Home > Table Talk > Archives > 2007 > March > 06
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
Big Bad Boo Boos, Like Hair in Your Food
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
An editor passed by my desk a few days back to discuss something that had happened to her and a friend on a recent dine out. I’ll just cut to the chase: Her friend found a hair in her food.
I know.
Bleeeeeeeeeeeeccccch!
Gross.
Yuck.
While the idea of finding someone else’s strand of DNA in my arugula salad is, to put it mildly, a turnoff, the whole situation prompted a lot of questions from me, and they weren’t about sanitation.
I mean honestly, it’s not like it hasn’t happened to all of us before. In my dining travels, I’ve found hair, fingernails — in one restaurant’s bathroom I even found a used condom on the floor of the women’s restroom (and it was a “nice” restaurant).
No, my interest in what happened to my editor and her friend was how the restaurant handled the whole mess. Sometimes a mistake — even one as icky as a hair in your food — can be an entree into a special relationship between the customer and the restaurant.
In this case, the customer was offered another entree immediately, and the price of the dish was removed from the bill. The manager took care in discussing the situation with her until her comfortability level returned. When the bill came, her dessert was on the house, too. A big minus was turned into a plus with an outcome where everyone wins: My editor and her friend both plan to return to the restaurant.
In my own experience, I’m happy when management makes an effort to let me know they’re sorry for my a) being yucked out or b) having been inconvenienced, like say, the time a waiter spilled an entire pitcher of beer on me. The horrible thing (as if being drenched in beer isn’t horrible enough) was that nothing was done about it at all, except for a rather inept apology. No free dessert. No offer to dry-clean my clothes. No plus, big minus.
Still, the discussion prompts me to offer this bit of irony to diners: Get over it. Unless something at a restaurant has made you physically ill and you know it (and if so, you need to report it to the authorities and the restaurant), we need to all take a chill pill and realize that mistakes — even disgusting, gross, big, bad boo boos like hair in your food — happen because people are handling your food and serving you. People, not machines. People, most of whom have hair. We should all be far more concerned about whether food handlers are washing their hands often enough — a sanitary habit everyone from my mother to the CDC knows is the No. 1 way to prevent the spread of germs and food-bourne illness from food handlers.
Of course, if management doesn’t bother to do anything about a problem, there’s, um, a problem. But when care is taken to make you feel comfortable, even under dire circumstance, people are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do: their jobs.
Have you ever found something really disgusting, like hair, in your food at a restaurant? What did the management of the restaurant do to compensate?
Permalink | Comments (96) | Post your comment | Categories: Dining
