some salmon and some other stuff... Guy: poo poo, that stuff is really expensive... managers gonna be mad if you throw it out... just put it back on really fast. Me: gently caress this place. For real, if we threw out expensive foods, even if it was dirty or bad, we would get in serious trouble from our store manager. So don't go to a fancy upscale grocery store expecting quality meats.
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Aug 26, 2015 00:13
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I got made fun of when I worked at a Walgreens in high school...for calling 911 when a pregnant lady's water broke in the store. I'd never dealt with that before but I just calmly dialed out, asked if she was OK or needed anything, and didn't panic when I called my manager up to let him know what was going on. Wasn't too bad, ambulance got there and since we didn't have a wheelchair I pulled a folding chair from the break room to let the lady sit while she waited. She and her husband were super chill and sweet, one of my bosses for some reason (a fat harpy bitch) decided to tell everyone I "panicked and freaked out" when it happened, even though the other manager I called was surprised I handled things as calmly as I did.
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Aug 26, 2015 03:19
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I worked in IT at a industrial bakery once. Things that ended up in products: Mice, the back cover of a cellphone, blue plastic yarn and a womans sanitary napkin. But well, that happens when you use 100 metric tons of flour each day. What shouldn't happen is that the management "encourages" you coming in to work even if you are sick (people who stay home too often get fired. Why are you getting sick 3-4 times a year? Because colleagues come to work being sick. After i stopped working there i went back to getting the sniffles once a year.) Everybody knew and there wasn't really poo poo you could do. So you had people coughing and sneezing on the dough, the product coming out of the oven, the products being sorted and finally the sales person in one of the over 350 stores.
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Aug 26, 2015 03:44
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Okay, nutjob customers time. Names changed to protect the guilty. *Mrs. Eagles was the nicest, sweetest little old black grandmother who ever graced our store... who also had a crippling addiction to lottery. Every third of the month, when her social security check hit, she was at our store. And when I say addicted, I mean you could watch her stand there in line a scratch herself, and bounce from foot to foot while picking her scratch-offs out, and shake as we gave them to her, and watch the rush she got from scratching them off. Like a junkie getting their next fix. She would intersperse her scratch-off binges with the three-number and five-number lottery tickets, and to be fair she pretty well broke just under even on them. But she would be in the store for hooooouuuuurrrrssss... there were a few times I started my shift with her in the store, and ended it eight hours later with her still in the store. Her grandson, who lived with her and took care of her, told me that she would blow her entire check on lottery, hit up all her relatives for enough money to pay her bills, blow all of that on lottery too, and he would wind up paying the bills, buying her food, and rationing out the money for her lotto addiction for the rest of the month. But every time I made mention about getting her some help for her addiction, The Hutt would crawl down my throat for threatening to take away her best lotto customer... *Billy used to be a locally famous high-school football star, a smart kid who was going places. Billy then did some bad meth, which induced some permanent psychosis in his brain. He would walk the town in any weather, shouting at himself (and I guess the demons that plagued him). His favorite activity in our store was to walk in, touch the wall and walk the entire circumference of the store, then come over and tell me he was God and I was going to hell and could he help himself to the powdered creamer? Never once spent a penny. The third time I caught him masturbating in the bathroom, I started locking it when I saw him come around the corner and head for our store, and told him sorry, it was out of order. Also, I told him every time he came in the store that if all he was going to do was say nonsense, waste my time, scare my other customers (he liked to stand about three inches away from women and fondle himself through his clothes) and steal my coffee creamer, he could get to stepping. The Hutt hated him too, so that one slid. *Arnold seemed like a nice guy with an unfortunate skin condition. However, Arnold smelled like... god, it's hard to describe. Like chewing tobacco fermented in swamp water. Like gym socks worn by a skunk. Like rotting meat tossed down the hole of a port-a-potty. Just this terrible, awful funk. And I don't know if he never bathed, or was literally rotting alive, but I was the only cashier who could breathe shallowly enough to check him out while the other one went to puke. We were not authorized to take Lysol off the shelf and use it. We did it anyways following a visit from him. *Tony would come in completely blitzed after the bars would close, and I mean wow, how is he still alive with that much alcohol in his system? Then he would mouth off, saying he was a bad motherfucker and everyone was scared of him and he would totally cut the gently caress out of me if I disrespected him. Then he would wobble off to the restrooms, puke, come back out, make more threatening statements, and then very politely ask for two burritos. I let him slide, because when he came in sober he was a pretty decent guy, and I knew he was just talking poo poo. *Willie was a older gentleman, with a slight stutter and a cheerful disposition. Everyone loved Willie. But come Saturday, he would start tying one on at 10 am, and then weave his Cadillac through traffic around 3 pm to come play the lottery. And his stutter was way worse, so you could barely understand him, he was hostile and combatitive, he would try to scam me out of expensive scratch-offs (and fail, because he was too drunk to pull it off), he would hang around for hours, stumbling as he stood still and scratched tickets, and generally be an absolute pain in the rear end. But if you dared call the cops... one of the other cashiers did call him in once, and oddly enough was fired two weeks later with no explanation beyond "It's just not working out." (yay at-will states.) *Dorothy must not have owned a mirror, because her makeup was never applied anywhere near where you would think makeup should go. She must also have nothing but trowels to apply it with, because that poo poo had it's own geography. She would come in, look around the store furtively like she was afraid someone would spot her, then sidle up to the counter, buy a hundred bucks or so of scratch-offs, and quickly shove them in her purse like she was afraid of getting caught doing something naughty. Then she would buy the smallest coffee we had. *There were four high-school kids who liked to walk in on new cashiers, grab a thirty pack each, and run like hell for the doors. I never did get their names. I did a very stupid thing when they tried it with me - I intercepted the last one at the door and yanked the beer out of his hands. I got a nice little write-up for that one... and very private kudos from The Hutt, the area supervisor, and the district manager. Apparently these kids had plagued the store for years, and got away with it because they only tried it with new cashiers who didn't know about their habits. *Saul was the immigrant owner of a trucking company. Saul was also a member of the Gulf Cartel, and his trucking company was a front for his drug smuggling and distribution ring. He liked to come in in full Mexican Peacock mode (this will take some explanation) with his most recent mistress, wave around a huge bundle of hundreds and tell her to get whatever she wanted. They would rack up a hundred buck or so of lotto and snack food. It wasn't that big of a deal, honestly, but he sticks in my mind because of a later job I had as a small-town newspaper reporter. I would be out covering something in the Hispanic community (yes, let's send the reporter who didn't speak Spanish to cover this stuff), and he would buddy-buddy up to me like we were best loving friends or something and monopolize my attention. All the while, I'm sitting there thinking "Motherfucker, if I ever get enough proof of your smuggling operation, it's going front page, top fold, with a great big picture of you, and I will pursue it until they throw your rear end in federal pound-me-in-the-rear end prison." He did cook fantastic tripas, though, and I ate more than my fair share. (Mexican Peacock: what passes for formal wear amongst a group of recent Mexican immigrants, both legal and illegal. It consists of black jeans; a silk shirt in eye-watering colors, most likely unbuttoned to the navel; a five-hundred dollar pair of extremely pointed cowboy boots in exotic leathers color-matched to the shirt; a five-hundred dollar cowboy hat, heavily rolled with a giant silver plate declaring the brand; various chains around the neck; and a fuckoff-huge dinnerplate of a belt buckle in silver and gold. It looks thoroughly ridiculous... but it's all genuinely high-quality clothes, it only comes out for celebrations, and considering that northern Mexico is pretty much all ranch land, it makes perfect cultural sense.) *These two gentlemen only graced our store once, but they were memorable. I was at the store about midnight, performing a night audit (ie. checking to see that the graveyard cashier was doing their job), when these two came stumbling in hammered to a gently caress. One of the two promptly puked in the floor, then walked right through it, leaving beer puke footprints all over the store. Neither one could stand up straight, and they would take turns falling on their face in the floor, laughing like loons, and standing back up. The cashier looked at me like she was asking me what to do, so I nodded at the phone and kept watching. One of our regulars came in about this time, and he was a hardcore alcoholic who had tied a few on himself that night. He looked at them, looked at the cashier on the phone, and then looked at me and asked "Can I have a ride home before the police get here, my man?" Being that he was always respectful even when drunk, and I liked the guy, I told him to go hide in the restroom and I wouldn't say anything. The pair had about seventy bucks of stuff on the counter by the time two sheriff's deputies came walking in. They just hung back and talked shop while the pair kept gathering stuff. Then when the pair finally decided to check out, the two deputies slipped in behind them, sniffed, and grinned and nodded at me. They let the pair pay, and start walking for the door, before they cuffed them. I asked them what to do about the stuff they had bought, and the deputies shrugged and marched the pair out. (We kept it behind the counter for a couple of days, then put it right back on the shelf.) As the pair were assisted through the doors, every other deputy who was on duty, on call, or off-duty but listening to their radios all lit up the lights in their cruisers - apparently we caught them on a quiet night, and they all decided to come watch the show. So here we were with twelve cop cars, lights going in the parking lot... the two got the most hilarious field sobriety test I had ever seen, then stuffed into one of the cruisers. Then they searched their truck. One of the deputies came back in, laughing his rear end off. It turns out, the pair were members of a very conservative Christian sect that emphasized plain living and frowned on alcohol and illicit sex. And the deputies found several empty liquor bottles, along with "more than a few" freshly used brown-smeared condoms in the back seat. e. I just realized none of this is food industry horror. But I'll leave the stories. rndmnmbr has a new favorite as of 05:59 on Aug 26, 2015 |
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Aug 26, 2015 04:20
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rndmnmbr posted:e. I just realized none of this is food industry horror. But I'll leave the stories. It was only a matter of time before someone posted something insane but only barely fitting the description thanks to the building having a vending machine in it somewhere.
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Aug 26, 2015 06:35
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RareAcumen posted:thanks to the building having a vending machine in it somewhere. If I could only build a convenience store where everything was in card-based vending machines and employees didn't have to have any contact with filthy, filthy customers... e. Okay, I'll make up for it with a food horror story. We hired my brother once. Now, my brother is a blue collar kind of guy who likes physical labor, calls it like he sees it, takes no poo poo, and does not suffer fools gladly. He was also nineteen, and had a regular job as a combine driver for a harvest company. Harvesting is a seasonal job, lasting from the first of May or so until late December, cutting various grains. This particular owner would lay off his entire crew at the end of the season and encourage the crew to go file unemployment for their downtime - I don't know why he wouldn't just pay them their half-wages directly instead of going through the workforce commission, but there you go. In Texas, the workforce commission requires the beneficiary to submit two applications a week, and most of them involved with harvest will file applications they know they won't be hired for to keep milking the unemployment. My brother submitted his application at the store. If I had known, I would have round-filed it. The Hutt got to it first - and figured since I was such a good little There are many stories I could tell of the six weeks he worked at my store, but the one I came here to tell you was the Eternal Burrito. His third night, he dropped a burrito in the deep fryer when he started. He didn't fish that burrito out of the fryer until just before The Hutt arrived. He wrapped it in foil and stuck it in the freezer. The next night he worked, out came the burrito, into the fryer it went, and so on and so forth. He would re-fry that burrito every night for a week, then sell it to the first person who pissed him off Saturday night (usually the first customer who interrupted one of his dozen smoke breaks, and yes, he took his smoke breaks in the food prep area inside the store). Six weeks, six burritos that had been deep fried for a total of twenty-eight hours each. I can't even imagine what those tasted like. He put things in that deep fryer that were never meant to be fried. Hot links, which were microwave-only? Deep fried. Precooked grilled chicken breasts? Deep fried. Sausage patties for our breakfast sandwiches? Deep fried. Frozen biscuits for our breakfast sandwiches? Deep fried. Candy bars? Snack cakes? Beef jerky? Sliced pickled jalapeno? Whole produce? Dog treats? Chewing gum? Deep fried. Scotsmen and carney workers could have taken lessons from him on what it was possible to deep fry. He claims to this day that Chef Boyardee canned ravioli are "Actually not bad!" out of the deep fryer. The only excuse we had to lock the doors and refuse service was if the power went out. I made the mistake of telling him that. So when he got tired and wanted a nap at night, he would pop the main breaker to fake a power outage, lock the doors, and sleep for an hour or two. Until the morning where he overslept and The Hutt walked in on him snoozing in the back. (I got yelled at for four hours over it, but I told the bitch, don't hire my brother goddamnit.) rndmnmbr has a new favorite as of 08:01 on Aug 26, 2015 |
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Aug 26, 2015 07:24
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rndmnmbr posted:If I could only build a convenience store where everything was in card-based vending machines and employees didn't have to have any contact with filthy, filthy customers... I'm probably getting the wrong idea because the idea in my head of a restaurant the employees are behind a glass wall like a pawn shop and they just lift up doors to push the food out on the far end of the counter and push money through a little slot and such.
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Aug 26, 2015 07:35
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RareAcumen posted:I'm probably getting the wrong idea because the idea in my head of a restaurant the employees are behind a glass wall like a pawn shop and they just lift up doors to push the food out on the far end of the counter and push money through a little slot and such. The death of the Automat was a sad moment in food history.
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Aug 26, 2015 08:32
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all ur stories are gold regardless of how food industry-related they are so pls keep them coming
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Aug 26, 2015 09:06
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this site has an interesting handbook that tells you about governmentally acceptable levels of rodent filth, insects and mould in your favourite fruit and vegetables http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/GuidanceDocumentsRegulatoryInformation/SanitationTransportation/ucm056174.htm unless you're growing your food in a lab there's no way you can't get it to the consumer without it being crawling with one harmless insect or another.
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Aug 26, 2015 09:15
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cash crab posted:This little old man came up to me one night and asked me how much a single banana would cost. I weighed it and said $0.30. Then, he placed a spider the size of an apricot onto the conveyor and asked how much that would be. I guess he found it in the bananas? Whatever, it was free. He should have been more careful about grabbing large spiders from bananas... these motherfuckers have turned up in shipments of bananas sent to places as far away as the UK.
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Aug 26, 2015 09:55
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Not gonna lie, if I had access to a deep fryer, i'd probably put things like candy bars and jalapenos in there too. But then I'm a terrible person when it comes to my diet choices.
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Aug 26, 2015 13:33
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I found a dirty, chipped, press-on thumbnail in a bag of broccoli once.
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Aug 26, 2015 15:38
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Novum posted:FOH manager was dating a server and the owners made him fire her the day before they fired him. Tha's frigid cold. Goddrat I walked into the produce cooler at the catering company I used to work at to find one of my part-timers bent over a pallet of fruit while a cook went to town on her. I asked the owners what I should do about it and they told me to go tell them to finish up and get back to work. I miss that job 
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Aug 26, 2015 16:07
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GOTTA STAY FAI posted:Seafood and tuna setups getting old in the coolers and having their dates changed when nobody's looking because EEEEWWW MAKING THOSE MAKES YOUR HANDS SMELL FISHY SOMEONE ELSE WILL DO IT TOMORROW, and lazy employees not FIFOing when they refill the bain containers. That and restaurant managers tend to hammer into you that shrink should be reduced at all costs. Never waste anything, ever, even if it means something is so old it might kill somebody. GOTTA STAY FAI posted:Goddrat One thing people running restaurants just have to kind of accept is that a thoroughly ridiculous amount of sex happens in the restaurant world. Your employees are going to all be loving each other and there isn't a drat thing you could do about it.
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Aug 26, 2015 18:41
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I worked at a Taco Time for about two weeks. I didn't last for a few reasons, but the main one that ruined it for me was the stacks of tortilla shells. The stacks would go moldy often, and the manager had us pick the tortillas that hadn't gotten moldy yet out of the stack and use them, while the rest were tossed on a pile on the counter to be thrown away after preparing the order. I knew the guy managed at least a couple of Taco Times in Calgary so I just never eat at them ever. There were mold spores over probably every surface in all of them, I bet.
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Aug 26, 2015 19:53
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Picnic Princess posted:I worked at a Taco Time for about two weeks. I didn't last for a few reasons, but the main one that ruined it for me was the stacks of tortilla shells. The stacks would go moldy often, and the manager had us pick the tortillas that hadn't gotten moldy yet out of the stack and use them, while the rest were tossed on a pile on the counter to be thrown away after preparing the order.  Taco Time was my favourite. This breaks my heart.
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Aug 26, 2015 21:19
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I worked for a while in a Steak N Shake. You know what gets used to clean the caked-on grease that mists out of the fryers and settles over every surface in the entire place, off? Lye. Only they'll deny it if you mention it; they literally have to hide the cans because it's a 'critical violation' if the health inspector finds out. Sometimes it even gets used to wipe down the surfaces on which the food is prepared!
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Aug 27, 2015 14:30
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To be fair, misted oil is hard to clean, especially if given enough time to polymerize. My go-to cleaning solution was full strength butyl degreaser and Scotch-brite pads, and I'm pretty sure lye is healthier than butyl degreaser. Besides, so long as you wipe everything down afterwards, it shouldn't be a problem. Especially on food surfaces, because they're getting scrubbed with plenty of water on a regular basis, and bleached thoroughly, right?
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Aug 27, 2015 16:42
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rndmnmbr posted:To be fair, misted oil is hard to clean, especially if given enough time to polymerize. My go-to cleaning solution was full strength butyl degreaser and Scotch-brite pads, and I'm pretty sure lye is healthier than butyl degreaser. Besides, so long as you wipe everything down afterwards, it shouldn't be a problem. Especially on food surfaces, because they're getting scrubbed with plenty of water on a regular basis, and bleached thoroughly, right? No. That isn't right. Some restaurants only clean things properly when they know the health inspector is coming. edit: Oh who am I kidding that's "most" or maybe even "all."
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Aug 27, 2015 16:44
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I never did cover a shift at another store and discover that someone else had thoroughly scrubbed anything at all on a regular basis... e. I take that back! There was one where the deep fryer shined like a diamond! Their usual night shift guy kept the fryer scrupulously clean, filtered the oil every night, and boiled it out twice a week. The reason I was covering a shift at that store was because the guy had been fired when they caught him boiling out the fryer with butyl degreaser...
rndmnmbr has a new favorite as of 16:57 on Aug 27, 2015 |
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Aug 27, 2015 16:52
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I love these threads. I only have a few of them: - I used to work at a bakery when I was 15 and one time I dropped an entire tray of apple fritters onto the filthy ground, picked them up, glazed them (could still see some dust and gunk trapped under the glaze), and put those fuckers out to sell. None of them came back and no one said anything about them. - When I was working at a pizzeria I sliced my finger open slicing tomatoes. My boss told me if I left for then I was fired so I just slapped a band aid and a plastic glove over it and worked away. Well, later in the evening I was prepping a pizza and noticed there was a bunch of sauce all over the dough. I ignored it and just kept on making the pizza even though I hadn't sauced it yet. It wasn't until it was done and in the oven that I noticed I was bleeding all up and down my arm and blood was spilling out of my plastic glove. Oh well, not making that pizza again. Heat will kill it anyways. - I once watched this guy I worked with rub every single slice of American cheese we had in the restaurant between his rear end cheeks and then place them back into that uniform little stack it comes in as best he could. I don't think he even had a reason for doing it. Just to be a dick I guess. It was funny to see him standing with his pants dropped in front of the cooler though.
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Aug 27, 2015 18:53
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rndmnmbr posted:To be fair, misted oil is hard to clean, especially if given enough time to polymerize. My go-to cleaning solution was full strength butyl degreaser and Scotch-brite pads, and I'm pretty sure lye is healthier than butyl degreaser. Besides, so long as you wipe everything down afterwards, it shouldn't be a problem. Especially on food surfaces, because they're getting scrubbed with plenty of water on a regular basis, and bleached thoroughly, right? One time a server left a loaf of bread in the lil oven thing they had for heating them up before serving. Half an hour later it was jet black and turned to dust when touched. The entire inside of the oven was covered in bread soot and nasty thick garlic herb butter that hadn't been wiped down recently. My coworker spent an hour with his upper body inside the still-hot oven, scrubbing it down with metal wool and butyl degreaser. He was hacking and coughing from the degreaser fumes like crazy. When he came back out he was uniformly bright red/pink with bulging veins in his arms and neck. I don't think he had worse than a small first degree burn on one forearm. 5 minute smoke break and back to work.  He had to put a fresh apron on, the other one was crispy and had holes burned in it.
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Aug 28, 2015 00:51
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rndmnmbr posted:To be fair, misted oil is hard to clean, especially if given enough time to polymerize. My go-to cleaning solution was full strength butyl degreaser and Scotch-brite pads, and I'm pretty sure lye is healthier than butyl degreaser. Besides, so long as you wipe everything down afterwards, it shouldn't be a problem. Especially on food surfaces, because they're getting scrubbed with plenty of water on a regular basis, and bleached thoroughly, right? If you use lye you can give the surfaces a good wipe down with a vinegar solution afterward, then wipe everything down with water. Same goes for fryers after a boil-out. If the fryer smells like salt and vinegar chips before the final rinse, you know you've done it right.
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Aug 28, 2015 09:04
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We used a commercial boil-out solution. It didn't work great, but all you had to do to neutralize it was reboil the fryer with clean water for five minutes. I only applied degreaser to non-food surfaces, like the outside of the fryer, the hood, the backsplash, and everything else in range of oil mist. That is, when a boil-out happened at all - our maintenance man impressed on me the need to do regular boil-outs, but apparently I was the only one who got the message out of the fifteen stores I wound up covering shifts for. No one cared. The employees were undertrained (the company only allocated 16 hours of training time), working solo shifts, paid minimum wage with no benefits, and frequently verbally abused by managers and area supervisors. It's hard to clean anything right when you have to drop everything for customers, you have no one to give you a hand with anything, and no amount of effort was going to prevent the management from calling you a thief and threatening your job every time you turned around. That last was the real killer. I went through management training, and they spent more time emphasizing that your employees were robbing you blind and how you should never trust them than they did actually teaching us how to run a store. And yes, employee theft was a thing, but you don't handle it by calling every single employee a thief and threatening to fire every one of them as the opening salvo of the monthly store meeting. The company gave no fucks about morale, and treated even managers and area supervisors as replaceable drones.
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Aug 28, 2015 09:46
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Oh man. I've got a bunch of stories over the years I could tell, but I might as well start with a memorable one: Getting the Band Together I was the kitchen manager for a few years at what grew to become a college + university town's most busy club. The food wasn't anything fancy. Just pretty much wings or deep fried items bought from Sysco but it was a decent job that paid the bills. At first. After awhile I went to college for culinary management so I could do a bit more than fry pre-made items for a living, and had to step down managing the kitchen so I could concentrate on school. I stayed on as what was basically their sous chef for my 2 years of school but it's my replacements that made it interesting. First guy in I'll call Bill and he seemed a little under skilled but was full of energy and enthusiasm for the kitchen. He had done a few other bar kitchens, but after reading Kitchen Confidential (Anthony Bourdain's book), he was sucked in by his tale of cooking adventures and wanted to live a life like him. I wish I had read the book at that point because Bourdain had a lot of luck, went through a lot of crap, and told tales of a chef banging a drunk bride over some garbage pails on her wedding night. I also wish I had known of Bill's band that 'was going to take off any day'. We went through staff fairly regularly since most employees were only in town for college/university. So Bill started sliding in a few of his deadbeat band mates as replacements. It became very clear that Bill and his band mates first priority was the band when about 80% of the kitchen staff had to have every Sunday off for practice. Not the worst since we had enough others to cover, but zero chance of any help if someone was sick or needed that day off. The first one got fired when he got so drunk on a busy Friday he couldn't make it to the bathroom and instead puked dead center of the packed dance floor. He was also 17 and lied about his age on the application. Bill's nephew had gotten out of jail at the ripe age of 15 and was needing a job, and still got hired at our bar despite management knowing his age and record. My first shift with him he literally told me how he just got out of jail for B&E, then asked if I lived nearby. He knew how to change the deep fryers and that it was a 2 pail process where you have to stop emptying part way than fill up a new one so they don't get dangerously full. One day the nephew put a pail under the fryer, pulled the lever to empty the grease, then went to the bathroom. I got summoned to help with the mess and I've never seen such a disaster. The pail had overflowed and the grease spread to almost every corner of the kitchen floor, under every piece of equipment, on every hanging power cord, and a small wedge oozing out of the kitchen to the DJ booth. We closed the kitchen and probably 20 kg of salt were dumped over the next 6 hours as we cleaned it up, then fired nephew. Despite the odd antics and red flags that were starting to pop up, Bill managed to convince the management to turn our newly renovated basement bar into an open mike night on Thursday and Fridays. To encourage 'budding and starving artists' to come down, the kitchen was instructed to comp the performers whatever they wanted. Of course Bill and his band performed those nights, which meant they now couldn't work those days. However the only people that came in to both perform and watch were Bill's band and his music buddies. Who ordered the largest amount of food possible including one guy ordering 100 wings just to see if he could eat them all. The hundreds of dollars that were evaporating in free food might have been worth it if anyone Bill knew had talent, but the sets being played were driving away our busy Friday crowds! The live performance experiment was killed in less than 2 months. The company also had a sister bar in town that used to be a concert venue, but was now a cowboy themed place. However on the very rare occasion, some band would come to town and want a different venue to perform at and would rent out the space. Bill was in charge when the band Disturbed rented it out, and he hired everyone in his band (and a few extras) to work as servers for the night. Instead of doing their jobs at a packed event like that, they harassed Disturbed with demo tapes and worse to the point that two of the guys were tossed out by the band's security. Bill had also tried sliding in on their hiring papers that they were getting paid $18/h for server work. All were fired except Bill who hung on for about another month. He was nearly fired for coming in on mushrooms and freaking out a waitress by asking her to lock him in the fridge. What got him out the door was management watching him on the security camera as he took off his shoes and socks, then proceeded to was his bare feet in the same sink we sanitize chicken wings. Last I saw of him, his band was doing a free charity concert for some 50 cent burger joint in town. thiswayliesmadness has a new favorite as of 05:46 on Aug 31, 2015 |
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Aug 31, 2015 05:40
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Jesus, I feel like I'm reading The Jungle for restaurants.
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Aug 31, 2015 06:19
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thiswayliesmadness posted:sanitize chicken wings. How does this work, exactly? PS: I was the km of a wing joint for 2 years.
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Aug 31, 2015 11:33
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^^^Pretty sure I read somewhere that you're supposed to rinse chicken off before cooking to remove the salmonella......
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Aug 31, 2015 13:56
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Make sure you use a really high-pressure tap as well to evenly disperse your campylobacter throughout your whole kitchen...
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Aug 31, 2015 14:04
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Radio Help posted:How does this work, exactly? It's pretty much how the poster above described. Soak with water and a bit of salt to leech out any blood, then rinsed till the water's pretty much clear. Sanitizing isn't the best word for it, but was how they referred to the method. Mostly keeps your fryer oil fresher for longer than anything else.
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Aug 31, 2015 18:18
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This is a quick blurb because it's my mom's experience, not mine, and I don't remember all the details. Whenever my mom would take us to a movie theater when my siblings and i were kids, she would warn us to never get ice in our drinks, and would refuse to buy us popcorn. We were always curious about this, so she finally told us why. Basically, in the early-to-mid-90s, she worked at a budget movie theater. The popcorn was stored at the front of the counter in a clear glass case. It looked cool as a customer, since the entire front of the counter was just glass filled to the brim with popcorn. ...Or, should I say, it SHOULD have looked cool. The thing is, that thing rarely ever got cleaned. It was full of old popcorn butter and grease most of the time. So, one day, when my mom went to go get popcorn for a customer... she was met with the sight of pantry moths and their larvae crawling throughout the case to the point where it looked like the popcorn itself was squirming. So, what about the ice? Sometimes, the soda fountain ice maker would get clogged. It happens, and there are clean ways to fix it. But that's not what the manager of the theater did. Nope, dude just used a plunger right from the bathroom to fix it! And apparently, that was a common occurrence. Once my mom saw that in action, she up and left.
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Aug 31, 2015 20:39
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