39 Horrifying Restaurant Stories Shared By Health Inspectors

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 it's juices for a week in the Texas summer heat. Those are the worst ones that I can think of atm.

One of the news channels where I live does a weekly segment called "restaurant report card." It's shows the good and bad DHEC reports of the week. There was one Chinese restaurant that had live chickens in the kitchen.

Was a tradesman working on a hotel in Lower Buttfuck a fine city in Alberta. 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.

Former health inspector here (and current third party food safety auditor): A few things that come to mind:

1. Grocery store so infested with rodents that an entire group of them was living in the dairy cooler- you know there had to be a lot of them in the store if some were resorting to living in a cold room.

2. 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- 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. 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.

3. Restaurant 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.

4. Observed people smoking in the kitchens and in meat departments of grocery stores. Also observed folks using chewing tobacco and keeping their spit cups on the food prep surfaces.

Most of the stuff we think is disgusting isn't necessarily what the general public would even notice. A lot revolves around handwashing- if you really watch someone during food production and see all the things they touch and then attempt to handle ready to eat foods, it's disgusting. People just don't even think about handwashing like they should.

Not an inspector but witnessed something gross.

I worked for a company that had a lunchroom with an older woman who cooked our breakfast and lunch. I think she was friends of the owners. She would bring in a daily special, like chili, but also made sandwiches and whatnot.

We had out-of-town customers and when lunch time came around, the secretaries would set up lunch in a conference room by the lunch room, and the lady would make something special just for them.

So I'm taking away plates after these people had eaten and bringing them to the lunchroom for lunch lady to load dishwasher. Now, not everyone had finished their meals. It was chicken and rice this day. It was rather late and an employee had come in asking her to make him something. Im going back n forth doing my thing and I see her scrape the left over food back into the pot. From several plates. I couldn't beleive my eyes so I just stare with question marks floating over my head. Then I hear her ask the guy (who was reading something, so not looking at her) if he wants chicken and rice. (?!) He says "Sure" and she makes him a plate, of left-over food she scrapes off the plates I gave her. I should have said something, but I noped out of there real quick.

It bothered the heck out of me so I confessed to a co-worker and she's all "You have to tell the boss!". I did, it escalated to the owners, and lunch lady was fired.

To make you feel better, I used to worked at Costco and the place was really clean.
The ice cream machine was dismantled and cleaned at least every week (it took 2 hours each time). The fryer emptied and clean everyday. In the food court, we would spend hours on cleaning alone.

The meat department was hose downed with disinfectant and scrubbed every day. Someone was hired just to clean the bakery department during the evening.
The health inspector was seen shopping there a couple of times which I think was good news.

I may not have a great experience working there but I know it's clean.

Okay okay finally I have a story! I got this!

I worked as a waiter in a Vietnamese restaurant owners and staffs are all chinese. The place is actually pretty clean and well run, and then one day....

A regular came in with a bad cold. Order a large pho and our popular whole coconut juice (make a hole in the coconut and stick a straw in it). Anyone who had drink hot soup while sick would know that you produced a lot of mucus right after... of which the dude spitted into the coconut.

I cleaned the table and tossed the coconut into the trash bin along with his other mucus covered paper napkins, food bits from other tables, etc. About 5 minutes later, another waitress came by and fished it out of the garbage bin, put it on the dirty dish cart inside the soup filled dish tray. I asked what she is doing, and she just laughed awkwardly and walked away.

I was curious enough to keep an eye on the coconuts. The dishwasher was the father of the manager of the restaurant. He came by, cut the coconut open with the cleaver (same one that is used to cut open fresh coconut, cut meat, etc), washed the coconut with water and scraped the mucus out with his bare hands. Took a spoon, scrape out the coconut meat that lines the coconut, wrapped it up with cling wrap, and placed it inside the little fridge below the smoothie station.

The meat then was used to make the popular coconut smoothie. I confronted the old man about it, who got really indignant and demand that I made a coconut smoothie with coconut from that batch (a coconut batch can make three smoothie). Then he drank it right in front of me. “See, totally no problem”.

I quit soon after but I also never saw the old man washed his hands.

My friend in school talked about how trash the place he works at is. He said stuff like if someone drops a slice of pizza, they'll pick it up and serve it to the next guy. They'll do this with all their food. The restaurant part is fancy, but the kitchen is a mess and nobody really cleans it.

How they're still in business? Well when the first health inspector comes, they'll fail and they have a certain amount of time to correct it. Then the supervisor of the inspectors comes, who is good friends with the restaurant owner. He passes the restaurant either way.

Not inspector but 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 its still super popular and still buggy.

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 Charlie 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)

I also had to negotiate with my boss on how often she’d let me clean the frylator grease. I wanted to do it once a day but ended up only getting a “once a week” approval; which was better than “once a season” like she had been.

My Mom used to be a health inspector. A bar had a bear chained outside and the owners would bring it inside to hangout with the patrons sometimes.

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 coworkers later that week and they agreed that place always has a weird smell.

Not a health inspector, but worked at a restaurant that was barely skirting by on health inspections.

We had a big roach problem, but we did a good job keeping them out of the actual food, which I guess is the big thing they look for with health inspections.

The most egregious issue, though, was the time I was making milkshakes and accidentally cut my arm on the metal counter. Well, I didn't notice how bad the cut was until I saw blood in the ice cream tub. Being a responsible person, I go to throw the ice cream out when the manager interrupts me, saying I should go use the first aid kit and they'll take care of the ice cream.

Well, I come back to the same tub of ice cream returned to the freezer, but the blood scraped out of it. *They kept using the ice cream.*

Edit: I want to clarify that they scraped the blood out before continuing to use the ice cream. They did not serve my blood to people directly.

I worked at a McDonalds that was just about to get rebuilt and had just narrowly passed inspection. What does this mean? The owner doesn't want to replace anything because the store is about to get torn down, so the whole place went downhill.

A drunk person flushed a pair of underwear in the bathroom and clogged the sewage once, causing sewage to come up through the drains in the kitchen and stock rooms. We still served food. Then the stock room where we keep a lot of food items had a ceiling cave in and fiberglass insulation was dangling less than a foot away from food products on shelves. We were regularly pulling trashcans from the lobby and kitchen anytime it rained to help contain rain water from leaks in the ceiling back in the stock room.

I left last November, the store doesn't get torn down for another month so I can only imagine how bad it is now.

Not the worst but never ate there after this...

First week in Canada I went into Popeyes as who doesn't like mashed potatoes. 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, the prep tables. Everywhere in that tiny space was just getting blasted with floor goop.

Former employee of a few food/drink related places...

•Rat/roach droppings in the pizza boxes.

•Fry cook dropping things and picking them back up to fry (he reasoned that the oil was hot enough to burn off anything. The oil was changed only weekly if not biweekly sometimes).

•ice cream shop where no hairnets or gloves were offered/needed, so managers hair ended up in ice cream. Also, questionably clean hands making cones.

•Slime/mold colonies (not growth, civilizations) in the ice makers and soda spouts at a whole chain of gas stations. AFAIK, I was the only one who ever cleaned those at my location alone, and whenever I babysat another store... Also, the coffee urns. Black bottoms and grinds caked on inside. If you live near em, go to Racetrak or Sheetz. Cleanest urns and spouts I've ever known.

Worked at McDonalds. The McCafe machines were the most disgusting things I've ever seen in my life. So much mold and slime and disgust. The first time I cleaned the machine, I never ordered a McCafe drink again. Just another day at McDonalds.

My mother briefly became the head of the health inspection for our county, I recall two good stories:

First, she noted that even though there were many violations there seemed to be no punishment from the department for restaurants that forced them to fix these things... except for new restaurants. She asked why. Their response was that "These restaurant owners are our friends! If we punish them or fine them, or send out a violation notice they might not like us any more." She tried to fix that but story three below got in the way.

Second... and this is just awesome so I am sharing it. A house (not a restaurant) had a sewage problem, it was backing up and the neighbors finally got the county to investigate. They decided that the septic tank and field were backed up. So they forced the home owner to dig it up and reinstall a new one (a few thousand dollars even back in the day). when they finally got it exposred they discovered the homeowner has backed a short school bus into a trench 10 or 20 years before and has the sewage going into a window in the front behind the driver seat, and had cracked open the back door to allow it to drain... it was full.

Third, there was a dude, old dude, who was "close to retirement." He was a poo stain. He was verbally and horrible to the staff (the inspectors not my mother who is well... matronly). What she did do is fire him. But the county board rehired him since he was" close to retirement!" After he attacked some of the women in the office she fired him again. (this is like month two of the job), and then 5 people on the county board and her all had flat tires the same day, and they discovered that each of them had a box of nails emptied at the bottom of their drive way... so the county board rehired the jerk.

She quit.

SLIIIIME in the ICE MACHINE.

Not a health inspector but worked at a food place:

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 to the 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.