What is the worst restaurant experience you've ever had?

Any number of places over the years where I’ve been seated and then basically forgotten for more than 10 minutes, not been able to get more to drink or to get staff attention to bring something additional for my meal.

For me, poor food is a gamble I take when eating out but not the service. I’m probably wrong but I assume attentive service.

I’m very fortunate with these experiences because I’ve never had problems with restaurant staff. My worst experiences have been with people that complain about everything and ruin the good time people are having. This one lady got upset because our waiter placed his hand on her shoulder when greeting us and telling us specials. It wasn’t creepy at all and her reaction was way overtop and made it awkward for everyone.

We sat down and the waitress approached with open,bleeding sores on her face.
As she asked for our order,she proceeded to pick them.
We told her we weren’t ready to order yet and promptly made a quick get away before her next inquiry.
We are still not ready to order XD

@lucillelucillelucille I just puked a little.

@KatetheGreat You and me both

@lucillelucillelucille Ho-ly Shit…...Where was this?

@Blackberry—At a BBQ/steak house…and no,that wasn’t sauce on her face!

The worst for me was when my daughter was about two or three, she got a kids portion of pasta and tomato sauce and it was so hot it scalded her mouth and chin.

I guess the Korean restaurant where I ordered Chicken and got Dog.

When I was at a Greek restaurant and a huge cockroach flew out of the fake plants and landed in my hair. Or the Round Table Pizza where, when I went to the front counter to complain that fruit flies were swarming at the salad bar, I found a baby cockroach crawling on the counter and pointed it out to the cashier (who couldn’t have cared less.) A coworker got a pizza slice from there, opened up the box, and found a dead cockroach on top.

Now I’m worried that the woman whose open purse received a serving of veal parmesan, including tomato sauce, when I was clearing a table too quickly might show up here.

Unless the occasional complete lack of empathy occasionally experienced at a fast food restaurant counts, I’m like @Blackberry. There have been more fellow customers that have spoiled the experience than the product or service.

I called and complained about the condition of the food at a buffet near by, and in a few days, the place was closed down, forever.

The only thing that I can think of is when a new restaurant opened here a few years ago, and we decided to order food for pick up. I got a Caesar salad (of course) and my husband ordered pasta. When he got home with the food I opened up my salad and it was full of chocolate chips.
They were very nice about it, though. They gave us lots of coupons for free food and replaced my salad free of charge. It’s not really a complaint, more of a funny story. No one knows how the chocolate chips got in my salad… but there were so many in there that I almost thought they were supposed to be there.

During uni, my then-boyfriend and I were driving through Ohio on my way to NYC to interview for an internship, and we had to stop at a Midwestern chain restaurant outside Akron. We ordered the big platter because it had some different offerings along with the rice and beans.

Everything must have been taken straight form the freezer bag. I don’t think they nuked it for more than 15 seconds. The rice was crunchy and the beans were actually pinto paste. The “tacos”, “enchiladas” and “chimichangas” was still frozen in the middle.

I refused to eat it and Boy refused to pay. At first, the waitress balked, but Boy was 6’4” (and still is, I reckon), so no one was inclined to argue with him.

“A celebration of food,” my arse!

I got kicked out of a restaurant tonight in a very rude way.

We asked for 3 salads, and after 40 minutes they still had not arrived, when we complained we was kicked out. Being drunk probably did not help our case.

Oh great! A chance to tell the “House of Prime Rib” story!

So… my wife and I were visiting her brother in Colorado Springs. At the time, there was a restaurant called “The House of Prime Rib”. It was our last night so we decided to treat ourselves to a fancy dinner. We expected the House of Prime Rib to be as excellent as it’s San Francisco namesake is reported to be.

So…. we enter the restaurant and are seated next to the only other populated table in the place (perhaps that should have been a tip off). We proceed to order two prime rib dinners (what else?). I did not bother to time how long it took to receive our order, but it must have been well over an hour and quite likely approaching two. It became so absurd that the we began to spontaneously jest with the table next to us (also patiently awaiting what should have been a fairly straightforward order). Some time at around the half hour mark the waitress appeared with a couple of stale rolls for our table and one of the guys at the next table said: “I’ll arm wrestle you for one of those rolls!”.

Eventually the “prime rib” came out and was little more than a thin slab of fat and gristle that was cooked to the point where it appeared to have begged for mercy before being served. Alas, by that time we were so famished we ate it anyway.

As the jesting with the next table continued one of them said “Good god! I don’t dare order dessert, we might never get out of here!”

So…. along comes the check and we find that they have charged us for 4 prime rib dinners rather than two. So I call this to the waitresses attention and she goes off to the hostess to correct the ticket.

Up until this point I have not bothered to describe the hostess. She was a gaunt lady somewhere between 65 and 150 years old with the general look (and smell) of a woman who had been supporting a 3 pack a day habit since the early 1900’s. So… she comes over (eventually) with the corrected ticket holding a cigarette with what must have been a 2” ash precariously dangling from the tip, indigently plops it down in front of me and says in the craggy voice of a woman who sounds on the verge of needing a trachyhdemy (I shit the not) “There’s where you put the tip…”.

To this day my wife and I still joke about The House of Prime Rib.

Fortunately, on our next visit to Colorado springs the “House of Prime Rib” had been replaced by a rather nice Indian restaurant. We enjoyed a nice dinner there as a way to exercise the daemons of our previous experience at that particular GPS location.

Went to a burger, fries place in The Flats in Cleveland as a kid. Kitchen help would bang the red plastic burger and fry baskets on the edge of the counter before they loaded them up. They were knocking off cockroaches.

Pubic hair found in my stawberry shortcake at a restaurant in Florida.

It was curled around the whipping cream.

That dinner was free.

My husband and I once went to a very upscale restaurant in Philadelphia called October. We sat there for at least two hours maybe three and they kept coming out and saying it would just be a little while longer.

We finally left after paying for the food which we took home. (Totally stupid, right?)

It turned out the chef had cut himself and been taken away in an ambulance.

They should have told us and closed the restaurant.

We should not have just sat there (which we would not do now).

My grandson reminded me of our experience at the Rainforest Cafe in San Francisco. The service was extremely slow, and when they finally did bring our food, they kept promising him his meal (the most expensive one on the menu) would “be right out”. After the rest of us were done, and eating our very expensive desert, his meal finally came out. I told the waiter that meal better be on the house, and they did give a full credit for it.

@poisonedantidote: Sorry we had to kick you out of the restaurant earlier tonight. You were really drunk and lucked out by arriving at the same time the kitchen got 5 other orders and when you started complaining it had actually only been 15 minutes, you were drunk, and well, I just wasn’t gonna take your crap.
-restaurant owner

The worst yet the funniest. Went to this Chinese restaurant in Chinatown (huh?) in DC and the place was not exactly the epitome of cleanliness but we heard the pork, chicken and beef buns were great so we decided to try them.

After dusting the chairs ourselves we sat down and then blew the dust from the table. Then we noticed this at least 90 year old diminutive Chinese lady, staring at us, sitting in a corner chair. She slowly stood up and in what seems to be a perfect example of real life slow motion special effect, shuffled towards us without taking her eyes off me. It took 5 minutes before she got to our table.

“Kun wa cheyah oochwereahh-??!!” she said. Whatever that means. What followed was 3 full minutes of attempting Chinese to English and English to Chinese instant translation, which failed of course, as to what we want to eat. I thought, where was a Rosetta Stone CD when you need one? Anyway I fixed that by merely pointing to the steamy buns on the display cabinet. So far so good.

Then she slowly turned around and started her, you know, epic slow motion shuffle to the kitchen. Should have brought my iPad preloaded with the movie Lawrence of Arabia. Next time, I thought, forget the darn buns, I want the Energizer Bunny for a waiter!

One of the most amusing was at a diner in Truth or Consequences, NM. I asked the waitress what was in the Denver omelette, and she replied, “I don’t know. I don’t make the omelettes.”

This isn’t related to the food, but service—
I went into Applebee’s a few months ago, with my 19 year old son. The hostess looked at me, then offered my son “a braille menu for his mom.” I was using sign language. I understand that some people are so dense that they can’t understand that the EARS…. have nothing… to do with the EYES…. but did she have to insult me by making me a child, and my son an adult? Am I too dumb to make the decision by myself?? I told our waitress that we had a sense of humor, and aren’t mad, but just make sure it doesn’t happen again.
A month later, I go into the exact same Applebee’s with my son. A different hostess looks at me and… asks my son if his mom would like a braille menu.
They got a serious nastygram.

Worst experience was a delivery from Pizza Hut. My partner’s pizza had a big machine screw in it – with green and brown moldy whatever around it. She felt it in her mouth and spit it out. We did not eat pizza from Pizza Hut for about 6 years after (up until a few months ago at a memorial service for my grandfather).

Here are a few pictures of our Pizza Hut screw. You can see what part of the goo on the screw is pizza and what isn’t (the green/brown gunk). It was so freaking nasty. My partner never went further than a few phone calls with head office. They offered us a gift card for $35 ..riiight. However, that particular Pizza Hut went through a staff and management overhall shortly after the incident.

@Plucky that’s horrific, oh my gosh. I can’t believe they offered you a $35 gift card, that was a dangerous mistake, not an inconvenience.

@ANef_is_Enuf Yeah, it was really nasty. My partner has immune issues too (and they were much more serious around that time). We are lucky she didn’t get really sick. Many of us kept urging her to take the case further but she didn’t. They had somehow lost the information of our first complaint (that evening). The pattern continued the first week – with the phone calls. By the time she got to speak to head office, they were telling her there was no record of her original phone calls. Plus they wanted her to send the evidence ..lol yeah, right. We had a lot going on at the time and she didn’t think it was worth the effort. I sometimes wish she would of sued them though, lol. We did keep that slice of pizza and the screw in the freezer for a few years though ..just in case.

I’ve been pretty lucky as far as restaurants go, but I once bought a loaf of bread that reeked of paint thinner for some reason.

The Indian restaurant in the Philippines where we saw a rat roughly the size of a chihuahua crawl under the crack on the door leading to a storage closet/pantry.