The Stupidest Reactions from Restaurants to Food Poisoning
You know the feeling. You’re eating and your stomach first starts cheerfully rumbling, then begins producing the sounds of a blocked drain slowly popping open. Next, you want just one thing: the bathroom. Everything has to come out, and quickly. Food poisoning or a foodborne infection. It can always happen. But how do restaurants deal with it?
Food poisoning
A restaurant can’t always do anything about it. Even if the chef scrubs his hands raw, even if you use a different-colored cutting board for every ingredient and an overdose of date stickers on the containers. Some crazy little mold or bacterium may still have crawled into the ingredients and released a toxin that makes you desperately ill within a few hours, or there may be a clump of disease-causing bacteria, parasites, or viruses in your last meal. Sometimes you notice it in the restaurant, sometimes only once you’re home. If you haven’t already taken refuge in a toilet along the way.
Occupational hazard
It’s simply part of the deal. If you often eat out at many different places and in many different countries, you inevitably run more risk than when you fry all the bacteria to death in your perpetually spotless kitchen. Whether it happens at friends’ homes, in the local pub, or at an internationally renowned Michelin-starred restaurant, it’s always unpleasant to tell them you became ill from their well-intentioned meal. And yet you should always do it! If only to protect other guests, because the culprit may be an ingredient that is still being used. The way a restaurant responds afterward says a great deal about it.
In the category: ‘My child would never do that’
Twice in a row, I went out for dinner with a colleague at restaurant D. in The Hague. A simple sandwich. And both times we got sick. The second time, I decided to send an email before the entire city of The Hague succumbed. I soon received a response from one of the employees. No apologies, but an invitation to have coffee with the chef. He could explain to me that food poisoning was impossible in his kitchen because it met the highest hygiene standards. I politely declined and never went back.
Threatened with death
By the Scheveningen seaside, I ate satay at beach bar B. and got sick. Seriously sick. No apologies, no ‘come back sometime,’ and not even a cup of coffee after I had reported it properly. When I later mentioned this in an interview, I received a threatening email from the owner the next day. He knew where my office was and would come and get me if necessary so I could try his chicken satay again. He was determined to prove that it wasn’t his kitchen’s fault. I feared for my life, so I didn’t accept his invitation. I was literally too chicken. Years later, in the toilets of the House of Representatives, during the closing of the parliamentary year, he recognized me and once again wanted to go for my throat, after which I fled behind the safe shoulders of a minister.
Near-death experience
In Morocco, I ate lentil soup in the salmon-colored five-star palace La M., but when the bottom began showing through the orange sludge, I fled to the bathroom. Whereupon I spent three days camped out there with a fever, muscle aches, and a headache. A near-death experience. ‘It’s impossible that it was the harira,’ the chef declared later, once I could keep a cup of tea down at breakfast again. He had been making it for years without any complaints. I must have eaten something wrong somewhere else. Whenever I’m somewhere where I smell this dish, my body automatically goes into a spasm.
Sneaky shrimp
When we went out to eat at restaurant K. in Amsterdam with the 40-person editorial team of a culinary magazine, it turned out the next day that half of us had become ill. Probably because of the sneaky shrimp in an appetizer. You can usually smell and taste it already when eating such a dish, but you don’t always want to act like a diva. So you politely wash everything down with the necessary quantities of wine, which disinfects everything. When they heard they were responsible for poisoning the culinary elite of the Netherlands, we received humble apologies, followed by the practical question of what this meant for their position in the restaurant guide. Recently, I tried a meal from this restaurant again and got sick once more. Coincidence or Pavlov?
Yeah, yeah, that’s what they all say
But the worst response was undoubtedly that of the (not unknown) chef of restaurant L. in Amsterdam to a guest who called the restaurant after a night of projectile vomiting. She had eaten wonderfully, to be fair, but something must have gone wrong, because she had spent the rest of the evening and night in the bathroom. Deathly ill. The chef, matter-of-factly: ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s what they all say. And hoping we’ll offer them a free meal. Have a nice day!’
Read also:
- Go on vacation without food poisoning
- Know before you go: 12 French dishes you may want to avoid
- Know before you go: 8 Spanish delicacies you may want to avoid
