Are Cooks And Servers Poisoning Your Food?
One would think not during a pandemic that by its nature results in low customer turnout.
One would think all employees cooking and serving at dining and drinking establishments would want to satisfy their customers more.
One would think that the quality of food, the attention to dumping spoilage or otherwise compromised ingredients, the quality and timing of service would improve, not degenerate into unacceptable or even dangerous.
The more customers the better the food and service seems to be the law of the restaurant and bar land these days.
Short tempers abound. Nobody has enough money, so they all take it out on the customer, as if the customer is the cause and answer to all their problems. They’re the ones with the wallets.
In a way it is, but the customer is also hurting, so where does that land them?
When is it appropriate for a chef or cook to vocalize an intent to poison somebody’s food, or for a server to make a prediction that food could be compromised, either as a threat or a strategy to get a bigger tip?
Never. It is NEVER APPROPRIATE OR ACCEPTABLE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE.
They’ll all say when confronted that it was a joke, but somehow nobody was laughing. People laugh at a joke. But even when it was meant as a joke and it rarely if ever was, it’s not funny. Is attempted murder funny? Does anybody laugh at molesting a child? Crime isn’t funny. Intentionally harming others is not funny.
This is a serious situation. It goes across county lines – in every demographic.
The ones who want you to hear it probably aren’t going to do it. And the ones who tell other cooks or servers that they’d like to do it probably aren’t going to do it either. But it happens more often than you might think; it’s just that it usually isn’t life-threatening.
The ones who hear it have an obligation to the public they serve to report it to management or to the owner or to the local newspapers. They rarely do. And even if they did, they look around as if looking for dead bodies and see none, so what’s the harm?
Most people who work in bars and restaurants are alcohol and/or drug addicted with family problems as a result of it. Add to that mental illness and/or people who trigger easily and you’ve got a continual recipe for revenge happening in the kitchen, at the bar and in the minds of the servers. They’re angry and they see you as the reason why, as irrational as that is.
A lot of homeless people get transitioned to restaurants. Why restaurants where the security of the food is critical to the survival of the customer would the government be transitioning anybody?
The service industry needs to screen their applicants more thoroughly. But that in itself isn’t going to solve an industry-wide problem: the integrity of the food.
If the industry is going to be policed by the health departments of towns and cities, then there needs to be actual training courses for chefs, cooks and servers that they must complete before even applying for a job. Like a driver’s license, you take a test to get a food service license. Free. No cost to the applicant. All they do now is check storage facilities, not food handling procedures by staff.
The entire system needs to be overhauled. There are too many loopholes in the laws and too many drive-by inspections. Their attitude is that if it’s too dirty and dangerous why go there? Go someplace else. They let the street take care of it. They put the onus on the customer instead of where it should be, on the establishment.
There’s no motivation to change the behavior that compromises the food thus the customer.
I walked into three restaurants downtown Cleveland recently and walked right back out. No wonder there’s no downtown activity. They were filthy. They stunk like sewer. It was like five hundred huge men came in and passed their gas at once and then left. Open the windows!!! Do they even have air circulating systems? Why no odor of disinfectant during a pandemic? Because they’re probably not using any. Who’s going to check?
I thought, who could eat here and not throw up. The only thing I figured was they must be a front for drug and people sales, not food. They were practically empty at lunch time.
It changed my mind on wanting to live downtown.
ANIMAL-FREE SOUS-CHEF™ 