37 Horrifying Restaurant Stories Shared By Health Inspectors

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 p*o 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Hi there!

Former health inspector here. During that time I was an FDA standardized food safety inspection officer and I still hold a credential as a certified professional in food safety.

The question you asked is a bit difficult to answer. Appearance is not always indicative of food safety conditions. You could have a filthy kitchen but relatively low risk foods and processes or you could have an immaculate kitchen and some very high risk foods and processes and have the more concerning kitchen be the super clean one.

I've seen restaurants severely infested with roaches, restaurants where the basement was filled with sewage and/or flood water, a complete disregard for food temperatures and food handling practices. You name it and I have probably seen it.

I'm not a health inspector anymore, but when I was, the worst calls I ever did were always for hoarding complaints. Two of the worst ones:

1. This guy didn't want to get evicted so he barred the entrance to his unit. In order to punish the landlord for evicting him, he destroyed all of the plumping in his unit so that water was just pouring from every fixture - toilet, faucet, etc. When we finally got in there (the Sherrifs came and used a sledgehammer to knock down the door) there was at least a 1" thick layer of mold on literally every surface in the unit - tables, walls, ceiling, whatever. Just caked in mold. I don't know how that guy survived in there.

2. Another hoarding call, we were talking to this guy who was obviously suffering from dementia or something about the complaints of cockroaches from his unit, and I look in his kitchen and see that he has every element on his stove on high with nothing on them. Just glowing red elements. Piled right next to the stove? Hundreds of cardboard boxes. Literally less than 6" away from the stove. I'm pretty sure if we hadn't happened to have shown up that day he would have burnt his apartment building down.

Some restaurant near me got shut down because they had freshly severed goat heads in the refrigerator. They didn't serve goat.

The walls ooze green slime!

Not a health inspector, but cook.

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.

There are two that come immediately to mind. One of them was a bakery that he showed slides of to us. Their sheet pans were filthy, as well as all their bunracks. Their floor was cement, but you could tell that there was a layer of grime covering it, pretty gross in general, but then he got to the slide of a rat that had been smashed into the floor. Instead of picking up the passed rat and disposing of it they would just repeatedly run the rat over with their bunracks.

The second one was 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.

Not a health inspector, but

One of the Starbucks in my city had roaches. They closed, fumigated, and reopened.

Still roaches.

So, they do it again, and use more bombs.

Still roaches.

At a complete loss, they leave traps every where to try to control the problem.

One day, one of the baristas disassembled an espresso bar to deep clean it. Roaches *everywhere.*

That's right, one of the bars they use every day had had roaches in it for *weeks*, and they were pulling espresso on it. People were drinking it.

That was messed up.

Obligatory 'not a health inspector', but I've worked in kitchens and front of house and seen some disgusting stuff.

I once worked for a fancy winery which had some very unethical practices and ripped off the customer a lot, as well as had a pretty gross kitchen. I stopped eating there after I saw the chef/owner's wife change their infant son's dirty nappy on our prep bench while we were using it to prepare for dinner.

I used to work in food service distribution as a director of operations. A few times a year, I would ride with sales people, meet with customers, make sure their service was good, all that.

I was riding with our top sales guy and we had visited some of our most important accounts. Then we stopped at this little diner that he sold because it was basically right between a few big customers and it was easy to service.

When we got there, the owner was in the process of adding on to his kitchen. All of the coolers and freezers were outside on his back deck, covered in pine needles and dust. He stopped hammering nails for a few minutes to chat with us. Then a waitress came out and told him she needed a lobster roll and fries. He went into the kitchen, took off his giant muck boots and set them on the end of the counter. His small dog ran around his ankles and eventually hopped on the counter. The owner did not wash his hands, made the lobster roll, fed some meat to the dog, the dog licked his fingers, he then went back to plating the meal, hit the bell, "order up!" and went back to working on his addition. I actually gagged and almost puked in my mouth.


Also, most of the Chinese restaurants I visited were horrific. Chinese trade was tough to break into. They were getting most of their stuff from NY or MA on spray-painted, dirty box trucks with no refrigeration. The trucks would arrive with several guys riding in the back and three in the cab. They'd unload all of the stuff and it was probably kept at about 50 - 60 degrees all the way to ME from NY. In the kitchen, there would be buckets of raw chicken with flies buzzing around. Employees would drop stuff on the floor, pick it up and throw it back in, stuff like that. It was gross as h**l.

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 if for the green moldy crud that coated the whole thing. That was my walking away point. I promised myself, if they ever asked me to clean that, I needed the job less than I needed to not do that.

Not an inspector, but my town has the inspection reports posted on a regular basis. I'm not sure how this place wasn't shut down:

"Non-critical violation: Observation: Observed holes in floor/wall junction (access point for mice/rats), at service counter, under grill, and above back door; floor tiles cracked at back, near 3 vat sink, ceiling tile falling in bathroom (sagging under debris and rodent p*o).

Non-critical violation: Observation: Harborage conditions exist."