10 Dirty Little Restaurant Secrets
There's a reason most restaurants keep the kitchen doors closed -- and it's
not just because it's so hot back there.
It can be tough for
restaurateurs to turn a profit and Slashfood has uncovered some of
the ultra-dirty deeds even the best restaurants commit
in order to pinch pennies.
Read on
for 10 true stories about the subtle, sneaky and sometimes downright
disgusting ways restaurants cheat to save a buck -- and how you
might be paying the price.
10. Using Cabbage in Place of
Seaweed
Says a former maître d' at an expensive Chinese restaurant
known for its celebrity clientele: "The owner figured his customers knew nothing
about Chinese food (he was right) and was a genius at saving money. A specialty
supplier used to provide edible seaweed for the popular seaweed appetizer, but
when that got too expensive the boss began experimenting.
"The 'seaweed'
on the menu ended up becoming thin strips of cabbage leaf, deep-fried, and then
rolled in equal amounts of salt and sugar. It's possible even cardboard would
taste good if prepared like that, but the dish remained a
bestseller."
9. Deep-Frying
Everything
But that's not all! At the same celebrity-friendly
restaurant: "In addition to the 'Chinese seaweed,' the other two most popular
dishes on the menu were a 'Mongolian lamb' main course and caramelized banana
dessert," the insider says.
"Often a diner would order all three, and not
realize that every item was cooked in exactly the same deep-fry basket. Although
the restaurant denied the lamb was fried, in fact the cabbage (ahem, 'seaweed'),
lamb shank and sugared banana would all go into the same oil."
8. Substituting Top-Shelf Alcohol with Generic
Booze
One of the most common scams at restaurant bars is to
replace premium vodka with generic brands, subscribing to the theory that most
customers can't tell the difference. (We know of one restaurant which even did
that with Scotch, but experienced whiskey drinkers could often tell and the scam
was not so effective.)
A New York City bartender says, "The way of doing
that is to start them on the bad vodka right away. You can't sub it in once they
started drinking the top shelf brands or they'll notice. But if you serve the
cheap stuff from the beginning they never know."
7. Topping Pitchers of Beer with Seltzer
Water
Don't think the fiddling is restricted to top-shelf liquors,
either. "In sports bars that sell pitchers of beers, the thing to do is to top
the pitchers off with seltzer after the table has ordered like the third one," a
source says. "The drunker the guys, the more seltzer they get."
6. Refilling Pricey Bottled Waters with
Tap
It turns out not all water bottles are created equal. You
might already suspect that some restaurants refill water bottles with tap water,
but some places turn it into an art form. "Where I worked we served Voss water
because it has the easiest screw top to re-seal," a waitress says. "You can't do
that with the brands that have a bottle cap."
5. Recycling Baskets of Chips
One diner
at a landmark cafe in Bethlehem, Pa., reported digging in to some bagel chips
and finding they contained old pineapple rinds.
"Someone else got served
the chips, didn't eat them all, threw their rinds from some other dish into the
basket, the waiter picked it up without looking and threw more chips on top and
re-served it to us," the customer claimed on an online ratings Web site.
"Yeech!"
Management didn't seem to care and the patron says "they were
trying to economize their chip ration, and it was probably standard practice to
re-use uneaten chips."
4. Serving Rotten
Meat
A steakhouse employee in New York says that sometimes not all
the meat is as fresh as it should be. "It's an old trick to keep the steak
that's past its prime and wait until somebody orders it well done or
medium-well," the insider says. "The more you cook the meat, the more you
disguise its flavor. When I'm eating out I never order anything higher than
medium rare, because I know how the kitchen gets rid of bad meat."
3. Using Fake Creamer
A former waitress
at an upscale restaurant in Philadelphia reports that one of the daily duties of
staff was to mix a large pot of non-dairy, powdered creamer. When coffee or tea
was ordered, the small milk jugs were to be filled halfway with fake creamer,
and then topped off with the more expensive real milk.
2. Serving Caffeinated Coffee as
Decaf
If your body has a problem with caffeine, it might be safer
to make your own coffee at home. The same Philadelphia source also reports
coming back to the kitchen with a cup of regular coffee when an elderly customer
had requested decaf. "The head waiter took the cup from my hand, handed it right
back to me and said, 'There -- now it's decaf,'" she says.
1. Souping Up Big Ticket Items
The most
shocking story came from an internationally well-known West Coast restaurant --
trust us, you've heard of this place. Part of the shtick of this very
fine-dining establishment is the presentation of a truffle at the table, so that
customers have the opportunity to order some (super expensive) shavings to be
added to their food. But while white truffles are more expensive than black
truffles, their aroma is more subtle, meaning that they make less of an
impression when presented during the sales pitch. "What the staff would do is
add black truffle oil, which is more pungent, to the white truffle, to give it
more 'pop,'" the insider says. "It's an absolute no-no to do, especially at
those prices. But who's going to know?"
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