Classic Restaurant F*ck ups: Mishaps, Fails and Awful Ideas in the Food Service Industry
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Food Service is a trade of extreme consequences. When it isn’t done well, the results can be exceptionally awful, and in some cases, exceptionally funny. Here’s a small collection of some of my favorite mishaps, fails and bad ideas in recent restaurant history. These cases range from social media disasters to racist Hulk Hogan-themed restaurants, but they all share the common quality of being both foolish and hilarious.
Magic Restroom Café
In a sudden stroke of genius, somebody decided to consolidate two facets of the modern dining establishment, the restaurant and the bathroom. Magic Restroom Café, drawing from a somehow popular phenomenon in Taiwan, is a fully bathroom-themed Taiwanese restaurant. The seats are toilets, you eat out of little ceramic toilets, there are showerheads on the walls next to every table, and a urinal is present in the front entrance (a nice touch!).
Unfortunately, the toilet seats are not actually functional toilets, demonstrating a clear lack of follow-through with the theme.
Though the idea is somewhat catchy and cute, the restaurant closed down after just half a year. This seems to be attributed to the mediocre food. Apparently dishes such as “black poop” and “stinky tofu” weren’t tasty enough to compensate for the fact that they were served in a toilet.
As a handful of Yelp reviews said, the food was “mediocre” by the wait times were great! As one customer put it:
“There was NO WAIT at all, actually, there was barely people in the cafe.”
Another customer seemed to be having a great time until “it got pretty disgusting towards the end of eating the dessert. When shaved ice and ice kind of melted and you realize that you are eating out of a toilet bowl…”
Fast Food Employee Insubordination
It takes nationwide success to give a fast-food chain a good reputation, yet it really only takes one bad employee with a social media account to ruin a reputation. That’s exactly what happened at Taco Bell, KFC, and Dominos.
In the case of Taco Bell, a photo was posted on the company’s Facebook feed a few years ago depicting an employee licking a large stack of the then-new Cool Ranch Doritos Locos taco shells.
Some would argue that you can’t blame him, but I believe it was the idea that the shells may be served later that put the fast food company in a predicament. Taco Bell assured us that this took place during training and that the licked shells were to be thrown out, but they fired the employee and apologized nevertheless.
Just remember next time you’re about to eat a Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Taco, it might have been licked by this guy.
KFC encountered a similar problem in 2008 when three of their employees decided to put on their bikinis and take a bath in their large commercial dishwasher sink.
The girls were discovered when they posted a series of photos from the event onto Myspace in a gallery entitled “KFC moments”. The pictures included captions such as “haha KFC showers!” and “haha we turned on the jets”.
Dominos probably endured the worst version of this. In their case, one of their employees filmed and narrated a co-worker shooting his nasal mucus into their food. In this instance, the employees faced felony charges and Dominos had to swiftly put out a statement in response to the brand-damaging act.
Hulk Hogan-Affiliated Restaurants
Pro Wrestler Hulk Hogan has dabbled in everything from rap music to web hosting to reality tv, so it’s no surprise that he’s been involved in the restaurant industry more than once in his life. It all started with Pastamania, a restaurant located in the Mall of America that served dishes such as “Hulk-U’s” and “Hulk-A-Roos”. Unfortunately for fans of both Hulk Hogan and pasta, the restaurant closed down less than a year after its 1995 opening.
Still eager to get in the restaurant business, Hogan licensed out his name to open a restaurant named Hogan’s Beach in Tampa at the end of 2012. In describing the restaurant shortly before opening, he said “It’s going to be Jimmy Buffet’s [Margaritaville] times 10; Hooters times 10.”
By 2014, the restaurant was tied up in controversy over an allegedly racist dress code. The dress code restrictions banned items such as sports jerseys, baggy attire, low hanging pants, backwards or sideways hats, do-rags, oversized jewelry, and bandannas. People felt these restrictions targeted a specific group of people, which prompted Hogan to change the dress code. The code was especially ridiculous considering they were targeting a style from over a decade ago and banning bandannas from a Hulk Hogan themed restaurant. Ironically, the restaurant changed its name and re-branded shortly following the release of a video transcript of Hogan using racist language.
Ever present in the food industry, Hogan also has had a blender named the Hulk Hogan Thunder Mixer, a grill called The Hulk Hogan Ultimate Grill, an energy drink called Hogan Energy, a line of microwavable hamburgers at Wal-Mart called “Hulkster Burgers” and finally, a website called Hogan Nutrition that sells nutritional and dietary products.
Gordon Ramsay Literally Leaves an Episode of Kitchen Nightmares, Owners Freak Out on Social Media
Kitchen nightmares is named kitchen nightmares for a reason. The restaurants featured are so awful and dysfunctional that Gordon Ramsay needs to come set things straight. This worked out well for a very long time, until one restaurant was so bad that Ramsay completely gave up on helping them.
Amy’s Baking Company, a restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona, seemed like a more than ideal candidate for Kitchen Nightmares. The owners, Amy and Sammy, pocketed their service staff’s tips and said to have fired over 100 employees since they opened the restaurant. Throughout the episode, the owners scream at each other, reject Ramsay’s advice, and literally threaten and yell profanities at a diner as they kick them out for complaining about a long wait.
Eventually, Ramsay is done and leaves the restaurant following a devastating final exchange where he calmly and effectively tells off the owners. After the episode aired, users on Yelp, Reddit and Facebook posted a healthy variety of insulting things about the restaurant and the owners.
Apparently still thinking their reputation was worth defending, Sammy and Amy struck back with a beautifully written series of semi-coherent Facebook posts in mostly all-caps. After they realized that they weren’t exactly helping themselves, they made a post claiming they were hacked. Considering the all-caps and similar nature of the rest of their comments and posts, this seems highly doubtful.
I could summarize what they say, but I don’t think I could do them better justice than the posts themselves. Enjoy.
