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30 Red Flags To Keep An Eye On To Spot A Bad Restaurant, As Shared On This Online Group
Each of us has specific standards for the quality and degree of service we want when going out to eat. However, just as the restaurant can have a variety of high-level qualities, there are some warning signs that can point to a poor eating experience or even serious health risks. Paying attention to details before and during the dining experience can help you spot warnings, which can be anything from bad food conditions to poor customer service or generally terrible food. Every time we go to a restaurant, we want to guarantee a safe and enjoyable dining experience by being aware of and avoiding these warning signs.
The red flags that indicate you are in not the best restaurant were recently discussed in this online group on Reddit. Here you can find 34 of the most liked ones we've gathered for you, and feel free to comment with your thoughts and the considerations you make when dining out!
More info: Reddit
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Ethnic restaurant with no customers of that ethnicity in a town with a large population of that ethnicity.
If you smell freshly popped popcorn, but they don't serve popcorn, they have a cockroach infestation. The smell is the result of a potent insecticide and dead roaches.
Long menu. Pages and pages of food that doesn’t really make sense or go together
Cool pic, the woman looks like she's floating above the floor. She must be sitting on a stool or something.
The very moment Gordon Ramsay appears and calls the employees f*****g donkeys
From what I read, it's just for TV show, once camera off, he's quite nice person. And also certain amount of British humour and attitude is involved.
The restaurant isn't even busy but they take ages to serve you, and when they finally do they seem reluctant.
If it smells like fish. Even fish-selling restaurants (the good ones) aren’t supposed to smell fishy. No pun intended.
Dirty floor, if they can’t keep the floor clean, they aren’t cleaning the important stuff.
Also, dirty floors are just nasty, even if they’re cleaning everything else.
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.
Massively disagree on this, I went to a 3* Michelin restaurant, turned up 10 minutes before service started, there was a staff huddle in the car park, service staff mainly, all late teens early 20's, did a massive group high 5 on the end of it, good to see that level of teamwork and not something I'd seen before.They were all impeccable and the service was excellent (their boss has won many, many awards), an utter credit to their employer and themselves.
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.
This ! A nice little restaurant in Rome, just accross the street of the Colloseum. Wonderfull view, espetially durring the sunset. Worst pizza I've seen and tasted in my life 😝
Order something complicated and it comes out immediately.
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.
Bad lighting or sticky tables
I can deal with poor lighting as I'm sensitive to bright light, but can't do sticky tables.
The Sysco truck unloading a pallet of frozen food.
Not necessarily a problem, it could just be fries and onion rings. I also hate to tell everyone but unless you are on the shore and you know the fried seafood is fresh, it's probably from Sysco and it's delicious!
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.
What's the problem with an innocent roachie, trying to feed on mid-priced meal, for a change? Stop being so judgemental, people 🙄
Whatever is on the menu 60% is not available
Ah, to be fair, one of the best meals I ever had was at a tiny local Restaurant in rural France, where the owner / Chef bought his ingredients for the day at the local market, then made his menu round those ingredients. 2 chalkboards outside told you what was on offer and you had to wait for a table as the locals always got there early. I forget what I'd ordered (possibly an Ossobuco style dish and my girlfriend had a parma wrapped Chicken dish). Both were stupendous - we were almost the last people to get food that evening and the locals who'd arrived late had a few drinks and wandered off, not unhappy, but a bit dissappointed that he'd run out of food. Had a chat with the owner afterwards in my really bad French and he stated that he would only cook for the number of people that would'nt put him under stress but would make him a decent living, something he seemed to have achieved. Went back many years later, the restaurant was there under new management. It wasn't the same.
Not busy on a holiday, Friday, or Saturday night.
this depends. the restaurant I work at can be not busy on holidays because we're 1 mile away from a major university. on holidays all the students are gone, so we tend to be slower.
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?
Not a deal breaker for me. If the food is good, I'll just believe that they have a limited time to clean and the kitchen is a priority over the windows. I'm blissfully happy in my ignorance.
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...
The parking lot is empty.
Not neccesarily true. One resuarant that I know of has absolutely amazing food, but it's a smaller one and less crowded.Other people haven't discovered it yet, so I get to keep it to myself. (:
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.
I remember going into a newly opened restaurant and seeing that. We gave it a chance because it was new but after getting a drink the waitstaff disappeared. Periodically someone would sneak through the dining room and deliberately not make eye contact. After about 15-20 minutes no-one had come back to take our food order and NO-ONE in the place had been served food that whole time. We left and never went back. Place went under within about a month. Big surprise!
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.
Completely agree with the "Google rule". Below 3.5 stars it's probably not worth (well or it's the s****y pub at the end of main road everbody goes to...). Between 3.5 to 4.0 you still can be up for a mixed experience - most of the time poor wait-staff. (Judging my middle European country.)
Sanitation rating isn’t in plain sight
Not everywhere does ratings. *Edit: Even if they do, that doesn't guarantee much. My company was doing a favor for a chain to get ahead of some bad videos that were coming out, so we inspected all their restaurants in the area. I had to wait for the Health Department to finish at one - they received an excellent report from them. In the first minute, I came across cockroaches. I found severe infestations of cockroaches and rodents, a failing walk-in cooler, and sewage dripping near to-go containers in the basement. None of it was on the report. They were closed to fix the issues and I had to go back a month later. They fixed none of it. To make matters worse, someone from my company gave them a passing score on their regular inspection before I showed up for the follow up visit.
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
Pizza sauce is the easiest thing in the world to make. Roma tomatoes, bit of garlic, salt, and fresh basil in the blender. Done. You don't need to cook it because it'll cook in the pizza oven. (If it's too thin a sauce, throw it in the fridge and let the pectins do their thing.)
Carpeting throughout
Slot machine.
Anywhere that serves food on anything other than crockery (ie shovels, shoes etc). We use ceramics for a reason.
As I was informed tonight at the restaurant where my friend bartends and her mom waitresses. Her mom told me how long the servers work there is a good indication of not only how good they treat their staff but also how good the food is. she had been there 25 years and another 35 (and the place has been there that long). She was right everything was great.
Long menus sometimes, but JUST SOMETIMES, don't mean bad restaurants. If you have a really good chef and cuisine that supports mix-match ( like Italian), it can be pretty good. I was once in an Italian restaurant that had a 6-7 pages menu, but everything was revolving around two dozen ingredients max. Pasta/rice/pizza dough + 5-6 meaty ingredients and a dozen of veggies and cheeses. I ordered risotto which is pretty tricky to order, and it was excellent, made from scratch in half an hour or a bit less ( as it should be), and my BF ordered pizza that had peppers on it, and they were still a bit crunchy ( fresh) when he got it. So yes, it is possible, but very unlikely.
If the menu is huge, it's frozen. If the table is dirty, the kitchen is too. If the menus are laminated, eat somewhere else.
Places that are cash only all the time. I find it a bit suspicious.....
Anywhere that serves food on anything other than crockery (ie shovels, shoes etc). We use ceramics for a reason.
As I was informed tonight at the restaurant where my friend bartends and her mom waitresses. Her mom told me how long the servers work there is a good indication of not only how good they treat their staff but also how good the food is. she had been there 25 years and another 35 (and the place has been there that long). She was right everything was great.
Long menus sometimes, but JUST SOMETIMES, don't mean bad restaurants. If you have a really good chef and cuisine that supports mix-match ( like Italian), it can be pretty good. I was once in an Italian restaurant that had a 6-7 pages menu, but everything was revolving around two dozen ingredients max. Pasta/rice/pizza dough + 5-6 meaty ingredients and a dozen of veggies and cheeses. I ordered risotto which is pretty tricky to order, and it was excellent, made from scratch in half an hour or a bit less ( as it should be), and my BF ordered pizza that had peppers on it, and they were still a bit crunchy ( fresh) when he got it. So yes, it is possible, but very unlikely.
If the menu is huge, it's frozen. If the table is dirty, the kitchen is too. If the menus are laminated, eat somewhere else.
Places that are cash only all the time. I find it a bit suspicious.....