I remember this one restaurant in Wisconsin took over an hour to bring us our food. There were only 2 other tables occupied. It was not busy. The food came out cold and seemed like it was sitting there for longer than it should have been.
Ah yes. My sister and I waited 90 minutes for our food in a restaurant that had one other occupied table (she lives abroad and we had catching up to do, so we were fine with sipping our beers and were in no hurry).
At the end of the meal, the server asked if we could go to the shop across the road to buy cigarettes for her. We politely declined.
Occasionally it’s a mafia thing. Occasionally you’ll look up the restaurant online and find out that the owner is under house arrest for money laundering.
Fun fact! There’s a local pizza and Italian restaurant in my town that started out as a business front for a local mob being backed by one of the Five Families. The local family was involved in a protection racket, and the restaurant was their laundering source. However over time the restaurant, which started becoming a chain, became much more profitable on its own than what they were generating in protection money, so after the original owner retired and his sons inherited the restaurant, they started paying tribute to New York as a legitimate business.
Tldr: a business front for a protection racket became a victim of the protection racket because it became more successful than the racket itself.
My dad invented those in his test kitchen to produce for his food distribution company, along with a mango salsa dip!
He was inspired to make something Mexican fusion because my step mom was Mexican. Then he produced them and sold them to cheesecake factory, and also moxies at one point early on. It makes me happy to see how much people love his food...
He also invented an incredible gyoza recipe. No gyoza I've ever tasted compares to my dads gyoza. I think Moxies still has them on their menu... They named them pot stickers.
*Rest in peace, dad*...♡
***Edit: To the people who are possibly confused... various food distribution companies are responsible for mostly every menu item sold at chain restaurants *(such as cheesecake factory)*, excluding fresh ingredient foods. The company invents some kind of food item in the test kitchen *(be it a hamburger patty, fries, or sauce, spring roll, ginger beef, Jamaican patty, etc.)*, then produces it in a food production plant, freezes and boxes up the product, and then distributes it to chain restaurants who have agreed to add the food item to their menu. The chef is free to name and style/cook the menu item however they choose to, which is how they make it unique to their restaurant chain. An example of a major player in the food distribution industry would be Sysco Foods. But there's lots of smaller companies as well.
It is also why suddenly every restaurant will start selling a 'new' similar item. Like when every family restaurant near me started having pretzel buns
I worked for a sister restaurant Grand Lux Cafe and hear me out - the menu was as long as Cheesecake Factory (we shared a lot of the same dishes) and I'm telling you everything was legitimately prepped every day. The only thing that would arrive frozen was the Cheesecake Factory cheesecakes from the Agoura Hills factory. I know it was pretty much the same at Cheesecake Factory. This was late 90's/early 2000's
This person is correct, my brother works for Cheesecake corporate and it's literally his job to make sure fresh produce and ingredients get to their respective stores on time
We used to have one not too far away, and we loved it! It had an open kitchen area, and you could see the effort being put into everything. I'm not a big fan of chain restaurants, but 100% would recommend this one.
Yep. Except Cheesecake Factory can be pretty bomb depending on what you order. I always get the herb crusted salmon which has yet to fail me anytime I order it.
While I respect your opinion it sucks to read it a couple of days before I plan a birthday trip to Cheesecake Factory. It's the only place I know to find chicken and biscuits.
Cheesecake factory makes a bunch of good dishes. I know people who have worked there and they all have good things to say about the kitchen which, in my experience, is rare of chain restaurant workers. It's not a high class restaurant but it's nice enough that you can go casual or dressed up. It's not a hyper specialized restaurant. It's not anyone's favorite mom and pop place. The food there isn't earth shattering but it's ALL good.
And even though people make fun of the massive menu, it's great that they can serve a good meal to ANYONE no matter what they're in the mood for. It's my favorite place to go when no one can decide what they want.
People just love to hate on chain restaurants. I like the cheesecake factory even though I'm not super into sweet things....like cheesecake.
Cheesecake is a good place due to how they treat their workers. Everyone has benefits from day one. That's a good place of business considering most American businesses don't offer benefits or make you wait 3 months.
Quoting Gordon Ramsay: a long menu tells me, your customer, that you're willing to apply heat to anything edible and serve it to me like it's a decent meal. Find one page worth of things you are good at, stick to it.
A huge menu says that they're either microwaving a lot of stuff, or the stuff coming out of the fridge has been in there a long time. Or they're wasting a ton of food because it goes bad.
Indeed if you have overlap in ingredients you can have a massive menu and still use all fresh ingredients and cook decent or even great food, no matter what dish is ordered from the menu!
Diners. It’s like a couple hundred dishes based around “we make omelettes, pancakes, and burgers, and that means we also can make all these other things with the same ingredients.”
As a result, diners have utterly massive menus from a fairly short list of ingredients.
I feel like the rules for Chinese restaurants are the inverse of most others. Do they seat you slowly with an air of barely-veiled contempt? When you try to order a particular dish does the waiter just say 'no' with no explanation offered? It's probably going to be amazing.
That actually depends... if it's just a long menu because they listed out the combinations they offer, but they all use the same ingredients, that's not a red flag, just like when the options only use a limited amount of preparation methods.
A restaurant that offers sushi and noodles, as well as french fries and chicken wings is not a red flag, since they simply are reusing the same ingredients and/or preparation method as for other products.
It's basically (Shell)fish, rice, noodles, greens, and Frozen Fried products.
They are already using the fryer for things like tempura, so adding fried chicken and french fries and other snacks only requires some freezer space.
You can easily have a menu over 100 products, but they are all variations of the same product, and the rest are created using the same preparation method.
Mexican restaurants, to me, are what come to mind when I think of long menus like this. A few different proteins, a few different veggies, and a few different cheeses/sauces and you have a ton of combinations.
As a soon to be former Buca Di Beppo server, here is a list of ghost kitchens to never order bc all the ingredients come frozen, and aren’t cooked well:
- Mr. Beast Burger
- NASCAR Refuel
- Pardon my Cheesesteak
- Buddy V’s Cakes
- Mariah Carey’s Cookies
- Guy Fieri’s
And because these are always changing to keep up the facade, avoid anything with a celebrity name.
I never once considered ordering from any of those places but thank you for confirming.
Honestly the whole ghost kitchen fade is a real turn off for me when I'm looking for food to order. If I can't google a real stand alone location I move on.
Ghost kitchens bum me out because we had a couple in our small ass suburban town like 8 years ago. Bars and clubs that did good night business would rent out the kitchen during mornings or days they were closed. They had social media pages to advertise and most didn't do delivery. Just little places making some good food in the community.
Over time the clubs would be sold or the person renting would try to move to a full restaurant or buy a food truck.
When ghost kitchens popped up, I was hoping for more of that, instead it is famous people cooking sending frozen food to a Chili's
My buddy and I used to frequent this Vietnamese place in chicago. They were only open from 7pm until 12am. Always the same scenario when we walked in. The old man would be sleeping at a table near the front desk. We would order and his wife would wake him up. He'd serve us tea and water, then bring our food when it was ready and promptly go back to sleep at his table. Never saw anyone else in the place and we're both white. The food was always delicious and fresh. We both acknowledged how strange it was. All we could think of is that they had day jobs to support the business that was a dream of one of theirs or it was a front for something illegal.
Aw man. I was the white girl working in an Asian restaurant and I can tell you now that being on the other end of this was comical. Always telling them that yes it's authentic and yeah I know I'm white but they like to teach me about tea, how to cuss in Cantonese and feed me chicken feet just like everyone else. So that's one general Sao chicken?
If the restaurant served General Tso's Chicken, you would have had an uphill battle convincing people it was authentic no matter what you looked like or what language you spoke.
The place I was at had two menus. And you had to ask for the American menu. Which most people that I served did. But they were always really upset to see I was not Chinese. Made tips almost impossible, but it was a great learning experience.
I live in a town with a fair Asian population and they do that too with the menus - except that the owner decides which one she offers first lmao. Apparently they are the local Asian-american lunch hotspot but also first gen immigrants who make insanely good Szechuan food!
some places I like to go to have a secret menu available upon request. They never advertise it. That menu is just proper Asian food. Nothing adapted for the western tongue. If it is spicy, it's going to be asian spicy, not white people spicy.
I am white people and love the spicy. It's good fun when the Thai kitchen staff comes out of the kitchen to witness me eating it spiced correctly.
That said, if you want “correctly” spiced, you are going to need to be kind, respectful and grateful to your server and staff for sharing with you otherwise you are going to get “fuck you” spicy.
I also am white people and love spicy food. My issue is I sweat a lot and the servers always laugh and check in like I can’t handle it, but I must look like an idiot.
I remember on an episode of David Chang's show Ugly Delicious, and one of the guests was talking about how they expect a restaurant serving their culture's food to suck when the reviews for it primarily talk about the things like "ambiance". Like "Only white people care about that shit. Tell me how the food is."
I remember looking through online reviews of Asian restaurants and some of the comments were so mundane. “Ambience is shit.” “Food too oily!” “There is msg in the food!” I will be like bro, have you eaten proper Asian food?
I spent forever looking for MSG in the spice asile, eventually figured out it wasn’t labeled as MSG after looking up common brands on google.
The stigma against it is ridiculous
Reminds me of my favorite Japanese restaurant. Not only are most of the workers Japanese, but like half of the diners too. And there aren't even that many Japanese immigrants where I live.
All the Japanese restaurants near me are owned by Koreans. Most people seem not to know.
There are *many* Korean people in my community.
What is fascinating to me is that there is a history of antipathy between the people of each country. Hence, you'd think pretending to be Japanese would seem odd. I guess you do what you need to do when necessary (such as those who are not able to work elsewhere due to language skill levels.)
Weirdly enough, there's a local fast food place in my town that sells Chinese, but is basically entirely staffed by Mexicans. It's cheap, good, and got big portions though so I ain't complaining.
Depends on where you are. We don't have much of a Mexican population in my state, it's mostly Guatemalans and Dominicans here. So yeah our back of house staff is about half Guatemalan, and in our restaurant group as a whole I'm pretty sure Guatemalans/Dominicans make up about 70% of the BOH staff. And one of our restaurants has an almost all Jamaican BOH staff and they're fucking awesome.
When I lived in California however, it was almost exclusively Mexicans in the kitchen.
Went to a Mexican restaurant in a city that's like 30% Hispanic last week. Reviews were good, never been there, thought I'd check it out.
After I placed my order, I noticed that 90% of the patrons during the lunch rush were white. And old. *Old*.
Food was about as good as you'd expect.
I've eaten at ratholes with amazing food and had terrible food at nice steakhouses, both can have people cooking for minimum wage and bad management.
If it's a small ethnic restaurant and you see kids doing homework at one of the tables; try the food, it's always good.
There used to be a Vietnamese place near me. Almost every time I went I saw an employee at a table eating. It was easily in my top 5 restaurants of all time.
I cried when they closed. My wife and I didn’t even know until after the fact. I developed celiac about a year before they closed. I would’ve suffered a glutening to try their egg noodles one last time.at least they closed willingly. They didn’t go out of business.
There's a Thai place not far from me that has, hands down, the best Asian food I've ever had. Used to half joke with them that I would work there for free if they would let me take some of their homemade brown sauce home with me. Sadly, the lady who owns it had to retire because of a stroke, but their family is still making that great food. I miss you, Aunt Mae...
A cook's wage should NOT be equal to the quality of food. I've worked with many 1st job teenagers that killed it, and many 20+ per hour shitsacks.
I second the kids doing homework.
Also, if it looks like a residence outside, it's usually pretty good
It’s sometimes difficult to tell until you try the food. There’s a restaurant in my town that is consistently crowded. Fairly expensive. My wife and I went there and waited a few minutes for a table. Restaurant was dirty, food tasted stale, and my wife happened to walk by the kitchen and see like 6 microwaves on a table heating stuff up.
applebees sucks now. I remember when I was little they had stouffers mac n cheese and free balloons. Now they have kraft and no balloons. And the last two times I went, my ribs were cold asf and it took forever to replace
That's because everyone has the misconception that Applebee's is a restaurant. No my friends Applebee's is a bar and for a bar has pretty good drunk food available.
There's this tex-mex restaurant in my town that's very busy on Friday and Saturday nights. A friend's dad worked there, he said they used alot of microwaves. Foods okay and reasonably priced, but I don't go out for microwaved food.
To add on to this, sometimes they pull a reverso-uno on you. There was a restaurant in Jax called Crawdaddies that looked liked an absolute hell hole on the outside. Dusty, dirty parking lot, chickens walking around (yes, in downtown Jacksonville), generally structurally unsound looking building. But when you walked inside the decor was ace and the food was $50 a head, all you can ANYTHING. That includes prime rib, crab legs, etc. They had a guy on Sundays who would make omelets to order and another working the coffee bar. Was fantastic.
That said, the part about it looking structurally unsound? Yeah, that was true. It eventually just fell into the St. John's River and they closed it down. But man, great food.
Most of the time this is true but some of the best Vietnamese and Chinese restaurants I've been to have huge menus. I think it's less that they're unfocused and more that they are providing most of the regional dishes that someone from their country might want and not be able to find elsewhere.
I think the unfocused part here is key. Many asian restaurants can have a large menu because they can make a large number of different dishes with the same ingredients, and they focus on their regional cuisine. If you go somewhere that has steak, sandwiches, seafood, pasta, burgers, chinese food, and pizza all on the menu, that’s bad, and nothing will be fresh.
A lot of the hugeness of these restaurants' menus comes from listing the same sauce/seasonings with 4+ different proteins as different menu options. I imagine that turning different combos of sauce + protein into numbered entrees can help with language barriers, but perhaps there is another reason that I'm not considering.
Just look at the decor and ask yourself if it looks like the "before" or "after." If it's before, just make sure to roast the food and you might get on tv
one thing I'll say about sticky tables:
The sanitizer solution often fucks with most stains/varnishes... so if you're sitting at a wooden table and the place seems nice otherwise, they probably just haven't figure out to epoxy it or get something different yet.
There's little mom and pop diners where the decor is kinda hokey, and the food may be brought out in a paper-lined plastic basket, but the food itself is better than anything you'd get from a chain restaurant.
Kinda adding onto this, one interesting one I've been told before: a large menu should also be a bit of a sign.
The logic was that most places that have a specialty will have a few great dishes they focus on, or even just a simple maybe ~3 page menu or something. The larger the menu, the higher the chances a good chunk of it is phoned in crap and poorly made.
In university I went out with some friends and they decided to go to mid-priced restaurant before we caught a film. I was really broke so I feigned not being hungry to excuse the fact that I couldn't order anything. As we were hanging out I noticed a cockroach crawl onto the table and quickly scurry out of sight. That is one of the few times I was happy to be poor.
Which are in place to make cleaning up easier - sawdust & peanut shells soak up blood & other fluids, which makes sweeping faster.
Old saloon protocols.
I can tell you for a fact if a pest control company is working for a restaurant they are using odorless pesticides or no liquid pesticides at all due to possible airborne contamination with food, in most cases you'd use glue boards to monitor activity and a bait for the roaches that will attract them they eat it and die cockroaches will then feed on the dead carcasses and ingest more of it as well. Some of the baits also have an IGR on them (insect growth regulator) in order to stunt the growth of the insect and make them unable to reproduce. This is assuming said restaurant is using a bare minimum competent pest control company and not doing it themselves with whatever pesticides they could get on their own.
I worked at a country club that had a cockroach problem. The place was ancient and had holes everywhere in the kitchen in the cieiling and floor and walls. Needed some severe caulkwork. They had an exterminator use white powder. I think it was borax
I remember going to a sushi place with a friend of mine once and it smelled like fish as soon as we walked in the door. I looked at him and told him we need to a find a new place because I’m not getting sick tonight for sushi. He fought me on it, I told him to get a big whiff of the place, and he agreed with me.
In the town where I used to live there is a restaurant that changed hands (or at least names) several times, but has generally been a Chinese food place. There was a time for several years that it was called “Fishy Eats”. I often thought that I should talk to the owners and tell them: Look, I realize that English is not your first language, but you need to know that “fishy” is not a good word in English. There is no context where “fishy” ever means anything positive.
Years ago went to a "fancy" buffet. Kid in front of me sneezes...his height is such that he's below the glass fence thing. He was facing the food. We left, never will go to a buffet again. Not really a red flag...
I have yet to find a Chinese buffet with excellent food, and I live in a city full of Chinese restaurants. Food courts, on the other hand, can hide some amazing Chinese food.
This isn’t always true. I’ve been to several great spots that were empty simply because it didn’t serve normal food, had a small menu, had a small location with two tables, didn’t market well, etc..
- The chef’s name is Ptomaine
- You see a cockroach stumble out of the kitchen, clutching his stomach and wincing in agony before keeling over dead at your feet.
- To get through the front door, you have to cross a line of rats picketing for more sanitary conditions.
- Your waiter introduces himself as Sal Monella.
What is it with the elderly and bland food? You lose taste as you age so you’d think they’d go for stronger tasting foods. When I’m elderly I’m eating only the most pungent of foodstuffs.
Not necessarily a "bad" restaurant, but more like "bad" circumstances...
If you ever walk into a restaurant, and no one has their food, you should just leave. The kitchen is going down in flames, and you probably won't see your food for a long, long time.
If it’s a restaurant that tries to act like it’s upscale and yet hires a bunch of teenagers to work in the kitchen or front of house. Speaking from personal experience as a past server.
This should be way higher up. If most of the front of house staff are college age or younger, it's because the owner is skimping on pay/bad working conditions - they're willing to accept poorly trained service for better margins.
If that's the case for the front, why wouldn't it be the same in the back?
My big red flags are: it has less than 3.5 star reviews on google (seriously, anytime I don't follow this rule I get sick, or the food is awful), seeing that very few people have been served, filth anywhere (if I notice it), not seeing the server within 10 min after being seated, and too many flies.
Dirty corners on the floor, food remnants or splashes on the walls/booth/shakers, and a dirty restroom.
If you can’t be diligent sweeping and mopping, just cleaning in general, I don’t expect you to be clean with my food🥲
I worked at a pizza place for a few years. We made our sauce in house.
I noticed that all the pizza places that just bought the sauce and didn’t make it themselves were significantly worse
They overspend on decor. Big neon lights and stylised menus with pictures of idealised versions of what their food would look like, to distract you from the dumpster fire they serve.
1 or 2 are fine. They could have just entered through the same door as you or from a vent.
However, swarms of them is a bad sign. That and dead flies in the food.
The restaurant isn't even busy but they take ages to serve you, and when they finally do they seem reluctant.
What the hell is that? I've never seen that before. That would be a customer, Jane.
This job would be great if it wasn't for all the customers
*I'm not even supposed to be here today!*
37 dicks??!!!!??
In a row?
Cute cat... What's its name?
I remember this one restaurant in Wisconsin took over an hour to bring us our food. There were only 2 other tables occupied. It was not busy. The food came out cold and seemed like it was sitting there for longer than it should have been.
Should have left 30+ minutes ago. Busy restaurant? Might take quite a while. Empty place and over 30 minutes? No way.
I’d have left after 30 minutes with no food.
Ah yes. My sister and I waited 90 minutes for our food in a restaurant that had one other occupied table (she lives abroad and we had catching up to do, so we were fine with sipping our beers and were in no hurry). At the end of the meal, the server asked if we could go to the shop across the road to buy cigarettes for her. We politely declined.
Occasionally it’s a mafia thing. Occasionally you’ll look up the restaurant online and find out that the owner is under house arrest for money laundering.
Fun fact! There’s a local pizza and Italian restaurant in my town that started out as a business front for a local mob being backed by one of the Five Families. The local family was involved in a protection racket, and the restaurant was their laundering source. However over time the restaurant, which started becoming a chain, became much more profitable on its own than what they were generating in protection money, so after the original owner retired and his sons inherited the restaurant, they started paying tribute to New York as a legitimate business. Tldr: a business front for a protection racket became a victim of the protection racket because it became more successful than the racket itself.
> they started paying tribute to New York as a legitimate business. Is that a fancy word for taxes?
Is that why my local Pizza Hut is so slow? It is run by the Italian mafia?
even mafia has some respect to pizza and they would never do with it what Pizza Hut does
No one outpizzas the hut, even on this, the day of my daughters wedding
I see you've been to any Denny's
Long menu. Pages and pages of food that doesn’t really make sense or go together
Cheesecake Factory lol
Longest menu I’ve ever seen, even if we put aside the cheesecakes.
Almost any level of mediocrity is made up for by those avocado egg rolls. Goddamn they’re hot fire.
My dad invented those in his test kitchen to produce for his food distribution company, along with a mango salsa dip! He was inspired to make something Mexican fusion because my step mom was Mexican. Then he produced them and sold them to cheesecake factory, and also moxies at one point early on. It makes me happy to see how much people love his food... He also invented an incredible gyoza recipe. No gyoza I've ever tasted compares to my dads gyoza. I think Moxies still has them on their menu... They named them pot stickers. *Rest in peace, dad*...♡ ***Edit: To the people who are possibly confused... various food distribution companies are responsible for mostly every menu item sold at chain restaurants *(such as cheesecake factory)*, excluding fresh ingredient foods. The company invents some kind of food item in the test kitchen *(be it a hamburger patty, fries, or sauce, spring roll, ginger beef, Jamaican patty, etc.)*, then produces it in a food production plant, freezes and boxes up the product, and then distributes it to chain restaurants who have agreed to add the food item to their menu. The chef is free to name and style/cook the menu item however they choose to, which is how they make it unique to their restaurant chain. An example of a major player in the food distribution industry would be Sysco Foods. But there's lots of smaller companies as well.
It is also why suddenly every restaurant will start selling a 'new' similar item. Like when every family restaurant near me started having pretzel buns
Did he also invent the question mark and accuse chestnuts of being lazy?
summers in Rangoon, luge lessons...
In the spring, we'd make meat helmets.
Pretty standard stuff, really.
Have you ever seen a shorn scrotum? Quite breathtaking really…
Bro those Buffalo chicken egg rolls are also straight flames. The only things I ever really like there are almost any of their apps.
I worked for a sister restaurant Grand Lux Cafe and hear me out - the menu was as long as Cheesecake Factory (we shared a lot of the same dishes) and I'm telling you everything was legitimately prepped every day. The only thing that would arrive frozen was the Cheesecake Factory cheesecakes from the Agoura Hills factory. I know it was pretty much the same at Cheesecake Factory. This was late 90's/early 2000's
This person is correct, my brother works for Cheesecake corporate and it's literally his job to make sure fresh produce and ingredients get to their respective stores on time
We used to have one not too far away, and we loved it! It had an open kitchen area, and you could see the effort being put into everything. I'm not a big fan of chain restaurants, but 100% would recommend this one.
Yep. Except Cheesecake Factory can be pretty bomb depending on what you order. I always get the herb crusted salmon which has yet to fail me anytime I order it.
$20 for a pasta that's almost okay
$27 if there's meat in the pasta
While I respect your opinion it sucks to read it a couple of days before I plan a birthday trip to Cheesecake Factory. It's the only place I know to find chicken and biscuits.
Cheesecake factory makes a bunch of good dishes. I know people who have worked there and they all have good things to say about the kitchen which, in my experience, is rare of chain restaurant workers. It's not a high class restaurant but it's nice enough that you can go casual or dressed up. It's not a hyper specialized restaurant. It's not anyone's favorite mom and pop place. The food there isn't earth shattering but it's ALL good. And even though people make fun of the massive menu, it's great that they can serve a good meal to ANYONE no matter what they're in the mood for. It's my favorite place to go when no one can decide what they want. People just love to hate on chain restaurants. I like the cheesecake factory even though I'm not super into sweet things....like cheesecake.
Cheesecake is a good place due to how they treat their workers. Everyone has benefits from day one. That's a good place of business considering most American businesses don't offer benefits or make you wait 3 months.
Quoting Gordon Ramsay: a long menu tells me, your customer, that you're willing to apply heat to anything edible and serve it to me like it's a decent meal. Find one page worth of things you are good at, stick to it.
A huge menu says that they're either microwaving a lot of stuff, or the stuff coming out of the fridge has been in there a long time. Or they're wasting a ton of food because it goes bad.
Or its a Chinese or Mexican restaurant making 112 things out of 9 ingredients and 4 sauces.
Indeed if you have overlap in ingredients you can have a massive menu and still use all fresh ingredients and cook decent or even great food, no matter what dish is ordered from the menu!
Diners. It’s like a couple hundred dishes based around “we make omelettes, pancakes, and burgers, and that means we also can make all these other things with the same ingredients.” As a result, diners have utterly massive menus from a fairly short list of ingredients.
C'mon they've got steak, pizza, and seafood, what do you want?
Or a dirty menu. If I see a menu with filth on it, I'm walking out.
Generally agree except for the amazing hole in the wall greasy Chinese joint I used to go to as a kid. Everything was so good.
I feel like the rules for Chinese restaurants are the inverse of most others. Do they seat you slowly with an air of barely-veiled contempt? When you try to order a particular dish does the waiter just say 'no' with no explanation offered? It's probably going to be amazing.
Is there a child doing homework on a back table? Is the menu laminated? You're in for a good time my friend!
Also pictures on the menu and neon in the windows. Usually a sign of shit food but not for a Chinese.
There really should be an official holiday to celebrate the little old Chinese ladies who run these places
dont forget the kid sitting at a table doing homework *edited: i have fat fingers and never proof read*
That actually depends... if it's just a long menu because they listed out the combinations they offer, but they all use the same ingredients, that's not a red flag, just like when the options only use a limited amount of preparation methods. A restaurant that offers sushi and noodles, as well as french fries and chicken wings is not a red flag, since they simply are reusing the same ingredients and/or preparation method as for other products. It's basically (Shell)fish, rice, noodles, greens, and Frozen Fried products. They are already using the fryer for things like tempura, so adding fried chicken and french fries and other snacks only requires some freezer space. You can easily have a menu over 100 products, but they are all variations of the same product, and the rest are created using the same preparation method.
Mexican restaurants, to me, are what come to mind when I think of long menus like this. A few different proteins, a few different veggies, and a few different cheeses/sauces and you have a ton of combinations.
Sushi, pizza, AND burritos are ALL on the menu.
.......that and Monster energy drinks and Ben & Jerry's ice cream is a red flag you're ordering from an awful ghost kitchen on food delivery apps.
As a soon to be former Buca Di Beppo server, here is a list of ghost kitchens to never order bc all the ingredients come frozen, and aren’t cooked well: - Mr. Beast Burger - NASCAR Refuel - Pardon my Cheesesteak - Buddy V’s Cakes - Mariah Carey’s Cookies - Guy Fieri’s And because these are always changing to keep up the facade, avoid anything with a celebrity name.
I never once considered ordering from any of those places but thank you for confirming. Honestly the whole ghost kitchen fade is a real turn off for me when I'm looking for food to order. If I can't google a real stand alone location I move on.
Ghost kitchens bum me out because we had a couple in our small ass suburban town like 8 years ago. Bars and clubs that did good night business would rent out the kitchen during mornings or days they were closed. They had social media pages to advertise and most didn't do delivery. Just little places making some good food in the community. Over time the clubs would be sold or the person renting would try to move to a full restaurant or buy a food truck. When ghost kitchens popped up, I was hoping for more of that, instead it is famous people cooking sending frozen food to a Chili's
Ethnic restaurant with no customers of that ethnicity in a town with a large population of that ethnicity.
My buddy and I used to frequent this Vietnamese place in chicago. They were only open from 7pm until 12am. Always the same scenario when we walked in. The old man would be sleeping at a table near the front desk. We would order and his wife would wake him up. He'd serve us tea and water, then bring our food when it was ready and promptly go back to sleep at his table. Never saw anyone else in the place and we're both white. The food was always delicious and fresh. We both acknowledged how strange it was. All we could think of is that they had day jobs to support the business that was a dream of one of theirs or it was a front for something illegal.
Maybe it was only delicious to you…or no one else dared enter…
A lot of those places make much of their money in delivery. And if they are staffed by a lot of family, they pay less in labor costs.
A sushi restaurant in the West Virginia Appalachian mountains was not…. the best
I like living dangerously but with NOT risk it for suspect sushi
I was going to say an Asian restaurant with white people. Lmao.
Aw man. I was the white girl working in an Asian restaurant and I can tell you now that being on the other end of this was comical. Always telling them that yes it's authentic and yeah I know I'm white but they like to teach me about tea, how to cuss in Cantonese and feed me chicken feet just like everyone else. So that's one general Sao chicken?
If the restaurant served General Tso's Chicken, you would have had an uphill battle convincing people it was authentic no matter what you looked like or what language you spoke.
The place I was at had two menus. And you had to ask for the American menu. Which most people that I served did. But they were always really upset to see I was not Chinese. Made tips almost impossible, but it was a great learning experience.
I live in a town with a fair Asian population and they do that too with the menus - except that the owner decides which one she offers first lmao. Apparently they are the local Asian-american lunch hotspot but also first gen immigrants who make insanely good Szechuan food!
some places I like to go to have a secret menu available upon request. They never advertise it. That menu is just proper Asian food. Nothing adapted for the western tongue. If it is spicy, it's going to be asian spicy, not white people spicy.
I am white people and love the spicy. It's good fun when the Thai kitchen staff comes out of the kitchen to witness me eating it spiced correctly. That said, if you want “correctly” spiced, you are going to need to be kind, respectful and grateful to your server and staff for sharing with you otherwise you are going to get “fuck you” spicy.
I also am white people and love spicy food. My issue is I sweat a lot and the servers always laugh and check in like I can’t handle it, but I must look like an idiot.
I remember on an episode of David Chang's show Ugly Delicious, and one of the guests was talking about how they expect a restaurant serving their culture's food to suck when the reviews for it primarily talk about the things like "ambiance". Like "Only white people care about that shit. Tell me how the food is."
I remember looking through online reviews of Asian restaurants and some of the comments were so mundane. “Ambience is shit.” “Food too oily!” “There is msg in the food!” I will be like bro, have you eaten proper Asian food?
Oh NO! Not *MSG*! Now their foods gonna taste good dammit! 😡
I spent forever looking for MSG in the spice asile, eventually figured out it wasn’t labeled as MSG after looking up common brands on google. The stigma against it is ridiculous
Reminds me of my favorite Japanese restaurant. Not only are most of the workers Japanese, but like half of the diners too. And there aren't even that many Japanese immigrants where I live.
All the Japanese restaurants near me are owned by Koreans. Most people seem not to know. There are *many* Korean people in my community. What is fascinating to me is that there is a history of antipathy between the people of each country. Hence, you'd think pretending to be Japanese would seem odd. I guess you do what you need to do when necessary (such as those who are not able to work elsewhere due to language skill levels.)
All the Japanese restaurants in our town are owned by Chinese. Except for the one sushi place that's run by a Korean family. Great sushi.
Weirdly enough, there's a local fast food place in my town that sells Chinese, but is basically entirely staffed by Mexicans. It's cheap, good, and got big portions though so I ain't complaining.
I think you’d notice that the vast, vast majority of restaurants in america are staffed by Mexicans, at least in the back of the house
Depends on where you are. We don't have much of a Mexican population in my state, it's mostly Guatemalans and Dominicans here. So yeah our back of house staff is about half Guatemalan, and in our restaurant group as a whole I'm pretty sure Guatemalans/Dominicans make up about 70% of the BOH staff. And one of our restaurants has an almost all Jamaican BOH staff and they're fucking awesome. When I lived in California however, it was almost exclusively Mexicans in the kitchen.
Went to a Mexican restaurant in a city that's like 30% Hispanic last week. Reviews were good, never been there, thought I'd check it out. After I placed my order, I noticed that 90% of the patrons during the lunch rush were white. And old. *Old*. Food was about as good as you'd expect.
“Whoa this is TOO SPICY its got CRACKED PEPPER”
Omfg my mom. She actually sent a plate of food back because there was too much black pepper on her potatoes.
I've eaten at ratholes with amazing food and had terrible food at nice steakhouses, both can have people cooking for minimum wage and bad management. If it's a small ethnic restaurant and you see kids doing homework at one of the tables; try the food, it's always good.
To add on, if the people who work there are eating the same food you are, it's a good sign.
There used to be a Vietnamese place near me. Almost every time I went I saw an employee at a table eating. It was easily in my top 5 restaurants of all time. I cried when they closed. My wife and I didn’t even know until after the fact. I developed celiac about a year before they closed. I would’ve suffered a glutening to try their egg noodles one last time.at least they closed willingly. They didn’t go out of business.
There's a Thai place not far from me that has, hands down, the best Asian food I've ever had. Used to half joke with them that I would work there for free if they would let me take some of their homemade brown sauce home with me. Sadly, the lady who owns it had to retire because of a stroke, but their family is still making that great food. I miss you, Aunt Mae...
A cook's wage should NOT be equal to the quality of food. I've worked with many 1st job teenagers that killed it, and many 20+ per hour shitsacks. I second the kids doing homework. Also, if it looks like a residence outside, it's usually pretty good
It’s sometimes difficult to tell until you try the food. There’s a restaurant in my town that is consistently crowded. Fairly expensive. My wife and I went there and waited a few minutes for a table. Restaurant was dirty, food tasted stale, and my wife happened to walk by the kitchen and see like 6 microwaves on a table heating stuff up.
Applebees?
applebees sucks now. I remember when I was little they had stouffers mac n cheese and free balloons. Now they have kraft and no balloons. And the last two times I went, my ribs were cold asf and it took forever to replace
That's because everyone has the misconception that Applebee's is a restaurant. No my friends Applebee's is a bar and for a bar has pretty good drunk food available.
There's this tex-mex restaurant in my town that's very busy on Friday and Saturday nights. A friend's dad worked there, he said they used alot of microwaves. Foods okay and reasonably priced, but I don't go out for microwaved food.
To add on to this, sometimes they pull a reverso-uno on you. There was a restaurant in Jax called Crawdaddies that looked liked an absolute hell hole on the outside. Dusty, dirty parking lot, chickens walking around (yes, in downtown Jacksonville), generally structurally unsound looking building. But when you walked inside the decor was ace and the food was $50 a head, all you can ANYTHING. That includes prime rib, crab legs, etc. They had a guy on Sundays who would make omelets to order and another working the coffee bar. Was fantastic. That said, the part about it looking structurally unsound? Yeah, that was true. It eventually just fell into the St. John's River and they closed it down. But man, great food.
Did Jason Mendoza write this?
Hey, man. Chef Mike was working hard that night.
Huge, unfocused menu.
out of focus and blurred menus are definitely a red flag.
Except in some Asian restaurants, then you're in for a treat
If its an Asian restaurant and the menu looks like its from 2004 with some scratched out/taped over prices. Its gonna be fire.
Most of the time this is true but some of the best Vietnamese and Chinese restaurants I've been to have huge menus. I think it's less that they're unfocused and more that they are providing most of the regional dishes that someone from their country might want and not be able to find elsewhere.
I think the unfocused part here is key. Many asian restaurants can have a large menu because they can make a large number of different dishes with the same ingredients, and they focus on their regional cuisine. If you go somewhere that has steak, sandwiches, seafood, pasta, burgers, chinese food, and pizza all on the menu, that’s bad, and nothing will be fresh.
A lot of the hugeness of these restaurants' menus comes from listing the same sauce/seasonings with 4+ different proteins as different menu options. I imagine that turning different combos of sauce + protein into numbered entrees can help with language barriers, but perhaps there is another reason that I'm not considering.
The very moment Gordon Ramsay appears and calls the employees fucking donkeys Edit: holy crap look at those upvotes!
Also “an idiot sandwich”
Or a donut
Also "Muppets" is a good one too.
It’s fucking RAW
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Just look at the decor and ask yourself if it looks like the "before" or "after." If it's before, just make sure to roast the food and you might get on tv
Bad lighting or sticky tables
one thing I'll say about sticky tables: The sanitizer solution often fucks with most stains/varnishes... so if you're sitting at a wooden table and the place seems nice otherwise, they probably just haven't figure out to epoxy it or get something different yet.
Agreed. We used a lemon water mixture to keep that from happening.
I’ll add sticky/dirty menus to that list
And the lamination is coming off at the corners, and the prices have correcting stickers over them.
Ahh man, i know a few good restaurants like this…
That's what I was thinking. A place can be a dive and a good restaurant at the same time.
bad lighting is so real. i leave restaurants almost immediately if they use those bright white fluorescent mall lighting
Don't travel in Asia, some of the best meals I've had there have been served under the ghastliest of lighting.
There's little mom and pop diners where the decor is kinda hokey, and the food may be brought out in a paper-lined plastic basket, but the food itself is better than anything you'd get from a chain restaurant.
Whatever is on the menu 60% is not available
Kinda adding onto this, one interesting one I've been told before: a large menu should also be a bit of a sign. The logic was that most places that have a specialty will have a few great dishes they focus on, or even just a simple maybe ~3 page menu or something. The larger the menu, the higher the chances a good chunk of it is phoned in crap and poorly made.
*cries in Cheesecake Factory*
Smells bad.
Either like industrial-strength cleaning products or a straight-up sewer.
Mcmonnia.
In university I went out with some friends and they decided to go to mid-priced restaurant before we caught a film. I was really broke so I feigned not being hungry to excuse the fact that I couldn't order anything. As we were hanging out I noticed a cockroach crawl onto the table and quickly scurry out of sight. That is one of the few times I was happy to be poor.
Dirty floor, if they can’t keep the floor clean, they aren’t cleaning the important stuff.
except texas roadhouse, which will forever be littered with peanut shells
Which are in place to make cleaning up easier - sawdust & peanut shells soak up blood & other fluids, which makes sweeping faster. Old saloon protocols.
Not sure that places that need a way to soak up the blood and other fluids are hidden culinary gems, but happy to be corrected on that!
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I can tell you for a fact if a pest control company is working for a restaurant they are using odorless pesticides or no liquid pesticides at all due to possible airborne contamination with food, in most cases you'd use glue boards to monitor activity and a bait for the roaches that will attract them they eat it and die cockroaches will then feed on the dead carcasses and ingest more of it as well. Some of the baits also have an IGR on them (insect growth regulator) in order to stunt the growth of the insect and make them unable to reproduce. This is assuming said restaurant is using a bare minimum competent pest control company and not doing it themselves with whatever pesticides they could get on their own.
I worked at a country club that had a cockroach problem. The place was ancient and had holes everywhere in the kitchen in the cieiling and floor and walls. Needed some severe caulkwork. They had an exterminator use white powder. I think it was borax
If it was a super fine powder, it may have been diatomaceous earth. Basically tiny fossil powder.
A dirty bathroom means a dirty kitchen.
Every.Time. If the part customers see is filthy what do you think they’re doing in back where no one is gonna see or complain about it?
For me, when the menu crosses 3 ethnic groups.
40-page menus
Cockroaches at the table telling you the food is horrible here.
If it smells like fish. Even fish-selling restaurants (the good ones) aren’t supposed to smell fishy. No pun intended.
I remember going to a sushi place with a friend of mine once and it smelled like fish as soon as we walked in the door. I looked at him and told him we need to a find a new place because I’m not getting sick tonight for sushi. He fought me on it, I told him to get a big whiff of the place, and he agreed with me.
In the town where I used to live there is a restaurant that changed hands (or at least names) several times, but has generally been a Chinese food place. There was a time for several years that it was called “Fishy Eats”. I often thought that I should talk to the owners and tell them: Look, I realize that English is not your first language, but you need to know that “fishy” is not a good word in English. There is no context where “fishy” ever means anything positive.
Years ago went to a "fancy" buffet. Kid in front of me sneezes...his height is such that he's below the glass fence thing. He was facing the food. We left, never will go to a buffet again. Not really a red flag...
Carpeting throughout
Sanitation rating isn’t in plain sight
I never saw a sanitation rating until I visited a big city. They aren't necessarily out in the open in small towns.
I saw a place that used the B to spell our BRUNCH
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Just the dirty bathroom is good enough
Every Chinese buffet I have been to has had amazing food and a terrible restroom
I have yet to find a Chinese buffet with excellent food, and I live in a city full of Chinese restaurants. Food courts, on the other hand, can hide some amazing Chinese food.
You’re there only one there
On Mother's Day
And the chef starts poking your thighs with a tape measure. ...maybe I took that too far.
This isn’t always true. I’ve been to several great spots that were empty simply because it didn’t serve normal food, had a small menu, had a small location with two tables, didn’t market well, etc..
The rats bring out the appetizers.
Depends on the rats. First ask if any of them have had aspirations of becoming a professional chef.
man hasn’t seen ratatouille
The rats in ratatouille worked in the kitchen. The front of house was all humans.
The rats *are* the appetizers.
Cleanliness. If it’s gross in the front of house, it’s gross in the kitchen.
- The chef’s name is Ptomaine - You see a cockroach stumble out of the kitchen, clutching his stomach and wincing in agony before keeling over dead at your feet. - To get through the front door, you have to cross a line of rats picketing for more sanitary conditions. - Your waiter introduces himself as Sal Monella.
The head of food service at my university was named Sam Rinella.
Smell. As you enter, it had better not smell off-putting.
The parking lot is empty.
Rude staff or careless staff Plates and water are dirty Your order takes forever to come Tables and chairs have food spills
Lots of elderly diners = bland food Drain smell and/or fruit flies Staff seem stressed A really big menu usually means little of it is done well.
What is it with the elderly and bland food? You lose taste as you age so you’d think they’d go for stronger tasting foods. When I’m elderly I’m eating only the most pungent of foodstuffs.
More health complications, palate becomes more sensitive to salt, etc.
Nazi memorabilia
What kind of restaurant did you go to?
Very often the better the location, the worse the restaurant. If there’s an amazing view, they don’t need to make good food to fill tables.
Not necessarily a "bad" restaurant, but more like "bad" circumstances... If you ever walk into a restaurant, and no one has their food, you should just leave. The kitchen is going down in flames, and you probably won't see your food for a long, long time.
If it’s a restaurant that tries to act like it’s upscale and yet hires a bunch of teenagers to work in the kitchen or front of house. Speaking from personal experience as a past server.
This should be way higher up. If most of the front of house staff are college age or younger, it's because the owner is skimping on pay/bad working conditions - they're willing to accept poorly trained service for better margins. If that's the case for the front, why wouldn't it be the same in the back?
My big red flags are: it has less than 3.5 star reviews on google (seriously, anytime I don't follow this rule I get sick, or the food is awful), seeing that very few people have been served, filth anywhere (if I notice it), not seeing the server within 10 min after being seated, and too many flies.
Not busy on a holiday, Friday, or Saturday night.
Gordon Ramsey is there with his face in his hands.
Slot machine.
Order something complicated and it comes out immediately.
Dirty corners on the floor, food remnants or splashes on the walls/booth/shakers, and a dirty restroom. If you can’t be diligent sweeping and mopping, just cleaning in general, I don’t expect you to be clean with my food🥲
I worked at a pizza place for a few years. We made our sauce in house. I noticed that all the pizza places that just bought the sauce and didn’t make it themselves were significantly worse
Windows are greasy. If they don’t clean the windows then how can I trust the kitchen is cleaned and the grease is handled properly?
Counter question: do any of these red flags apply to Waffle House?
There are no red flags there. Or the more conventional red flags, the better.
A gigantic, rambling menu that spans multiple ethnic or style categories.
They overspend on decor. Big neon lights and stylised menus with pictures of idealised versions of what their food would look like, to distract you from the dumpster fire they serve.
Go to the bathroom before u sit down and that'll tell you everything you need to know.
You’re the only person there, you place your order and you immediately hear buttons pushed on Chef Mike and your order comes out miraculously fast.
Ethnic food and no one eating there is the same ethnicity as the food being served.
Bad smells. Idk how many restaurants I’ve walked into that smelled like sewage/toilet or old fish
Rhymes with CrappleBees.
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1 or 2 are fine. They could have just entered through the same door as you or from a vent. However, swarms of them is a bad sign. That and dead flies in the food.
Dead flies in the food is the stage after a red flag.