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If you dine out regularly, chances are you’ve had an unfortunate experience at least once or twice in your life. But has it ever been so bad that you’ve sworn off a particular restaurant entirely?
Reddit user Nukemarine recently posed this question to the online community, asking, “What happened to make you say ‘I'm never coming to this restaurant again’?”
The post, which was first submitted to the AskReddit forum on Feb. 1, has already garnered more than 24,000 responses and comments from diners who were allegedly disgusted beyond belief. Some of their stories were gross, a few were pretty funny, and others are so scary you may want to start cooking the rest of your meals at home-- for life.
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These stories have not been substantiated by anyone other than the Reddit users who posted them. Still, we bet you wouldn't return to a restaurant after experiencing anything like this...
1. Re-used rice
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"Was eating at a Chinese restaurant where you order rice by the bowl. From the angle I was sitting I saw the waiters taking half uneaten bowls of rice and dumping them back into the rice cooker."
– Reddit user chubby_hamster
2. Creepy cola
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"The nozzle fell off the soda fountain and bug parts fell out into my cup. (Roaches and other bugs in the soda fountain are a common problem if you don't clean it properly.) I told a worker and they just screwed the nozzle back on when they thought I wasn't looking. Who knows what else they weren't cleaning."
– An allegedly grossed-out Reddit user
3. A hair-raising quesadilla
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"There was hair baked into my quesadilla. Like, enough I was concerned for the health of the chef."
– Reddit user Nightthunder
4. A side of bedbugs
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"It was a restaurant in Waikiki, the last night of our vacation. The place was crawling with bedbugs. We didn't know they were bedbugs at the time, didn't actually figure that out until we were back home and the telltale bites developed. We had to call the hotel, tell them we may have introduced bedbugs to the room. (They freaked out but hey, it was their employee who'd recommended the place.) We had to empty out the freezer to deep freeze everything we couldn't boil or leave roasting in a black garbage bag on a sunny patio for weeks. We had to put special covers on our mattresses and vacuum and scrub every surface every day. Our house wasn't infested but it was over a month before we could relax.
"When I called the restaurant, the manager said, oh yeah, we have a terrible bed bug infestation, we have an exterminator come once a month, but every place in Waikiki has bedbugs, everybody knows that, you should read the local newspaper.
"When we wrote about it on Trip Advisor, the same manager called us to ask us to remove the review. In return, we'd get dinner on the house if we ever returned.
"Not only am I not going ever going back to that restaurant, I'm not ever going back to Oahu."
– Reddit user AnkleFrunk
5. A burger with everything
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"Took some of my friends to a local burger place that I loved. We went at 3 p.m. so there were only two other tables with customers besides my friends and I. Our food took roughly 50 minutes to get to our table, which was not cool, but I wasn't going to make a fuss over it. As I took the much anticipated first bite out of my delicious looking sandwich, I discovered an extremely odd texture. It was the plastic from the cheese. Great. I just ate plastic. Turns out, the cooks were watching the Browns vs. Steelers game and must have thought that more important than doing their job."
– Reddit user tanooki_
6. A birthday cake scam
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“Went to a restaurant on my birthday. They found out and surprised me with a huge piece of cake. Then they added the cake to the receipt.”
– Reddit user hobbitlover
7. An allergen-topped side dish
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"I have a deathly [sic] tree nuts allergy. I ordered a plate of fish tacos, and it came with a side salad — [but] upon receiving the dish, I noticed that the salad was covered in candied pecans. This hadn't been mentioned anywhere on the menu, so I politely informed the waiter that I couldn't eat the salad, specified it was due to a severe allergy, and requested a replacement.
"They INSISTED on taking everything back to the kitchen, even though the salad and the tacos hadn't touched, and of course I thanked them and let them take it.
"Fast forward fifteen minutes, everyone else is done eating, and they finally bring my food back. I am famished, so I dig in. Imagine my surprise when I find no fewer than three pecans at the bottom of my salad bowl after having consumed maybe a quarter of the salad, and begin to experience anaphylaxis.
"To this day I don't know if it was an assassination attempt, if the sous chef didn't believe I was really allergic so he just scraped the nuts off the top and called it good, or if it was just a reeeeaaally sloppy kitchen, but you better believe I'll never go back."
– Reddit user RedHeadedMenace
8. Previously owned wings
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"Found a bunch of eaten chicken wing bones in my appetizer basket. They just dropped a new piece of paper over them and filled it up with onion rings. Pointed it out to the manager, declined to get my app for free and walked out."
– Reddit user GooberMcNutly
9. An accidental dine-and-dash
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"We got home and realised [sic] neither of us had paid the bill."
– Reddit user Eoiny
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