“Frozen Half The Time”: 41 Restaurant Workers Reveal Items On Their Menu To Never Order

Bored Panda got in touch with the netizen who posted this question online and they were kind enough to share some more details with us. Firstly, we wanted to hear why they asked this in the first place.

“What prompted me to ask the question was a conversation I had at a family reunion. My cousin and I were talking about fried chicken gizzards being good from a local restaurant but his gf who worked there told us not to order them from there because they sit out in the warmers all day. I was on my way back to Colorado from Arkansas which naturally meant I was stopping for fast food more often than I usually would and it made me want to ask the public what I should avoid when I do.”

It ended up having thousands of comments, so we also were curious to hear their thoughts on that. “I think most working people in the US/Canada have worked in a chain restaurant at some point in their life so there are plenty of first hand accounts and secondly nearly everyone already has some lingering suspicion that they shouldn’t eat certain things from certain places and they want to make sure they avoid them.”

“I actually don’t have much experience in food service. I worked at a McDonald’s for about 3months when I was 16 and was a bar back at an upscale local restaurant called “Public at the brickyard” and the Hyatt in Wichita Kansas. Both Public and the one in the Hyatt were exceptionally clean and I never saw anything I would worry about in either. At McDonalds I’d probably stay away from the McRib and I never saw those McCafé machines get cleaned.”

Lastly, we wanted to hear if they had any favorite comments. “I think the ones that stuck to me in the thread were the consistent ones. There were a lot of responses where one person was saying they worked in one franchise and it was disgusting and another would say they worked at a different location and it was clean which makes sense depending on the competency of management, but then there were others I kept seeing like subway where people would say not to eat there and no one refuted it. Another big one was ice machines which I’ve heard of before. My biggest takeaway was the guy who said don’t eat at restaurants that are always slow because it’s difficult to keep track of what food is going bad if it isn’t moving quickly.”