That restaurant owner shaming the OP story reminded me of this.
My husband and I went to a new little sandwich shop in town to try it out. We both ordered a burger and fries. It was about one in the afternoon, so we weren’t surprised to see only one couple, who were about to leave, as most people here get 12 to one off for lunch. We noticed that several tables had not yet been bused, but there was only one waitress in this tiny place, and she started cleaning them as we sat down.
Our burgers came quickly enough, and I bit into mine just before my husband did. He had his burger to his mouth but I immediately said, “Stop.” I explained that the meat in my burger didn’t taste like beef – or pork – or chicken – or turkey – or even vegetarian, all of which I’ve eaten. I can’t even explain what it tasted like – not spoiled, just … odd. He couldn’t resist trying a bite and quickly agreed with me. We signaled to the waitress, and I explained that our burgers tasted funny – they didn’t taste like beef. She assured me it was good freshly ground chuck. I said again that they didn’t taste like beef and we didn’t feel comfortable eating them. Her response, with a patronizing smile, was, “You’ve probably never had really good ground chuck before, just plain old cheap hamburger.”
I kept my temper, but I told her I’d eaten plenty of good beef, and this wasn’t it, and we needed our checks. She refused to comp our meal, and only gave us a discount on our glasses of tea. My husband, who was paying, finally said fine, but we’d never be back. As we were walking out, my husband pointed to the tables she was clearing, and asked if I had noticed that all of them had plenty of food left on the plates. The shop was closed in less than three months after it opened. I still wonder what it was they were serving as “beef.” 0115-19
My first thought was to wonder if the beef was grass-fed. Pasture raised beef comes with a hefty price tag as being more organic but it definitely can have a taste to it that some people dislike.
You called the waitress over and complained that the burgers did not taste right, not that you suspected spoilage. Had you used the words “tastes spoiled” in your communication with her, this would have escalated the situation to one that should be taken very seriously by any restaurant owner. Failure of the staff to address the possible serving of spoiled meat could have been resolved by requesting a leftover box be brought to your table with the stated intention that you are delivering the burgers to the Health Department to determine if the meat is, in fact, spoiling.
In the situation where you cannot detect that the food is spoiled but rather you don’t like how the food tastes, I believe the common response is to pay for the meal, leaving food uneaten if you choose to, declaring to yourself that you’ll never eat there again and possibly write a detailed food review of the restaurant.
OP here. I eat locally raised grass-fed beef as a rule at home, and I find the taste delicious. This was a little inexpensive shop, and their prices and the establishment itself gave me no reason to expect grass-fed beef, nor was it noted on the menu. No, the meat didn’t taste spoiled, but we were afraid to eat it, afraid of that it might be going bad, or contaminated, especially since she kept telling us it was purely ground chuck. My later thought was that it might have been really “stretched” with soy, bread or another filler.
I’ve eaten lots of meats and poultry, including some not so common to all areas, such as mutton, turtle, dove, quail, elk, goat, and beaver. I still have no idea what we were served that day, but if it was beef, it wasn’t just beef. My main issue was that the waitress assumed we didn’t know what good beef tasted like. It felt like she was implying that we were unexposed and uninformed.
Ahh, I see.
I wonder if they were cutting it with horse meat? Some cultures are used to it and probably wouldn’t have registered the difference. While it is super “cheap” in the US because it’s illegal and unregulated.
I have found that some meats which are perfectly safe but a little old have a off taste or flavor (often kind of sharp or vinegary). It was really obvious when I was pregnant, I found it difficult to eat cheap/discounted meat, including from diners and fast food places.
I wonder what was the waitress supposed to do? I suspect servers at all kinds of restaurants are regularly faced with the vague complaint of “my food tastes funny” or the accusation of dishonest business practices, followed by the expectation that they don’t have to pay for the meal. I don’t think the waitress violated any etiquette rules in this story. She was just trying to offer an explanation as to why the OP didn’t like the taste of the food.
OP has eaten grass fed/ grass finished beef. The difficulty with something tasting “off”, but not spoiled, is that it’s generally well on its way to “off”. It’s true that when it’s a question of the normal range of seasoning/ manner of preparation, restaurants should not have to comp a client. But- we recently had a holiday meal spoiled because of a popular chain restaurant having a bad night in the kitchen. Cold/ frozen veggies, cold entree and no seasoning. I have to own part of the blame here because I allowed myself to be talked into trying them again after an experience of being served salmon that was raw in the center. It didn’t help matters that the server also opined that I didn’t understand how “their” salmon is prepared. I was left to wonder if clients are supposed to obtain some sort of “salmon credentials” before they can decline raw fish. In my estimation, unless it’s sushi or sashimi, it should be cooked. It doesn’t have to be overcooked, but it shouldn’t be able to swim off of the plate and escape. So- yes, in cases where the kitchen is having a bad night (or a bad lunch rush), the restaurant should not charge for the poorly prepared (or poorly stored/ poorly served) items.
Reminds me of the infamous “Amy’s Baking Company”, where complaints about the food would be turned back onto the customer. Something like “Maybe they just aren’t used to sauce that doesn’t come from a can,” “You should know what you like to eat before you order food,” “Even you can’t tell me exactly what’s wrong with this dish,” “You just don’t know what food tastes like unless it’s store bought or frozen”, et cetera.
Surprise surprise, an attitude like that was one thing that made them the only restaurant that Gordon Ramsay has walked out on and not helped at all. It’s inappropriate to blame a customer for an unpleasant food experience. Even if the food is perfectly fresh and fine, if the customer finds it unappetizing then it’s the duty of the restaurant to provide them with a more palatable option and not give them an attitude.
I can only imagine what an unsettling experience it would be to bite into a food and have the taste not only wrong, but unidentifiable. Maybe it was cheap beef mixed with turkey and chicken and soy all together?
If they weren’t closed, I’d say leave them a Yelp review. Maybe look up the health department inspection records to see if that’s a reason they shut down.
God I loved that episode… It was insane but great.
Overall, you are correct. However, if someone goes out to eat and decides to try something out of their comfort zone, then dislikes it, that it on them, not the restaurant, and they should not expect it to be comped. (Obviously not the case in this scenario)
Maybe not comped, but they should be permitted to order something else off of the menu without the restaurant insulting them for their taste. Obviously if there’s nothing wrong with the food then the customer can still pay for it.
Absolutely. Say “I’m sorry that wasn’t to your liking, may I get you something else” and also throw in an offer of a box for the disliked food in case “someone at home may like it”, which gives the hint that the food won’t be comped. There is never a reason to be rude about it…even if someone is being rude to you, responding with rudeness will just worsen it in these situations.
Fun fact: they’re one of the few restaurants that survived (not sure if they are still open, but they were a few years after the episode aired).
Problem was that the episodes usually aired long after they had been shot, and Gordon was there. So the help from the episode came too late for quite a few restaurants. Other restaurants closed because the owners would revert back to their old behavior after Gordon left. There were also a few restaurants that eventually collapsed under their new found succes (as in: they were so fully booked all the time, people eventually stopped coming because they were “always fully booked”).
Amy’s bakery survived because people went there to experience the crazy for themselves.
They are closed. It’s a burger place now.
They did remain open for a little while, mostly due to the notoriety. They tried selling t-shirts with slogans from the show like “I’m the Gangster” or “Here’s Your Pizza, Go *** Yourself”, capitalizing on their bad rep to bring in gawkers. But they did not improve their food and the novelty wore off, plus they got in more trouble for things like having fruit flies in their drinks. And then some really troubling stuff came out…
Samy had to go to court and face deportation to Iran, turns out he had a flat ban on entering Germany and France for being involved in drug trafficking and extortion, and after all the publicity from the show his reputation caught up with him.
Amy has a history of credit card fraud and identity fraud, and she had actually spent a year in jail for social security fraud. She opened a new business of just baking (sweets and desserts) and tried to sell a cookbook, but it didn’t go well.
Could be that they were “stretching” the beef with soy or other fillers. Or, recently, there have been a few cases (in Canada) where they’ve found horsemeat mixed in with beef. I’d have been tempted to take a sample, for testing purposes. Did you ask for something else instead? I do have some sympathy for the restaurant (assuming they hadn’t served bad/incorrect product) not comping the meal just because you didn’t like the taste of your burger. She shouldn’t have been rude or snarky about it though.
That’s what I was thinking too – horse.
Horse is like a very lean beef- but it does have a slightly sweeter taste. If marinaded or mixed with ground beef you wouldn’t notice.
I’ve eaten alligator and kangaroo but not horse.
Some things really do warrant a call to the department of health. This is one of them. Better safe than dead.
Spoilage and taste can be very different. An excellent book to keep on hand is Putting Food Away, which explains food poisoning in great detail. Food can taste fine and still cause food poisoning. I’ve had personal experience with this, twice. Both times I ended up in an emergency room, severely hydrated, on an IV drip overnight. One GI doctor has suspected I may have permanent gut damage due to the incidents (which I suspect were E. Coli).
I have to admit, I’m skeptical at the advice to take the food to the Health Department. Safe food could become unsafe in the time it takes to take the food home and wait until the opportunity to get to the Health Department, deliver it, etc. The bacterial load could change significantly enough that it couldn’t prove anything about the restaurant.
There could also be the risk of accidental cross-contamination with other foods if you try to refrigerate it. What happens if an unsuspecting teenager or younger child investigates the refrigerator for a midnight snack?
My advice, based more on health and safety concerns rather than etiquette or a desire to “collect evidence” when untrained to do so, would be that if you suspect food is “bad,” get the H*** away from it as soon as possible. Don’t take it home for crying out loud. Call the Health Department. They have people whose entire careers are for investigating and tracking down food contamination and spoilage.
My mother and I once bought a rib roast for New Year’s. We cooked it as normal, but when we cut off a slice to check for doneness, it had a very weird taste. Never knew what it was – it smelled fine but had an odd “chemical” taste that made our tongues burn. (I wondered whether the butcher had dropped it and tried washing it with cleaning solution to avoid having to throw it away!)
Definitely don’t eat something that tastes odd, but for myself, I’d give the restaurant a chance to do something about it if something really tastes weird, rather than just suffering silently and then writing a bad review. It could be that they would recognize a problem and fix it without any hassle.
I saw an expose on 60 Minutes or some other news program where they showed meat departments soaking old meat in bleach to give it a little more shelf life. I wonder if that’s what happened to your roast? Did you take the roast back? A reputable butcher would.
I don’t agree that you have to pay for something that you find you cannot eat.
If you eat a good portion of it, then yes, you need to pay for it. But, if you take a bite and something is not right, you send it back. And if you feel comfortable you order something else. If not, you pay for your drinks or apps and leave.
I kind of find it hard to believe you can reliably determine that a burger is not made of beef, especially when you don’t recognize what it is. (It would be one thing if, say, you recognized the flavor as turkey, but if you don’t know what it is, how sure can you be of what it isn’t?) I think calling the waitress over and accusing her, implicitly or explicitly, of breaking the law (in many places) by misrepresenting the type of meat she’s serving is not the best way to get to a mutually satisfactory solution.
I used to wait tables and manage a restaurant, and I can tell you that it’s incredibly common for customers to be surprised and suspicious of different preparations of foods they’re used to one version of, even when nothing untoward is going on. Sometimes in that situation the most productive approach is to reassure them that the food is safe and it is in fact what they ordered, and explain why it tastes a little strange. Many people, once reassured they’re not eating something contaminated or forbidden by their religion, are able to enjoy the culinary adventure. If they still aren’t happy with the taste, we’d gladly make them something else; the actual food cost of any given item is usually a pretty small fraction of the total cost of running a restaurant (rent, labor, insurance, utilities, etc., which all stay the same when you throw out a dish and make something else.) Even if it’s not our fault you don’t like what you ordered, it’s worth a little waste to keep a customer happy.
But when someone comes at us with the attitude that, because a dish tastes different than what they’re used to, we must be defrauding them, that changes the calculus. The chances of placating them with a different menu item seem slim, as does the chance they’ll ever come back even if you comp their meal. (Be honest–after biting into that burger, would you come back another day, even if they didn’t make you pay for it?) At best, you might shut them up rather than have them write a negative review, but even that’s not guaranteed. And there are lots of scammers out there who use the threat of complaints and bad reviews to try to get out of paying. It’s a difficult judgment call to make in the moment.
Maybe you’re right and they served you something that wasn’t beef, or wasn’t safe. I still think you could have handled it differently. Perhaps “hey, this tastes weird to me; could we get something else?” Instead of “hey, this tastes weird; is this real beef?”
Meat can pick up odd flavors in the refrigerator or freezer if it isn’t stored properly. Also, the restaurant may have been using a spice or herb that doesn’t agree with your palate. I’m one of those people who think cilantro tastes like soap – even a little bit will ruin an entire dish for me. Or, you may have been right and the restaurant was serving you mystery meat. All good reasons for you not to keep eating.
I’m sorry the waitress didn’t treat you with a more customer-friendly attitude. She was in the wrong, IMO.
In my experience eating out, and working in a restaurant, if something tastes “off” to you, you have a reasonable expectation of returning your food and getting your money back. It doesn’t have to be spoiled, per se. I believe it’s up the individual restaurant, they aren’t *required* to take the charge off, but in my experience, most will. You can’t however, finish the meal, and then try to say you didn’t like it.
If the manager did not offer to take the charge off, I would pay it without any fuss, but that would be the last time I ate there.
I’m wondering if they do a meatloaf style preparation for their burgers – breadcrumbs, egg, spices, which changes the flavor and texture of the meat. In either case immediately saying you don’t think they served you beef is a big jump from we don’t care for this preparation.
I waited tables through college and if someone had thrown out an accusation like that, it would take me a second to compose myself and offer a suitable response. If the place had items like pork burger or veggie patties on the menu, I could understand you confirming you recieved the beef burger. I think if you had asked for it to be remade or for a new item you may have gotten a better outcome.
The admins advice is spot on, pay the bill and don’t return. Obviously money talks as the place shut down months later.
I remember ordering something in a restaurant and not loving what I ordered. I didn’t eat the meal and when the waitress came to take the plates away she asked what was wrong with the dish. I said nothing – I just didn’t like it. I had every intention of paying for it. She came back and told me she took the cost of my meal from the check. It was an incredibly nice thing to do – I never forgot it and it gave me a favorable impression of the restaurant. I would definitely go back. When you have an experience like this it goes a long way to fixing the problem. If she had given your money back – you might have tried again.
There was no reason for the server to be so rude. Any decent restaurant wouldn’t charge people for food they were unable to eat. I think it would be ok to refuse to pay, take a picture of the full plates left behind, and leave your contact info if the restaurant wants to call the police.
“You’ve probably never had really good ground chuck before, just plain old cheap hamburger.”
Is your manager available?
I don’t know what that meat was, but bad staff can ruin a place even worse than odd food.