“At Texas Roadhouse, my managers have always told me not to suggest the Porterhouse T-Bone steak. It’s the only steak we don’t hand cut in the restaurant. It’s shipped in frozen, and it’s generally considered our not so good steak.”

“Basically anything from Fridays. It’s almost all frozen, your lobster, soup, veggies – all microwaved. If any of your food isn’t hot enough, microwave. Plus if you order fries, anyone who walks through the kitchen and sees the plate on expo probably ate a good portion of them. At my restaurant, they kept cooked and raw meat literally right next to each other but wondered why people complained about getting sick. All around distasteful. Also, anything “vegetarian” actually isn’t. All the soups have meat or meat bases in them. And 85% of the time your food has been touched by hands that likely weren’t recently washed. Plating the food before it’s served means one of the staff touched it with bare hands because they’re too lazy to use gloves. I never ate anything there when I worked there.”

“I worked at Denny’s for years. Everything comes frozen (even the avocados, which are then microwaved,) the gravy is powder stirred into boiling water, nacho meat microwaved. Store to store can vary from cleanliness, but at mine I suggest avoiding the scrambled eggs, nachos, corn hash, sausage, French toast and waffles (especially the wheat or whatever custom mix they have.) I occasionally glanced at the menus and was surprised at how much they charge.”

“Well if you’re health conscious or counting calories, everything from Cheesecake Factory is fucking awful. Same with the blooming onion at Outback Steakhouse. I’ve seen people order that as an appetizer and eat that alone. That shit is something like 3000 calories and 6000mg of sodium.”

“I will preface this by saying it has been years since I worked there but here goes. Subway. Stay away from anything with mayo on or in it. We used to get our food shipments from a major distributor. We’d get our mayo in enormous bags. I started to notice in many bags that there were these lumps that got thrown away. One day I picked one out to examine. It was spongy and kind of yellow. We began referring to this as the mayonnaise meat. It will be in the squirt containers, in the tuna salad, etc. I saw this in multiple stores. Also, those veggie patties were foul.”

“As a prep and grill person for a burrito chain that advertises its lack of GMOs, I would say chicken. A lot of cooks tend to undercook it, so you get some raw pieces. I also suspect it’s where a lot of the outbreaks from years past originated.”

“Order what a place is known for. I used to work at an Italian Beef place (not Portillo’s but similar) and the beef sandwiches we served contained Italian beef cooked at another location and dropped off daily, giardiniera and peppers we prepped and cooked ourselves, bread delivered daily… quality food. Fresh. Then, we had a BBQ rib sandwich. A box of them came frozen, we warmed em up and sent em out. Same thing with a fried steak sandwich we had. It was a beef place, just order the beef!”

“I worked in the deli at a Winn-Dixie for a few years when I was younger. (Winn Dixie is a grocery store in the south). We sold an Antipasto salad that was just made up of the ends of all the lunchmeats and cheeses we didn’t sell. They were usually expired, but we cut them up into cubes, and cover them with Italian dressing. I never tried it, but it sounds disgusting. People loved it though. On a related note, at Winn-Dixie, after you open a new package of lunch meat, you have 6 days before the rest of it has to be thrown out. We would label it with a sticker, and wrap it in saran wrap every time we used it. Every night, we would go through the case, and pull the ones that went past their date. The manager would come in in the morning, and smell them. If she thought they smelled ok, she would put a new sticker, and put them in the case for another 6 days.”

“I’ve never worked at McDonald’s but the McRib is fuckin’ suspicious as hell.”

“Ruby Tuesday salad bar is a big no for me”

“Pretty sure they don’t sell it anymore, and it should be self-explanatory, but the shrimp basket from Dairy Queen.”

“ANY of the wings from sonic. It is our lowest quality meat. Just ask for some popcorn chicken with wing sauce on it. Don’t subject yourself to sonic wing meat.”

“I used to work at Papa John’s. You’re gambling with mushrooms – slimy or not, we’re using em I guess.”

“Check the menu, if there is an item used only in one dish, chances are it’s not as fresh as the rest of the menu.”

“At McDonald’s just say you want a fish filet cooked to order. It will take ~5 more minutes but worth it compared to the filet that has been in the heated cabinet for hours.”

“I have heard many chefs saying not to order the fish on a Monday, as they get their last fish order of the week on Friday and they don’t get a new one until Tuesday.”

“Seafood specials/buck a shuck oysters. It means my seafood delivery is tomorrow and I’m trying to get rid of my old stock. Really most special dishes are either ‘trying a new dish to see if it should go on the menu or not’ or ‘I’m trying to get you to buy this product before I have to throw it out.'”

“Ice almost everywhere. Unless you’ve seen people take apart the ice machine and scrub the whole thing out, there is definitely mold in those.”

“Most of the food at Panda Express is kept in a more sanitary environment than you would expect but I wouldn’t get the mixed veggies, fairly often we would get shipments of carrots that were clearly bad, like gooey and moldy but I was told to cut around the gross parts and then the carrots still got used. Also, the blancher rarely gets cleaned or properly and gets used to clean off the wok ladles after every other dish gets made so there’s usually debris from other dishes just sitting in the water.”

“It’s been a while since I worked there, but don’t get a bourbon steak from Applebee’s. It’s like a black licorice tasting steak. It makes no sense. I’m convinced that every one of those I ever cooked was someone trying it for the first time. I remember one time we accidentally cooked an extra one, and we offered it to a waitress to eat. She took one bite and immediately spit it out. She kept asking us all night “what did you guys put on it?!” she was convinced that we had put something nasty on it to mess with her. We didn’t do anything to it…that’s just how bad they were.”

“Worked at Taco Bell for way too long. Obviously, nothing is top of the line, but I never ate anything with beans or red sauce. They sit out, get all nasty and crusty, and then the workers just pour hot water in it. By the end of the day, it’s just recycled crusties. The beans aren’t as bad because they go through more, but that red sauce is disgusting. Red sauce is in the Mexican pizzas, burrito supremes, bean burritos, etc. Avoid that shit. Edit: the red sauce is not in the Mexican pizzas, but there is pizza sauce. If anything, this stuff is worse because they only use it for the pizzas. Grows a thick crust throughout the day.”

“Tomorrow the zombie frap comes out at Starbucks. I’d recommend not getting it. Tastes like the fakest of fake sugar-free caramel flavor mix with whay someone took a swing at what a Granny Smith apple tastes like after having it described to them.”