They Weren’t Expecting THIS When They Ordered Pizza
Odua Images/Shutterstock
“We traveled to Sicily and decided to get some pizza. We found a really nice place at the beach where we could watch the sunset over the sea.
We ordered our pizzas and everything seemed perfect. Then the pizzas came and my boyfriend tasted his. First, he thought his pizza had a funny seasoning and gave it a shot, but after a few bites, he said his tongue began to tingle.
I tried a few bites myself and it was a really weird sensation in my mouth. Like when something is really spicy, but more in the acid kind of way. So he tried to explain to a waitress something was off with the pizza.
There was a huge language barrier, so in the end, she took the pizza away and looked quite irritated. My boyfriend decided to walk towards the kitchen because we had the feeling they didn’t understand our complaint. From my point of view, I saw different staff members rushing out of the kitchen, including a chef, and try to explain something to my boyfriend in quite a panicky way.
It turns out their dishwasher was broken and the plates were covered with highly concentrated dish soap. Their head chef ate some pizza and had to be picked up by an ambulance. Fortunately, we didn’t get food poisoning and just left the restaurant with empty bellies.”
Chicken With A Side Of Food Poisoning
AppleDK/Shutterstock
“I got salmonella poisoning from undercooked chicken. After throwing up once, I basically dry heaved for a few hours.
I had an insanely high fever, like 104, and had severe hallucinations. I was dripping in sweat and saw shadowy figures in my peripheral vision dancing around in a circle.
After experiencing that, I see why people think they were visited by demons.
Don’t mess around with chicken.”
Is That Ash?
Nazar Gonchar/Shutterstock
“Back when I was in middle school, I was in softball. After practice one day, my dad and I went to McDonald’s. They had those burgers with Frito Lay’s chips on them and I got one.
About halfway through the burger, I noticed some ash in the burger, so I opened it up, and there was an ashy cig butt inside it.
We ended up heading back to the McDonalds, and they found out who was smoking while working, but he already finished his shift. All the manager did was offer us some coupons for free ice cream and a refund (the hamburger was roughly $2), but this was a McDonald’s with a constantly broken ice cream machine, so good luck using it at that one.”
Don’t Be So Sauer
kurhan/Shutterstock
“I hate sauerkraut.
I get that it’s popular and I respect its place in food culture, but I hate it.
I was raised to hate it. You see, my dad was born in 1928 on a cotton farm in West Texas, the son of a sharecropper. The Great Depression had already hit West Texas and my dad grew up with nothing.
During the lean winter months, my grandfather would work for the city as a garbage man, and he’d bring home the cabbage that restaurants had thrown out.
They would pick off the outer leaves, wash it thoroughly, and then have thin, soured cabbage soup. It was revolting, I’m sure.
My dad could NOT stand the smell of souring cabbage, so he raised me to hate sauerkraut.
A dozen or so years later, I followed in my father’s footsteps and joined the Navy. During the middle of boot camp, we had to work for a week in the galley.
I was mostly on milk duty, refilling those and cleaning up around them, when one day, this mess specialist (female cook, mid-20s) came up and pointed at me, and said: ‘You should be tall enough, follow me.’
I was thinking that she wanted me to get something off of a high shelf for her. But no.
She led me back to the kitchen to this vat of greenish/grey mush, congealed into a thick coating on top. It was sauerkraut – which we didn’t have that day. No, it’d been sitting there since yesterday. Because someone had failed to put the screen back on the drain pipe at the bottom, so the liquid could be drained from the vat. Instead, that drain pipe was clogged with sauerkraut.
I had to climb into the vat, head first, submerge my entire head, down to my shoulders, and hold my breath, while I tried to scrape out the sauerkraut from the drain, keep it from filling back in with my fingers, and then eventually fit the drain screen back over the pipe.
It took about 45 minutes, constantly coming up for air, and doing everything in my power to not vomit. But I finally got the drain screen on and then the liquid was able to be drained out and the remaining sauerkraut dumped and cleaned.
So yeah, I hate sauerkraut. I hate the smell of it, I hate the thought of it, and one whiff makes me feel like I’m still picking it out of my nose and ears.”
I’d Avoid This Restaurant In The Future
Michal Kowalski/Shutterstock
“We went to a local, hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant for lunch one day. It was a huge restaurant on the inside, but it was completely dead when we went at lunch rush hour.
I ordered something simple, maybe chicken fried rice or something?
Our food came out and I had a WHOLE CHICKEN, almost completely raw, just sitting on the top of my rice. Like a whole, plucked chicken without a head pretty much. It LOOKED like it was MAYBE boiled? But it even still had some feathers and small feather pieces left on it.
I tried to just tough it out; I didn’t want to insult the people there and I didn’t want to waste food, so I tried cutting into the chicken to mix into my rice to maybe try and eat some of it.
I seriously could NOT cut into the chicken. It was so tough and just inedible. It was not cooked on the inside, and the feather stuff really grossed me out. I managed a few bites and took the rest to-go.
I remember having major food poisoning/diarrhea later that day. I’m betting it was from my whole, uncooked, feathery chicken.
I still don’t know if that is an authentic way of serving that dish and I’m just not used to it because I’m used to ‘Americanized’ Chinese food, or if they really just messed it up or something.
Either way, it was worst food experience ever, especially the aftermath that came later while praying to the porcelain gods that night.”
The Dangers Of Microwavable Pizza
Andrey_Popov/Shutterstock
“I made a microwaveable pizza when they first came out in the late 1980s. I loaded it up with extra cheese.
I heard the microwave go BING. I pulled it out and it flipped over onto my hands. I had boiling-hot cheese stuck to my fingers. I screamed like a banshee. My mom looked at me like I was some kind of weirdo. And my best friends were there and started laughing at me with blisters forming all over my hands.
A few weeks later, I was over at my friend’s parents’ place with him. He threw in a microwaveable pizza. I heard the BING then him screaming like a banshee.
He’d done the same thing.”
He Couldn’t Even Think About Mexican Food For Two Years
Elnur/Shutterstock
“I got food poisoning from a Mexican restaurant.
I crapped my pants twice, popped a blood vessel in my eye from vomiting so hard, and I couldn’t even think about Mexican food without getting nauseous for the next two years.”
At Least Things Have Changed Since Then
Dean Drobot/Shutterstock
“My first time at my best friend’s house, his mom decided to make us a snack while we did our homework.
She was a single mom for a lot of his upbringing, so she worked all day and was usually not up for cooking lunch/dinner. She wanted to be nice and offer me something though, so she whipped up some food.
She served us undercooked whole wheat pasta. She also didn’t have any sauce or topping for it, so she just crumbled some Triscuits over the top of them. My friend was severely embarrassed.
His mom has since remarried and has learned much more about cooking food for others.”
Just Porkin’ Around
RollingCamera/Shutterstock
“A co-worker poisoned me.
I’m allergic to pork, I always let people know this. It’s pretty important.
One day, she brought in homemade burritos, I asked what kind of meat was in them. I always ask. She went on to explain how they were cooked, and said, ‘Beef.’
I said, ‘Just beef?’ I was verifying because a lot of Mexican food gets pork thrown in when it’s traditional.
She said, ‘Yep, just beef.’
So I ate it.
About 30 minutes later, I started to feel ill. I tried to stick it out, but another hour, and I had to go home.
Chills and sweating, vomiting, the runs, headache. All through the rest of the day, and overnight.
I had to stay home the next day.
She texted me and asked if I was okay. I told her no. She said she hoped that her food didn’t make me sick. Thinking it was the flu or something this whole time, I told her, ‘It would only do that if it was pork.’
She said, ‘It was half and half, you didn’t ask.’
I almost murdered her.”
“We Both Went Inside, Brushed Our Teeth, And Never Spoke Of It Again”
InesBazdar/Shutterstock
“I made the mistake of eating Dim Sum at a local Chinese restaurant that constantly gets lauded as being super authentic. The seafood tanks had dead fish floating in them. We could see the server station and we got to watch multiple members of wait staff use their bare hands to scrape food from plates/bowls into the trash, push down the trash, and then go back to handling food and plates. It was horrendous.
I figured I was being too precious and tried to just roll with it. The first dumpling I bit into had a hair in it. I managed to grab the hair and swallow the bit of dumpling already in my mouth. Didn’t want to just spit it out in front of the whole dining room or seem ‘high maintenance’ in front of my dining companion. The hair was still connected to the uneaten portion of the dumpling though I tried to pull it out. This hair was weaved into every nook and cranny of this dumpling like some kind of nightmare meat embroidery. I kept pulling and pulling while the dumpling fell apart around the loose strand of hair. This thing was easily three feet long, and I can’t imagine how a person would not notice it being worked into a hand-rolled dumpling. This whole ordeal was somehow not noticed by my boyfriend, who remarked when I pushed the plate away: ‘You’re just going to waste that?’
I legitimately felt sick, so I went into the restroom. We arrived as some of the first guests of the day, approximately 20 minutes after opening. The trash was overflowing with paper towels and there was toilet tissue covered in human feces scattered around the floor. There was no soap in the soap dispensers and it smelled like how my mouth tastes when I wake up after a night of binge drinking and hot wing eating.
Despite all of this, I still felt like I had to be polite and not say anything. I ate a few more small plates of food and rode home in near silence with my boyfriend. As we were pulling into the driveway he just said, ‘That was foul.’
We both went inside, brushed our teeth, and never spoke of it again.”
It Wasn’t Quite The Tropical Paradise They’d Been Promised
“Trump’s Cap Cana restaurant: Trump Cap Cana is an abysmal place.
Cap Cana is in the Dominican Republic and is supposed to be an ultra-exclusive gated resort type area. Apparently, Lil’ Wayne ‘recovered’ from his dental surgery prior to going to Rikers there. All of the resorts have multiple helipads, there’s a private petting zoo, you drive golf carts all around, etc.
My mother did a favor for someone wealthy (we’re firmly middle class), and they gifted her with a week there. She invited six friends and I invited someone, and off we went. Since we were there for a girls’ vacation and didn’t have to pay for our accommodations, we decided to go big (we’d been eating amazing ceviche and some of the best chicken fingers and coconut based desserts I’ve ever had until this point).
Trump’s restaurant is atop this mesa that overlooks the whole area and takes like a mile to get up on a winding road. There were six (empty) helipads and an empty parking lot surrounding this ornate looking, dark wood, tropical-ish building – inside was just bowls of fake fruit and giant portraits of the man himself (no surprise, really). There was no one else there and the staff neither spoke nor seemed to understand English, so my 6 years of terrible Spanish came in handy. Everywhere else, everyone seemed to speak a variety of languages or at least understood them. The place looked like it could comfortably host 100 and was staffed to do so. However, we were the only eight people there. This meant whenever we took a sip of water, it was refilled. Put a used fork down (gold, obviously), it was immediately replaced with a clean one – regardless if you were actually finished eating. This was highly annoying as conversations were being constantly interrupted with a white-gloved hand reaching in front of someone.
Then came time to order – we’d been there for 90 minutes at this point and had only been offered water and bread. After explaining through a combination of poor Spanish and terrible pantomiming that I was allergic to mushrooms and another woman also had an allergy, we thought we’d successfully ordered (the dish I ordered had no mushrooms but reusing a pan they were previously cooked in has set me off in the past and I didn’t want to have to go to a hospital on vacation). Forty-five minutes later, you guessed it, my dinner came out smothered in mushrooms (it was a seafood pasta dish FYI) and my mother’s friend’s dish comes with a side of nuts (again not even listed on the dish as being an ingredient). She could at least eat her’s as the nuts hadn’t touched her actual dish. My mom pulled the ultimate mom move and swapped with me. Two bites in, I realized this was the blandest food I had ever had. Like eating raw pasta covered in overcooked tomatoes with overcooked lobster meat and some sort of seeds on it. A table of eight boisterous women was brought to almost complete silence for a full minute. Then everyone busted out laughing about how horrible the meal was and what a waste of a night it was.
We paid as fast as we could and got out of there. We wound up at a beach ‘shack’ (it still had flowy white linens acting as walls and tiny tabletop candles) eating chicken fingers with sweet chili mango sauce and drinking copious amounts of a fine red. When the owner asked why we were eating so late (it was about 10:30 pm when we got to the shack after about a ten-minute drive; we got to Trump’s at 5:30 pm), we told him where we had started our evening and he just bent over laughing to the point of tears and comped the next three bottles of red.
We ate nearly every meal at that shack for the next four days we were there.”
But They Had Such Good Reviews…
“My boyfriend and I went on a date to a sushi restaurant that we have never been to before. I found it online and it seemed like a really cool place to try in town, plus we were feeling experimental, so we decided to try it. And let me tell you, it was really good! We got like this shared assortment platter thing that had a whole bunch of different kinds of sushi, stuff we’d never tried before but we both really enjoyed it and had a lot of fun.
Cut to a couple of hours later, we got to my place and we were on my bed watching a movie. About half an hour into it, I felt a little uncomfortable in my stomach and had to go to the one bathroom I had in my apartment. I quickly relieved myself and then went out, still feeling a little bit ill. And my boyfriend was sitting there on my bed like, ‘Yeah, I have to go too,’ and went to the bathroom immediately after.
After he got out, we were both just feeling very gross and sick. We had realized after that that we probably got food poisoning from the sushi place.
So we made a quick trip to Walmart to get some Tums to try and settle our stomachs a little back at my place. We were both groaning because the place was super good and it was so disappointing that it ended with us both feeling sick.
We have vowed to never, ever, ever go back to that place again.”
“Still Not Sure What Would Make A Steak Taste Like Old Fish”
Photographee.eu/Shutterstock
“I went to a restaurant a coworker recommended called ‘Fred’s Place.’ Not sure what it was even supposed to be.
The problems started with the drink. I ordered a plain frozen drink. I tasted it and it was astringent and just wrong, so I asked the waitress: ‘Is there by any chance Jose in this?’
She glowered at me and said, ‘A daiquiri is Bacardi.’
‘I know what it’s supposed to be, but this doesn’t taste right. Could I get another drink?’
They messed that up as well.
By the time the food came out, they already thought I was a ‘problem customer.’ I ordered mixed seafood with pasta. It was supposed to be crab, shrimp, and clams. It smelled like hot garbage. I still tried to take a bite, thinking maybe I was smelling it wrong somehow, and it tasted like old garbage, too. Sour, foul, rotten. Had to spit it up in my napkin.
But at that point, I’d complained about the drinks, so I thought they’d be upset with me if I also complained about the food, so I asked to have it taken out in a to-go container. I threw it in the nearest garbage can when we left (the entire car was smelling bad now).
That place closed down. Poor Fred, whoever he is. I realize only now we were like maybe one of two people in the restaurant.
I also went to a wedding where everyone got a porterhouse steak. Mine tasted exactly like pure fish oil. I tried to eat it because you don’t want to complain at a wedding, but finally asked other people to try it and they said, ‘Don’t eat that.’ I’m still not sure what would make a steak taste like old fish, and why it was only mine.”
An Uncomfortable Plane Ride Following In-N-Out
“I ate at In-N-Out for the first time (and last time) around lunch before an evening flight back home and I’m pretty sure I got food poisoning.
While waiting for my flight, I started to feel a little strange. Ended up with the runs prior to the flight, then my head started getting light. When it came time to board, I ended up blacking out for a second or two while making my way to my seat. I came to with my arms locked holding myself up by gripping the seats on either side of the aisle and people asking if I was ok. ‘Sure, just a little nervous.’
I proceeded to alternate between destroying the bathroom and puking into multiple bags for the remainder of the flight while everyone looked on in horror. I must have filled five bags. I insisted it was just air-sickness because I didn’t want the plane to land somewhere random and make everything worse for everyone. Took a couple days to recover and pretty much wrecked my time at home. I was 20 at the time and didn’t realize how serious everything could have been. Knowing what I know now, I should have gone to the hospital.
I still feel terribly bad for the lady that sat next to me.”
She Couldn’t Understand Why Her Rice Was So Minty…
“I lived small city that had some of the worst food. All the restaurants sucked. My parents were in town and my mother-in-law and sister-in-law wanted to take us out to eat at a Chinese place.
I’m always very leery of Chinese restaurants. I loved them as a kid, but as I got older, it seemed good Chinese cuisine was hard to find. I had been to this particular place once before and it had a dingy diner vibe to it, with a middle-aged smoker voiced hostess. I didn’t want to go, but my mother-in-law and sister-in-law told me it had changed owners and was really good. So I acquiesced and we went. I ordered a fried rice dish with basil, but when I got it, I started to notice it was kind of minty.
My mother-in-law and sister-in-law were like, ‘Oh, the basil and mint are probably right next to each other and got mixed up!’
I didn’t see any fresh mint leaves and it sure tasted a bit…mouthwashy, but I noticed a stringy substance that confused me. At first, I thought it was egg, but as I got to the center of my dish, I found the nucleus. Gum.
There was someone’s nasty mint gum that I’ve been eating. The owner apologized and my meal was comped. They offered to make me a new meal but I declined. My mom looked horrified because she hated eating out for reasons like that. My mother-in-law and sister-in-law assumed it got stuck on the plate and went through the wash and my meal went on top but, man, I don’t know, it got a bit melty and mixed into my rice.
I took that as a lesson to be assertive about where I don’t want to eat.”
Love Stories And Want To Read More Like These?
Subscribe to our digest and receive a weekly email of hand-picked stories.
