What are your restaurant red flags?

[SpergPatrol]

I have a lot as one of my family members was a secert shopper and another as a health inspector and they let me experience a lot of these things.

I look up and see water stains on the ceiling.
That is a sign of black mold and any place that has noticeable stains are normally places that are also unsanitary as hell.

If the place has employees that are clearly overworked then that also a sign.
Places that overwork someone for food normally tend to have the worst food that at best is overcooked and bland.

Any place that restaurant that is located close to a place like a paint store or another restaurant that clearly run down or closed.
These places without fail have rats and vermin always running around even well known fast food chains.

Any restaurant who google or yelp reviews are below 4 who have lots of reviews.
Check the dates but if it is recently been <3 don't go you will get sick.
Unless it is from a karen, ignore their review entirely.
Always look at photos too because you be surprised how your mood changes from seeing how the food actually is.

Most Important Sign:
How clean the fork and knife are.

You be shocked how easy it is to find shitty restaurants by doing just that before anything.
If you ask for a clean set and they give an attitude, the new set is dirty, or they try to convince you it isn't.
Get the fuck out that door as soon as possible.

Those places do not give a fuck about sanitation and will make you sick. They do not care if you get sick and are always the same types of places you will see in kitchen nightmares, I am not kidding, fucking run you're better off at burger king.

Anything that has to remind you how authentic it is. Yeah no, 9/10 those are shit shows filled with roachs in the back with terrible food that shocker isn't authentic.

I got more to share if you want but yeah use these to help you because you be surprised how much of good indicators these really are to help avoid food poisoning.

 

[McMitch]

A restroom that isn’t just dirty, but either looks like it is normally dirty or is insanely dirty is an instant walk-out.

My sister has the Celiac real bad, so anytime staff takes a blasé attitude towards it usually means we have to figure something else out for family night.

 

[Dan Abrams]

Doordash/Grubhub pickup lane as soon as you walk in.

Requiring masks even after the mandate is over "because it's the right thing to do".

Mismatch between the races of the kitchen staff and the cuisine (Mexicans at a sushi place etc)

Those restaurants where you order at the cashier in the front then go sit down and wait.

Joggers eating there. There's a very good chance they're going to be loud and obnoxious as fuck and ruin the experience, and if there's joggers chances are it's a cheaper kind of establishment.

Gigantic portion sizes. I feel like usually they're making up for mediocre food by just giving you a ton of it.

Excessive french fry servings. This ties in with ^^^ but some places get away with skimping out on the real food by giving you a plate full of fries.

Gimmick restaurants. I just won't go there period because I care more about the food quality than some dumb shit like eating in the dark or the waitresses being dressed like nurses. That shit is funny if you're a family of fat midwesterners on vacation.

Light/cheap silverware. I like a fork and a knife that has some weight to it.

Prices on the menus. If you have to tell me how much the food costs, it's probably a poor person restaurant.

No physical menus and you have to scan a QR code: Restaurants are going to keep doing this because they can easily increase the prices on the weekends or during holidays like Uber does.

 

[Megaroad 2012]

There was a Nandos Chicken near me with a big rainbow Nandos flag in the window and underneath it was a big sign saying unvaccinated people couldn't eat there. I love our more tolerant society.

Believe me when the next round of riots happen, there's one local business I hope to see burn.

 

[MerriedxReldnahc]

From my experience working in a food service environment, a big-ass menu or a menu that keeps changing is a heads-up that the quality isn't going to be very good. From a business standpoint, too many dishes leads to higher costs and potentially wasted product if no one is ordering menu item #45 which specifically takes ingrediant #75.

Consistancy becomes an issue as well because you have to train the whole kitchen staff on how to make everything on a huge menu. I've worked in environments where the owner kept changing the menu or changing the process on how to make something, menu overhauls were a MONTHLY event and I never had a single one of them completly down. I had plenty of times where someone ordered a dish that I didn't know existed until an hour prior. What happens there is that one dish has potentially several different outcomes based on who's cooking that day.

Also if everyone is old, you're about to eat some very sad, bland, food!

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Dirty windows and a massive menu.

 

[TurdFondler]

A clean kitchen in a Chinese restaurant: means they're serving premade food. If the kitchen doesn't look like a wet market after closing time, don't bother.

 

[Gig Bucking Fun]

I have been to quite a few disappointing restaurants, and of those disappointing restaurants, a majority have been expensive restaurants. If you’re a farmer with a fat wallet, here’s a general rule of thumb to abide by for a night out:

• Any restaurant that is renowned for their desserts. Expect everything else to be ass. If the desserts look too showy, expect those to be ass too. You’re paying for the aesthetics, not the flavor.
• Any restaurant with some gay ass theme. Again, you’re paying for the aesthetics, not the flavor.
• Celebrity chefs are hit or miss. There are two reasons someone is a celebrity chef: they really are just that fucking good, or their stardom supersedes their cooking abilities. You never know which it is until you try, so be prepared to pass by a drive thru just in case.
• Bistros. These are spots where chefs with too much money sniff their own farts by preparing insanely tiny portions of completely overrated dishes they thought of while high off spice. You will leave hungry.
• If it looks like a club. Then it’s a fucking club, you fucking retard. Prepare to spend $50 on a roasted chicken drier than your grandmother’s cunt.
• Japanese restaurants. You’re being scammed, you fucking weeaboo.
• No old people. Old people have money to burn and they’ve spent more time at restaurants than you’ve been alive. They know where to eat; your faggot friend IG food reviewer soycuck doesn’t.
• Too many young people. All the faggot IG food review soycucks convinced your friends to burn their money at some dogshit restaurant where they cover unseasoned steak in gold flakes. Fuck them.

I will keep adding as I think of more.

 

[Stoneheart]

Fried chicken places with only white customers

thats something american, normal people dont eat fried chicken.

Most Important Sign:
How clean the fork and knife are.

best food i ever had was in some dirty dumb in croatia. nothing was clean at that place but it was in some small fishing village, no menus just what ever they catched.
even the shots were clearly homemade.

Excessive french fry servings. This ties in with ^^^ but some places get away with skimping out on the real food by giving you a plate full of fries.

sometimes they just dont care about the amount of fries they serve, serving a bucket of fries or just 4 makes very little difference-
Potatoes are super cheap and you peel them with a machine. its more a sign of a working class place.

Prices on the menus. If you have to tell me how much the food costs, it's probably a poor person restaurant.

that doesnt mean its bad.

• Any restaurant that is renowned for their desserts. Expect everything else to be ass. If the desserts look too showy, expect those to be ass too. You’re paying for the aesthetics, not the flavor.

Or its just an Austrian place. all their desserts are super good-

 

[I Love Beef]

Japanese restaurants. You’re being scammed, you fucking weeaboo.

To expand on this:

• The big cities and international hubs tend to have the best Japanese restaurants. Always look up if they are legitimate.
• If you are out in small town America, again, do your research. You will be surprised with finding traditional family run mom and pop places, which are nice and quality.
• Japanese restaurants that do the whole "pay fee, all you can eat" are most almost always run by Chinese or Koreans. They can be okay to obviously skeazy. Do not expect anything amazing, though they will deliberately try to fill you up on rice just to make you full faster. Out of rule of thumb, do not buy any bowl dishes.
• Be very weary of teppanyaki resturants. While these kinds of places are going out of style and buckling down on quality, they will be joints that deliberately charge arms and legs for their live cooks and real estate, and quality will vary depending on who is at work and where the restaurant is, so only eat at these places for celebrations. You will be fine if the joint is at a tourist/vacation spot, high traffic towns (like a college town) and/or the inner city; obviously, small towns or the suburbs are major red flags, as they are not traffic heavy (ie where the money runs) and sometimes the place will not even cook for you in the open, which is a major no no. There are also stories of lower end teppanyaki restaurants not storing stuff correctly and being sanitary out in the back, so unless the place has that great of reviews or is a Benihana, do exercise caution.
• For a new future turn of things, be very cautious of Japanese restaurants in "blue state" cities. This is because some joints will go for attracting soyfags/hipsters with low sodium on their menu, which means very bland ass food and a disappointing turn for very booming culinary scenes that sold out for two faced virtuesignalling limpwristed douchebags. If the restaurant goes for trying to look hip and chic with 2000s style nu-Japan aesthetics (like having anime and pop shit floating around and tries to look like it came from Blade Runner), and/or are located in a hipster neighborhood, they may have sadly cucked out for soyfags, which in all irony, their current customer base would have died from exposure to any healthy amount of sodium that comes with an actual Japanese diet. Do everyone and yourself a favor and tell these places that their current menu sucks for selling out to soyfags.
• Another rule of thumb: Do not expect to eat on the cheap at Japanese restaurants. You are a fucking idiot for thinking otherwise. You also may think you're being ripped off, but if you know where the best joints are and have read this list, you are paying for the effort for your food to not be literal shit by good chefs who know what they are doing. Japanese food demands dishes to be fresh, on the spot, and with focus on subtleties for its flavors; you need to go to a Mongolian grill or a Chinese restaurant if you want to eat until your belly bursts on a budget.
• New add: NEVER buy omakase or "random chef's choice platters" from a sushi restaurant that sells escolar and tilapia on their menu. Sushi restaurants that sell escolar and tilapia are red flags that the chefs who run the place are fucking chink fuckface shiteating garbage fucking chinamen who want a quick buck. Tilapia is fucking nasty; like the bottom of the barrel of fish you can ever eat, while escolar is fucking banned in just about every country in the world and yes, even Japan, while it is completely legal to sell in the States; tilapia is farmed from China and they literally feed the fish fucking livestock shit and antibiotics, while escolar is banned because it is an instant laxative because human bodies cannot digest it, ever. This is also sadly, not common knowledge. Tilapia in Japanese is known as izumi dai, while escolar in Japanese is aburasokomutsu, but is more commonly known in ripoff conman language as waloo/walu, "white tuna" or snake mackerel. The more you know. If you have no other place that sells sushi without these abominations, only order straight and narrow, and if they offer otherwise, tell them no. I am being generously nice on this topic and to those who serve this as sushi on their menu.
• Another new add: It's probably me being a purist, but Japanese restaurants that don't sell anything more than either teppanyaki and sushi sadly run on a bell curve due to popular consensus: they will be either really good, or they will be absolute shit. This may be a TL;DR summary, but Japanese restaurants that sell anything other than teppanyaki, sushi, and even ramen are incredibly rare. I'm talking about other dishes like donburi, bento, and even traditional Japanese dining. If you want Japanese and anything other than the major three picks on the menu, you will need to be in the aforementioned places or even make it at home, and it is admittedly slim pickings for a popularity run overseas restaurant scene.

 

[mindlessobserver]

Any place that charges 30 bucks for a steak and serves canned green beans as a side. Panda Express has fresh grilled green beans, goddamnit.

Comparing any restaurant to the glory that is Panda Express is unfair. Panda Express is the best eatery in America bar none. Every one I have been too has been consistently clean, tasted great, never skimps and 10 bucks gets you a huge Plate of Rice, Chicken, or whatever. All of it good.

Protip, always order the white rice. The Chowmein is fine, but their rice is always on point and goes way better with the entrees. Also, chopsticks DO matter.

 

[Nonconsentual Pronouns]

• carpet in the dining area - There's a reason why houses generally don't have carpet in the dining room or kitchen; it's gross as hell.
• Spanish being spoken in anything other than a hispanic or Spanish restaurant - This is possibly the most prominent symptom of cheap, incompetent labor in the US.
• noggs or wiggers working the kitchen, no matter what kind of food the place serves - Your food will be dirty either on purpose or just because they don't give a fuck.
• disruptive children/kids' menu - Places that attract people with improperly cared for children generally have cheap, shitty food. I also don't need to be around screaming kids while trying to make the best of overpaying for shitty food that I was dragged along for.
• staff asking for personal info like my phone number, email, full name, etc - No, I don't want to be in your worthless rewards program just so you can sell all my info to Xhinny the Pooh and Pajeet before you start spamfucking my inbox.
• insane charges for extra toppings - I'm not paying $2 for a goddamn slice of Kraft Singles and $2 for two little pickle slices on my burger. Looking at you, Five Guys.
• they don't ask you how well done you want the burger patty cooked - All they serve is low-grade, possibly old beef that they have to overcook to shit just to avoid giving you food poisoning.
• coffee places that don't offer medium and light roasts - Their beans are trash and need to be burnt in order to keep you from tasting how trash they are. Most of the caffeine will be burned out as well.
• won't allow customers to reasonably omit components of a dish they order - I'm not asking anyone to pick all traces of onion from my French onion soup; I just don't want some wretched garlic butter sauce drowning my shrimp skewers. If it's cooked fresh to-order, omitting a topping or whatever isn't a problem.
• undercooked chicken or pork - Do not ask for a re-fire, just leave.
• labeling anything as "kosher" or "halaal" - Either trust me on this one or have fun going out to find out the hard way.
• woke propaganda - They care more about pushing an agenda and pandering than they do about the food. I'm also just not going to support that shit.
• limitless supply of food that takes hours to cook - If they don't have a very finite amount of pot roast or tonkotsu broth to serve each day, you're paying for leftovers or something not made in-house.
• tablets at the tables with overpriced mobile games to run your bill up - It's an underhanded way to make a buck off of parents and it also implies less focus on the quality of the food. It's worse when it's got some flashing, technicolored nonsense trying to get your attention throughout the entire sitting. Asking the waitstaff to remove it doesn't solve the issue of the rest of them flashing at you from every table.
• won't serve chicken grilled in stead of fried when they have a grill - They're not battering fresh chicken; they're frying or baking some Tyson's they found in the freezer.
• wilted greens - If they can't be bothered to update fresh stock of their cheapest components, what chance do the more expensive ones have?
• TVP used to bulk up the actual meat in a dish - If they're serving textured veggie protein, aka fake meat like Subway's "chicken", they give zero fucks about the food.

A lot of previous posts give really good advice that I don't need to repeat.

 

[MuuMuu Bunnylips]

Believe me when the next round of riots happen, there's one local business I hope to see burn.

One place did that here and I pissed on their floor before leaving. It was worth being banned.

 

[marvlouslie]

Haven't been to a restaurant since I started cooking for myself, so.. since I was 20?

 

[Rome's rightful successor]

Employees that look and act like they don't give a shit being there.

 

[I Love Beef]

Prices on the menus. If you have to tell me how much the food costs, it's probably a poor person restaurant.

???? How is this a red flag? Just saying. Kinda contradicts the last rule on your list.

Employees that look and act like they don't give a shit being there.

I have a tendency to work restaurants as a passing job, and finally, someone gets it. Honestly, it does depend on the establishment, but anyone who doesn't find the rush after a busy day with a wad of bills and a sense of making a lot of people's nights a great time are dead inside.

 

[RichardMongler]

Oh, the duality of man in these posts.

Majority of customers are geriatrics.

Also if everyone is old, you're about to eat some very sad, bland, food!

No old people. Old people have money to burn and they’ve spent more time at restaurants than you’ve been alive. They know where to eat; your faggot friend IG food reviewer soycuck doesn’t.

I'm going with @Narcoleptic Rowlet and @MerriedxReldnahc. Old ass townies tend to have bland taste in food and generally don't know what they're eating. They're also unadventurous when it comes to food options. Even French food is weird and exotic to them. They were born in a time period where the world was much smaller and had a much more limited palate as the options were much fewer. They also tend to wince at anything spicier than black pepper or even smoked paprika.

Case in point: my grandpa (RIP). He lived into his 90s and couldn't eat anything hotter than a Wendy's spicy chicken sandwich. His favorite place was a pub that served fish and chips along with overcooked steak and burgers. The man couldn't be bothered to try anything that wasn't American or Americanized Italian.

By no means am I a fan of cumguzzling "foodies" and other such hipster faggots, but don't pretend your average old timer is some kind of gourmand.

 

[Magicicada_septendecula]

A few of my experiences have led me to these:
Weird hours or days. Such places will have dinner and/or lunch service at normal hours, but you'll notice they are only open around that meal, give or take a few hours and they're open only a few days. In my town, it's common for restaurants to not be open on Monday, yet there are a few restaurants open three days or fewer a week, one was only open Friday until it closed a few years ago. There's probably something very wrong with both their business and their food if they have to squeeze things like that.
Places who do both restaurant and catering services. My brother is a professional chef and speaks from experience when he says many cooking related skills and passions do not translate well from one thing to another (the most common thing being people thinking that simply being good at cooking means becoming a chef is a good idea). Many restaurants and caterers seem to think they can go from one to the other and often keep both businesses.
Local chains. These can be both a big hit or miss. I lived in a rust belt college town for a while which had some local places with several locations that I remember fondly. The issue seems to be during the initial expansion, maybe they spread themselves thin at first or lose focus. My former favorite Chinese place, which started out as one of those hole in the wall places with greasy noodles and dishes named after a fake general expanded in its original location, became more upscale and expensive, then opened multiple places around town while quality suffered, then just closed the original location. The others are more contemporary and "authentic", which is fine sometimes, just not when you're in the mood for General Tso's chicken and Lo Mein served with a Maitai.

As for the presence or absence of old people, I think there's a big difference between WWII era old people and boomers. That restaurant that was open only on Friday was a favorite of my grandmother for a while (it was actually open three or four days a week while she was alive) and even she, in her 70s at the time was one of the younger people there. The only thing they did really well were the pierogi, Perun's gift to mankind and hard to screw up (not explicitly a Polish place, but given it was in the most Polish place in the US that's not Chicago, it would have closed much sooner if there weren't pierogi, kielbasa, and czarnina on the menu) and everything else was bland. The clientele were all people who probably spent their childhoods eating whatever they could get for a few pennies followed by years of war rations. The people of that generation I knew only eat authentic Polish and Hungarian food, mostly authentic German food, heavily Americanized Italian food, and standard American food. If they ate anything that you would consider adventurous, it's because it was the culinary horror of the ancestral village in the old country, of which there were many. General Tso's would be too exotic for them though.
My boomer parents on the other hand are always trying a new Korean BBQ, Vietnamese, "Pan-Hispanic", Burundian-Portuguese fusion, etc., all of it very good. Expensive as fuck, for me one or two of those places might be a yearly treat if I were paying, but some of the tastiest food I've ever had.

 

[soft breathing]

If I see a pride flag and a BLM sign in the window I avoid.

I'll add the label 'women owned' to the list. Yes, it's a tag on google maps, and some restaurants also put a sticker of it on their door, often next to pride flags and BLM shit.
As soon as you have to virtue signal to me, I'm assuming your food is shit.

 

[𝕺𝖑' 𝕯𝖎𝖗𝖙𝖞 𝕱𝖆𝖙𝖘𝖔]

Restaurants that serve sushi, thai and generic American Chinese dishes at the same time. I've been to plenty of great Thai restaurants that served like sesame chicken to satisfy your lame aunt Karen but any of them that are basically Chinese takeout with a Thai curry section are usually shit