Restaurant And Bar Employees Reveal 30 Shady Cost-Saving Secrets The General Public Is Not Aware Of

There are two extremely shady things that I’ve seen restaurants do to save money that top my list.

Years ago, I was working banquets as a part time gig for a hotel to help them get through a busy few weeks. One night, we served a large wedding, and at the end, about 30% of the food was left over. Instead of offering it to staff and throwing the rest of it away, it was saved for later use. I know a lot more about food safety now than I did back then, but even back then I knew that this was wrong. Trays of food that had been sitting out for hours, and not held hot, need to be thrown away.

The most shady thing I’ve witnessed occurred long ago. I worked in a bar and restaurant, and perhaps their most important employee was their do-it-all dishwasher. I will call him Albert. Albert was an extremely diligent man of about 50, and he also happened to be mentally challenged. The owners took advantage of his hard work and unfortunately, also took advantage of the fact that had a low IQ. They made him do every job that no one wanted to do, and quite frankly, the place would have come to a screeching halt if he decided to not show up for work one day. He worked 80 hours a week at minimum wage and did not get paid overtime. They paid him in cash for his overtime hours, but that still works out to considerably less in that particular tax jurisdiction. When the minimum wage would go up, they would tell him he is getting a raise. This is easily the most blatant abuse of a worker that I have ever seen. He was the kindest, hardest working man I’ve known in the industry. At least the rest of the staff treated him with respect and kindness.

There are a number of things that less-than-scrupulous owners do to increase their margins. I’ve seen operators pour bulk liquor into premium bottles hoping guests won’t notice. Cocktail bars can print one brand on the menu and then pour another one because they ran out of the more expensive one. The shadiest thing that I’ve encountered though was an owner that tried to hire all of his staff as independent contractors so he wasn’t liable for paying payroll tax or required insurance. Treating the human capital poorly is the shadiest tactic an owner could do to cut costs.

I was a 16-year-old waitress in a deli and my cheap boss would make me re-use the soda cups unless they had obvious lipstick marks on them. I lost all respect for him and soon quit.

It was back in the 1970's. I was a young cook in a restaurant in LaCrosse Wisconsin. Most restaurants would run a Friday night all you can eat special which was always fried fish, usually beer battered, Cole slaw and fries. Yep, YOU KNOW WHERE THIS IS GOING.. An extra dishwasher was scheduled that night to search the returning plates for untouched fish and fries. These would be refried and served again. The owner's explanation was that the refrying killed all “GERMS". Needless to say I rapidly found another job before someone got sick and the kitchen was blamed.

In my teen years I worked at a Sonic Drive In. When it got slow, the manager would make us carhops dig through the trash (no gloves) and pull out unused ketchup, mustard, etc packets and put them back in the bin on the shelf. I did that once and then quit and never went back!

My cousin work at the same Sonic and she said they used to make her wipe the green slime off of the hot dog wieners and then throw them on the grill. Barf!!

The shadiest thing I’ve seen is the bartenders taking left over customers drinks off tables and mistakes and pouring them all into a pitcher all day long then serving a dollar drink in a paper cup they called “ all nations” to the drunks that hung around behind the bar like alley cats.

There's a weird thing they do at certain restaurants where you can order pizza by the slice. When someone orders a whole pizza, they’ll take an older pizza (with some slices sold from it) that's getting close to its hold time, fill the missing slices in from the new pizza, and serve the Frankenstein pizza to the customer. Then they have a bunch of brand new slices to sell instead of having to throw out the expired slices.

Many years ago I tended bar for a guy that was the ultimate of cheap. He would go to restaurants and pick up the raw chicken they were throwing away, take it in the bar’s kitchen and bleach it in strong Clorox solution until it was Snow White, cover it in really hot sauce, salt it like crazy and cook it up for h’orderves. Everyone ate it. I don’t know how many people got sick from it but they kept coming back for more.

Do I have a story for you. When I was in college I took a part time serving job at a restaurant near my parents. The guy who ran it was CHEAP. He would serve food that was past it’s due date regularly including dairy desserts, if it had visible mold he would throw it out, but only when it was visibly moldy!

This man would make me go through the lettuce for the salad bar by hand and pick out the wilted pieces instead of just using fresh lettuce, not only cheap, but super unsanitary. He would make me do the same thing with fruit, but if the fruit was moldy he would just store it in the walk in freezer to cut the bad parts off and use.

He couldn’t afford cleaners so he expected his servers to come in an hour before their shifts, clean the bathrooms and then PREP THE FOOD. Sometimes he would even make me clean the front porches by hand with a wash cloth and bleach (it was an Inn/Restaurant) prior to opening.

He even kept his compost in the walk in fridge, which in hindsight is the weirdest thing he did, who does that???

I won’t say where the place is though, he had to close and the place was bought by a new owner who has done an absolutely wonderful job!!!

UPDATE: Yesterday I drove by this place on my way to my parents and it is absolutely amazing there now, so clean they even gave me a tour of the facilities (including the kitchen!). It’s a far cry from what it once was and I cannot believe how awesome it looks now! The new owners really deserve a hand for how they turned it around!

Back in the late 70’s I had a close friend who worked at a swanky restaurant in Calabasas, CA. One of the jobs she had was to remove the unused “garnish” from plates returning to the kitchen, to be used on new plates going out to customers. I was incredulous and had to see for myself, so I stopped by one night. Sure enough, she was the first person in “scrape” (kitchen slang for the area where used plates were brought to be scraped of major food debris before loading into the dishwasher), and would take parsley off and put it in a pile to the side, then scrape off the little pile of peas and carrots into a bin. Eventually, someone would come by and grab the parsley, peas & carrots, and take them to where new dishes were being assembled and the garnish would be used again. Gross!!! Who know what happens to that food while it’s out there, or how many times it was re-used? Now, when I eat at a restaurant that has garnish on the plate, I carefully shove it to the side so it won’t touch the rest of my food.

Besides watering down booze or lying about premium labels, I think the worst atrocity is claiming local,organic, farm to table yada yada & getting all your products off a Syso truck.

I have never worked in a restaurant but I cook a lot and find it interesting to take a scientific approach to cooking. I therefore know that one common method of tenderizing sliced meat is to add baking soda. The baking soda breaks down protein and leaves the meat very tender, with a slightly spongy texture. It only works on the muscle tissue however, and still leaves any stringy connective tissue just as tough and stringy as before. It also adds a slight alkaline flavor, which can usually be covered up with a marinade or seasoning. Having figured this out, I can instantly spot when restaurants use this trick. The biggest giveaway is the presence of tough connective tissue within otherwise very tender meat. And it bothers me quite a bit when an establishment advertises a dish to contain “flank steak” or “rib eye” when it’s just a cheap cut tenderized with baking soda. There’s nothing wrong with using baking soda for this purpose (actually aids digestion), but I still like truth in advertising! This trick is used mainly in Chinese stir-fry, and is quite prevalent, from what I’ve experienced.

I went with friends to a local chain Mexican restaurant in Northern Virginia for dessert.

As it was close to closing time the staff were cleaning up for the night. They were emptying the bowls of tortillas and the salsa from the tables back in the packets/jars. My friends questioned the staff about the hygiene and the manager denied they were doing anything wrong. Needless to say we left and my friends have never been back

Let's hop in the Tardis, and travel back to Korea, circa 1982.

I was in the Army, Military Police, and, of course, every Camp had a few bars, which were set up for servicemen. When I was at Camp Long, there was one such club which I frequented. The beer and wine they served there was absolutely awful. After a few weeks, I learned one of the reasons it was so awful.

Since I treated the ladies there with basic human dignity, (which was rare, in these types of bars), they let me play at being a DJ, some nights. The DJ booth was behind the bar, and folks wanting a particular song played would send me a bottle of beer, with a note. For a young Army private, it was a cheap way to get drunk.

So, where does the shady cost savings enter the picture?

I wasn't exactly observant, back then, but eventually I noticed there were usually a few open beer bottles, behind the bar. This finally sunk in, stirring my curiosity, so I kept one eye out. One of the ladies had just cleared a table, and one of the beer bottles was not empty. She poured the remains into one of the bottles behind the bar, capped it with a manual capping thingy, and put it in the cooler, to sell to someone else.

My first bartending gig was in a very popular night club ran by a family not necessarily known for being the most legit business folks in town. They only had a small handful of employees on the books and most of us were paid under the table at the end of each shift.

The business always changed hands and names whenever they were sued by former employees or got hit with huge fines. We'd show up for work and often the doors were locked with “Out of Business” signs and then called back in a few weeks later to work but the name of the place was different and no one had any idea who the actual owner was anymore.

One particularly busy night, I happened to see a manager filling up Patrón bottles with a bottom shelf tequila. He was a close enough friend that I felt comfortable asking wtf. He admitted most of our high-end liquors were actually just sh*t booze poured into better brand bottles. I was not only shocked by the deception (and knowing what we charged for “Patrón” considering!) but also that I'd never had a single customer mention any kind of doubt when ordering Patrón or Grey Goose or whatever. In fact, we often had a large percentage of Mexican customers who scoffed when ordering tequila shots and were asked “well or do you have a preference?” They'd reply things like “I only drink Patrón, none of that other sh*t!” And while I was mortified to be part of this huge scam going on behind the bar, I was more intrigued by not a single person noticing the $12 shots they were ordering in quick succession were actually just “that other sh*t”.

I've since worked for other owners guilty of this same cost-saving tactic and suspect it's a more common practice than we realize. I've also seen more expensive bottles of liquor get watered down. I almost always stick with well drinks these days when I'm out on the town and when I'm the one pouring on the other side, charge well prices for any bottles I've opened and think the cap came loose a little too easy.

Way back in the late 70’s my high school girlfriend worked at a movie theater in Studio City, CA. Each night at closing they would bag any leftover popcorn and put the hot dogs back into the fridge. The next day they would dump the popcorn back into the ‘Fresh Hot Popcorn!” machine and put the hot dogs back into that greasy display case.

The hot dog thing was gross enough, but recycling a few cents worth of popcorn is definitely the chintziest thing I’ve seen.

I used to work at Wendy's and the "unsalted fries" were just old fries thrown back in the fryer for 30 seconds to "get the salt off"

I’ve never answered a question before, but I do have a shocking cost-saving story to share.

I worked in a handful of restaurants in my teens and twenties, and they’ve all done some stuff you wouldn’t want to hear about as a patron, but one place really takes the cake. It was a “fine dining” spot in Niagara Falls, Canada.

We once served either lobster or crab for dinner service, I can’t remember which. When we brought the dirty dishes back to the kitchen, the chef had us save the shells to make stock for soup the next day. Shells that had been on everyone’s plates - in their mouths. Eugh.

At the time I was young and was disgusted, but assumed this was some sort of common practice within restaurants. I now realize the chef was just cheap. Oh and morally repugnant.

Thinking back on it grosses me out entirely.

edit: doing a little digging into my profile I see I have answered two questions before! Baby brain. I’d totally forgotten.

For me, it’s some of the more rural areas of Belarus. I kid you not, in most street vendor places if you order a cup of coffee you get charged for the cup, the stir stick, the sugar (rather you asked for it or not) and the coffee. It’s quite comical really. The wife gets mad at me when I mess with the sellers and say, no I don’t need the cup thanks. The confused look on their face is priceless. Several times, to the missus embarrassment, I have actually had the waitress/waiter remove the charge for the sugar. The majority of the restaurants cut their napkins in half. The food is relatively cheap (at least for me, not as much for the locals) but the portions are small. I usually order two on some of the dishes I know won’t fill me up. I love Belarus, but man are some of the restaurants skimpy.

Depends on location but watch out for the liquid cheese. Some managers will make the crew pour boiling water from the coffee maker into it when it's almost out to "make more"