Starbucks supervisor here. There is no secret menu, and we're not trained to make those viral TikTok drinks. Some of the more common ones, like a Cotton Candy Frap, the baristas might know, but don't bank on it. If you want us to make something 'off-menu,' have the recipe handy. As a side note, many of those drinks also rely on seasonal ingredients, so you should have a backup choice ready.

Health inspection is really kind of a sham. Health inspectors tend to inspect all the restaurants in an area around the same time. When the inspector shows up at one restaurant the manager will typically notify the other restaurants in the area. I worked at a Taco Bell. When we got a call from the BK down the street that the health inspector was there, we knew he would be showing up at our place sometime in the next week. We would call in extra people to do a deep clean of everything. It did not matter that most of the year every time we hosed out under the fryer or food prep lines, we drowned hundreds of roaches. When the health inspector showed up everything was clean, so we still had a 100% on our health inspection.

Not so much a secret but a lesser known fact...

Kirkland products, the white label brand from Costco, are independently tested to beat OR EXCEED the industry leading product in that category. Razor blades. Cookies. Cheese. Laundry pods. If it doesn’t beat the industry leader, they won’t put the Kirkland name on it.

Maybe not a "secret secret" but just not something people realized.

At Wendy's, the cooked burgers that don't get sold, those go into a pot in a refrigerator, and they get made into TOMORROW's chili.

The crispy chicken that doesn't get sold today? Those go into a pot in the fridge and those get made into TOMORROW's crispy chicken salads.

Back when Wendy's had a salad bar ... the burger buns that are going stale at the end of a day? Those got made into tomorrow's garlic bread on the salad bar.

None of this is unsafe, all of this is approved by the department of health, and none of this is a trade secret ... but I bet you didn't realize that.

Candy man here. We left chocolate out in display cases for months on end. When my friends came by to the store I told them to avoid it at all costs.

Back when I was a fry cook, some customers thought they were being slick and would order unsalted fries to make sure they got fresh ones. Us cooks would just put already salted fries back into the fryer to wash the salt off.

My husband used to work in a gastro-pub in a well-to-do area where it was the only option.

The baked Camembert. It was literally the Camembert from Aldi. £1 each. Baked and sold for £15 to share.

Everyone was convinced it was some really posh continental fine cheese with a special Camembert oven or some s**t. Nope, they could do the exact same thing at home for a pittance of the price.

I'm not a chef by any stretch of the imagination, but I do have a small BBQ business. I've had some people call me out on my pricing for say, pulled pork. They even say, "I saw pork shoulder at Kroger's for $1.99/lb". I tell them that is great, but I source slightly higher quality than commodity pork. Aside from the meat cost, there is the cost of that fresh ground pepper and other seasonings. Then the cost of wood and propane for my smoker, which wasn't cheap, and right now I'm trying to figure out how to replace it with bigger, better, because it is falling apart. The cost of wrapping material. The cost of the sauce that comes with it (homemade from scratch). Let's not mention the minimum of 8 hours I had it in the smoker, watching it carefully, then letting it rest for the right amount of time before shredding. Oh then there is the knowledge base it takes to do it right, which took many years of crappy BBQ that only I ate to get here. But absolutely, you could buy commodity shoulders at the store and replicate for a fraction of the price. And they should.

Most of our desserts are purchased from the Wal-Mart directly across the street then marked up 500%. For the price of a couple of pieces of cheesecake, you could just go across the street to Wal-Mart after your meal and buy a whole one.

We just drizzle a bit of chocolate or raspberry sauce on it so that it doesn't look exactly like the one from Wal-Mart.

Also, a smoker outside the building doesn't mean your barbecue is fresh. Most of it is frozen. Sometimes we just throw logs on there so it *looks* and *smells* like we're barbecuing. Homey, we made that s**t two days ago. That's just wood you're smelling.

Not really a rip-off, but there's an Italian place nearby that serves a deliciously savory dipping sauce called Bagna Cauda. $13 gets you about an 8 oz crock of it and 6 soft breadsticks to dip. I googled it and it's just melted butter with anchovies and a little sour cream melded in. I made a fondue pot of it for New Year's Eve. Super easy, inexpensive, and impressed the hell out of our guests.

We used to sell a house-made drink with a ton of stuff we could make behind the bar for basically nothing. The cost to us, per pour, was $1.89. We sold it for $12.

Granted, that kind of thing allows us to sell expensive things for far less than other places, which actually pissed off the guys up the street from us who were selling the same products for a good deal more. So usually when you're getting ripped off via a particular item, it's letting you get something good for less. Take salad, for example. Nothing about mixed green should cost $11, but when everyone and their mother eats one, we can sell that ahi tuna steak for $24 instead of $28.

I love doing this with beer. Yes, Peroni on draft is going to cost you $6, even though our pour cost is about $1.25. But that means I can put up that log of Alesmith Speedway Stout and it will also cost you 6 bucks instead of 8 or 9. Basically - the cheap s**t should cost a ton so the expensive stuff isn't so bad.

Not a chef but, in the UK if your restaurant is licensed to serves alcohol you legally have to provided free drinking water, but what they can do is charge you for the glass.