The Worst Restaurant In Which You Have Ever Eaten

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Maybe we need to develop a list of places to warn people NOT to go to.

There was a little trailer on the outskirts of Athens, GA that was parked in a gravel parking lot between a road and a river. Some how they had a license to serve food. People swore by the place - best cuban food in town. I never ate there, but I'd go with friends who loved the place. It always smelled of raw sewage and kept looking in back to see if they were pumping it into the river. Stinky.

Thinking now about which was the very worst of the very worst of the worst restaurants. Back later.

When we moved to Canada we went to this little place in town that we heard was good and it was awful.

oooooh, me and the general lee went to that mexican cantina in harvard square - aweful!

For those with less sophisticated tastes, the A&W in Aztec, NM, is outstanding - for what it porports to be. I was traveling through the San Luis Valley in Colorado with friends some years back, and we passed an A&W. I said "Lets." Oh, brother! Tasted like everything had been cooked in rancid grease.

A couple of months ago my mate and I were coming home from a rush trip to the city - we only get there about every 3-4 months and look forward to Kentucky Fried Chicken whenever we do. We got to the last stop on the way home with a KFC only to find that it was closed for renovations. The only other place open was a dingy looking place that wasn't at all appealing but we were hungry and still had a way to go. We had steak that it was impossible to cut, salad that consisted of a limp piece of lettuce and a stick of carrot, and french fries that were like little blocks of wood. But the worst of it was the cockroaches that crawled up the table legs!

I like your tag line, Eve.

Welcomr to A2K, Ducky1 .... Hope you like it here.

The worst place I've ever eaten at? Hmmmm .... Quite a few ...but really, I must take the blame for the bad experiences. I'm always dragging people into new "interesting looking" places. Very much a hit or miss process & sometimes it works, though other times, well ....
But this is part of the adventure of living in a city that has such a variety of potential eating places, with new ones springing up all the time.

There's a steakhouse a few blocks from my current fling's apartment, I think it's called the Madison Street Grill. One day, after a fit of drinking, we went inside, sat down, and were promptly served warm water. Her cup had lipstick markings on it. My fork had a chunk of beef stuck to it.

The tablecloth was crinkled, heavy plastic; the kind you see on a picnic bench in a trailer park. On the floor were various bits of discarded food, some of which appeared to have been chewed and spit out. This, of course, tells a great deal about the meal we were about to eat.

The server had no patience with us, and between the cigarette she was tending, and the vodka-shakes she was racked with, I'm suprised she got our order at all. As the coffee I'd ordered never showed up, I went behind the bar to get it myself while the waitress was visiting the bathroom. The other patrons frowned on this, though after 10 minutes of waiting (and being a far better restaraunt employee than anyone I'd seen there), I figured I was excused.

30 minutes later, when the food showed up, I bit into my hamburger to find the middle not only cold, but spoiling. The accompanying salad was warm, the lettuce brown, and the dressing gritty. My companion's sandwhich--ordered with turkey--was served with pale, semi-translucent ham. In an effort to reverse my suddenly souring disposition, I went to the bar and ordered a Maker's on the rocks, and was poured a half-shot with extra ice.

The worst part? I paid.

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Mexican catina in H.square?

I'm turning this around. Border Cafe: Good.

Ah, Border Café = good.

Not so the place I was taken way back when I was doing the Personals (before I met Mr. Jespah).

It was Long Island, 1988, summer. My date and I met at a mall. Okay, whatever; there are lots of malls on LI. He was weird but I figured okay, coffee can't hurt, right? We went to the Woolworth's coffee shop and had coffees, which were something like 50 or 75 cents apiece. The check came to less than $5, I know that.

We talked, or rather I babbled because he was weird and mostly silent and I was trying to kill time before I could escape (I was under the impression that he could possibly outrun me, or I'd've left sooner). Thin, watery, tepid coffee-like substances were served by a sullen waitress.

After perhaps 15 minutes I announced that I had to go, uh, somewhere. I think I said I was meeting my mother, which is always a good excuse. I got up and we settled up the bill! This idiot didn't even have the good sense or social acumen to just drop a five and be done with it. Instead, he sat and figured out the precise tip and split it exactly. I think I handed the waitress $3 and tore out of there as fast as I possibly could, hoping he hadn't gotten my license plate number.

There's another cantina in Harvard Square - Casa Mexico? - across from Grendal's. It's always looked a bit sketchy and I've never been in there. Maybe that's where little k ate?

Had to "figure out" the tip on a $3 bill?

What a winner.

This was a small restaurant in the slum quarter of the Turkish town of Mersin. I wanted to taste an authntic Turkish food, so I went to the place that did not serve tourists. I have no problems with taste of food (it was OK), or size of meals, or price. I have problem with diarrhea I suffered from during a week after having tasted the authentic food...

Bangkok Spoon in Mountain View, CA. Consistently rated the "worst restaurant" reviewed at http://www.dine.com.

I ate there once before the web existed. Everything was the same temperature - room temp. It was as if they had made everything at lunchtime and simply left it on the counter waiting for the dinner crowd. Truly disgusting. Everyone in my party agreed it was the worst meal they'd ever been served.

Well, I seem to have left my "bad restaurant radar" on, because as of late, every place I've gone recently has been a little "off".

Having worked in the food business for as long as I have, I try to judge each restaurant by it's own merits, not by what I'd do. So, I can be just as happy(almost) at a "Friday's" as at "The Ritz" because they aren't the same thing, and shouldn't be judged the same way. In other words,..I'm not a "Food Snob".

I've had some very memorable experiences. None of them had much to do with the food, as with the service. The worst have happened at big corporate restaurants, it's not the individual servers faults, that's how they're trained. Waiters in these kinds of places are trained to introduce themselves, they are taught very basic sales technique and praised for being really, really, really, really friendly. That's OK, you expect that.
Sometimes they take it a little too far though:

Outback Steakhouse: Our waiter SAT in the booth next to me to take our order,..I was horrified. When I mentioned that it was not such a great thing to do, he KNELT on the floor, leaning on the table to finish taking the order. Whoever dreamed up this style of swervice, has got to go.

P.F. Chang's- A corporate chinese/american bar/restaurant, meant to appeal to a young, hip crowd, very reasonably priced (I think the most expensive thing on the menu was $11.) I went with a friend after a long day at work, I was tired and admittedly cranky (22 double shifts in a row), just wanted to relax, have a drink and a snack.
This waitress would not leave me alone, even after being asked too nicely.
She insisted that I have here favorite thing on the menu, some lettuce wrap thing that I didn't want (I really hate iceberg lettuce, have since I was a kid, not cause I like "fancy" lettuce better,..just cause I hate it )
I finally ordered it just to get her to leave...... ...but she didn't.
She stayed, touching my shoulder every so often, felt obligated to explai in great detail that the condiments on the table were to put on our food (I was going to drink them),..that the brown liquid was soy sauce,.... This was like a freakin' nightmare!! I explained very nicely to her that my friend and I wanted some quiet time, so we could talk, she smiled, lleft for about thirty seconds...reappearing with our food, then felt obligated to show me how to properly assemble my lettuce thing,....because apparently I'm too stupid to know what soy sauce is, so there's no way I could figure out that the meat stuff goes inside of the lettuce leaves.
I finally made up some story about needing to smoke, so we'd just move to the bar.
I have nightmares about this night!!

I went to PF Changs a couple of months ago...good drinks.