Worse aspect of a bad dining experience?

[BarkingGhostar]

Having to wait for more than an hour for a pizza at a place that wasn't busy says everything.

 

[zinfamous]

i got food poisoning at a fancy restaurant in chicago.

i walked around the city all day feeling sicker and sicker but couldn't throw up when i found a bathroom.

eventually i vomited in a subway station drain like a hobo.

This sounds like perfect pome material.

 

[AznAnarchy99]

Sorry folks, got distracted. Here. Seems a lot of others got bad service that same night and the next as well.

Some prime reading material on that page lol.

 

[brianmanahan]

Some prime reading material on that page lol.

these reviews just reminded me of my favorite negative review of all time, NY times critiques guy fieri's restaurant in times square:

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GUY FIERI, have you eaten at your new restaurant in Times Square? Have you pulled up one of the 500 seats at Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar and ordered a meal? Did you eat the food? Did it live up to your expectations?

Did panic grip your soul as you stared into the whirling hypno wheel of the menu, where adjectives and nouns spin in a crazy vortex? When you saw the burger described as “Guy’s Pat LaFrieda custom blend, all-natural Creekstone Farm Black Angus beef patty, LTOP (lettuce, tomato, onion + pickle), SMC (super-melty-cheese) and a slathering of Donkey Sauce on garlic-buttered brioche,” did your mind touch the void for a minute?

Did you notice that the menu was an unreliable predictor of what actually came to the table? Were the “bourbon butter crunch chips” missing from your Almond Joy cocktail, too? Was your deep-fried “boulder” of ice cream the size of a standard scoop?

What exactly about a small salad with four or five miniature croutons makes Guy’s Famous Big Bite Caesar (a) big (b) famous or (c) Guy’s, in any meaningful sense?


Were you struck by how very far from awesome the Awesome Pretzel Chicken Tenders are? If you hadn’t come up with the recipe yourself, would you ever guess that the shiny tissue of breading that exudes grease onto the plate contains either pretzels or smoked almonds? Did you discern any buttermilk or brine in the white meat, or did you think it tasted like chewy air?

Why is one of the few things on your menu that can be eaten without fear or regret — a lunch-only sandwich of chopped soy-glazed pork with coleslaw and cucumbers — called a Roasted Pork Bahn Mi, when it resembles that item about as much as you resemble Emily Dickinson?

When you have a second, Mr. Fieri, would you see what happened to the black bean and roasted squash soup we ordered?

Hey, did you try that blue drink, the one that glows like nuclear waste? The watermelon margarita? Any idea why it tastes like some combination of radiator fluid and formaldehyde?

At your five Johnny Garlic’s restaurants in California, if servers arrive with main courses and find that the appetizers haven’t been cleared yet, do they try to find space for the new plates next to the dirty ones? Or does that just happen in Times Square, where people are used to crowding?

If a customer shows up with a reservation at one of your two Tex Wasabi’s outlets, and the rest of the party has already been seated, does the host say, “Why don’t you have a look around and see if you can find them?” and point in the general direction of about 200 seats?

What is going on at this new restaurant of yours, really?

Has anyone ever told you that your high-wattage passion for no-collar American food makes you television’s answer to Calvin Trillin, if Mr. Trillin bleached his hair, drove a Camaro and drank Boozy Creamsicles? When you cruise around the country for your show “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” rasping out slangy odes to the unfancy places where Americans like to get down and greasy, do you really mean it?

Or is it all an act? Is that why the kind of cooking you celebrate on television is treated with so little respect at Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar?


How, for example, did Rhode Island’s supremely unhealthy and awesomely good fried calamari — dressed with garlic butter and pickled hot peppers — end up in your restaurant as a plate of pale, unsalted squid rings next to a dish of sweet mayonnaise with a distant rumor of spice?

How did Louisiana’s blackened, Cajun-spiced treatment turn into the ghostly nubs of unblackened, unspiced white meat in your Cajun Chicken Alfredo?

How did nachos, one of the hardest dishes in the American canon to mess up, turn out so deeply unlovable? Why augment tortilla chips with fried lasagna noodles that taste like nothing except oil? Why not bury those chips under a properly hot and filling layer of melted cheese and jalapeños instead of dribbling them with thin needles of pepperoni and cold gray clots of ground turkey?

By the way, would you let our server know that when we asked for chai, he brought us a cup of hot water?

When you hung that sign by the entrance that says, WELCOME TO FLAVOR TOWN!, were you just messing with our heads?

Does this make it sound as if everything at Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar is inedible? I didn’t say that, did I?

Tell me, though, why does your kitchen sabotage even its more appealing main courses with ruinous sides and sauces? Why stifle a pretty good bison meatloaf in a sugary brown glaze with no undertow of acid or spice? Why send a serviceable herb-stuffed rotisserie chicken to the table in the company of your insipid Rice-a-Roni variant?

Why undermine a big fist of slow-roasted pork shank, which might fly in many downtown restaurants if the General Tso’s-style sauce were a notch less sweet, with randomly shaped scraps of carrot that combine a tough, nearly raw crunch with the deadened, overcooked taste of school cafeteria vegetables?

Is this how you roll in Flavor Town?

Somewhere within the yawning, three-level interior of Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar, is there a long refrigerated tunnel that servers have to pass through to make sure that the French fries, already limp and oil-sogged, are also served cold?


What accounts for the vast difference between the Donkey Sauce recipe you’ve published and the Donkey Sauce in your restaurant? Why has the hearty, rustic appeal of roasted-garlic mayonnaise been replaced by something that tastes like Miracle Whip with minced raw garlic?

And when we hear the words Donkey Sauce, which part of the donkey are we supposed to think about?

Is the entire restaurant a very expensive piece of conceptual art? Is the shapeless, structureless baked alaska that droops and slumps and collapses while you eat it, or don’t eat it, supposed to be a representation in sugar and eggs of the experience of going insane?


Why did the toasted marshmallow taste like fish?

Did you finish that blue drink?

Oh, and we never got our Vegas fries; would you mind telling the kitchen that we don’t need them?

Thanks.

 

[JulesMaximus]

Poor service I can deal with. Try getting food poisoning within a few hours after eating at what you thought was a decent restaurant. I had that happen twice in one year.

 

[TeeJay1952]

Not every time but it is your mouth and the answer is walk. Get a Pizza. try again another time.
If items smell fishy and it ain't fish......

 

[dullard]

Poor service I can deal with. Try getting food poisoning within a few hours after eating at what you thought was a decent restaurant. I had that happen twice in one year.

Food poisoning can be delayed by as much as 24 hours. So it could have been the food that you ate BEFORE the decent restaurant. Although, it probably was the decent restaurant, you most likely can't prove it unless more than one person fell ill.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

Poor service I can deal with. Try getting food poisoning within a few hours after eating at what you thought was a decent restaurant. I had that happen twice in one year.

I actually had been poisoned, but probably not intentionally. A restaurant I would go to about twice per month was always indicated to me by others as having an outstanding offering for Thanksgiving. So, after a couple of years of hearing this we went, took some stuff home and refrigerated it immediately. By Saturday morning I was vomiting without anything in me and we hadn't dined out the Friday in between the holiday and that Saturday. I had the leftovers late that Thursday night and cramps all Friday before the vomiting began late on Friday.

Went to urgent care to get something to prevent the vomiting since the stomach was empty, but all in all dealt with six days of cold chills, sweats and cramps. Let's just say we hadn't gone back and it has been five years. We did email the company about it but they didn't even respond--they simply didn't care. And we were always one of their good customers but I guess that means nothing to businesses these days.

On the other hand we've eaten at Pappadeaux weekly (actually ~60 times/year) and have had about two instances of something not coming out perfect in almost a decade. I guess the general manager of the specific location and his crew (all really good people) just know what they are doing. The two instances weren't bad, just not great. We never complained and have repeatedly informed their corporate office of the great experiences. We've also been treated on the house several times as a result.

I guess it is just things like our Pappadeaux experiences that make such bad experiences so BOLD in our memories.

 

[JulesMaximus]

Food poisoning can be delayed by as much as 24 hours. So it could have been the food that you ate BEFORE the decent restaurant. Although, it probably was the decent restaurant, you most likely can't prove it unless more than one person fell ill.

Not with me. It always seems to hit within a few hours. Maybe 4-5 hours max and then I'm throwing up every 10-15 minutes for the next 6-8 hours. Everything I ate prior I had eaten with family and nobody else got sick so I KNOW it was the restaurants we ate at.

Thankfully, it seems to run through me pretty quickly and once I'm done with the throwing up part I start to feel normal again, just tired and sore from all the dry-heaving.

By the way, both of the times I had it recently was when I ordered fish. Cooked fish. I've never had bad sushi thank god.

 

[tynopik]

Is this true? Some evidence? I've heard stuff, but is it that bad???

If it's true, I'll never go there again.

the accusations continue

http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2018/01/09/yelp-accused-hiding-positive-reviews-non-advertiser/

Yelp Accused Of Hiding Positive Reviews For Non-Advertiser

He said after months of non-stop phone calls from Yelp, he claims his favorable rating dropped after he finally told the company he would not pay for advertising.

“What I would compare it to, the mafia,” said Sinnott. “You know, you do business with me or there’s retaliation.”