Stories of Some of the Worst Restaurant Bosses You're Ever Likely to See

I worked at Starbucks when I was in college in 2003. It was a bad year for me—I had just gotten my heart really broken for the first time, I’d dropped out of college for unrelated reasons, and would go on to have a complete nervous breakdown about three months later. But I did my best to be a good employee—I showed up on time, I was really nice to customers, and I took pride in making drinks well.

Unfortunately, I was young enough to think that I could be more or less myself behind the scenes at work. I was on good terms with everyone but they all knew that I was incredibly depressed. So you can imagine my shock when my peppy manager, Greg, pulled me aside and let me know that they were letting me go. Shocked, I could just say, “But…why? What did I do? I haven’t even been written up once!”

So Greg smirked at me like the little shit-weasel he was and said, “Honey, you’re too sad. I want this place to be like Disneyland, and there’s no sad people at Disneyland.”

I was so dumbfounded. I said, “I’m clinically depressed, and I think Disneyland has been sued for that kind of thing.”

He said, “Well, that’s not my problem.” And like that, I was fired for being too sad.

I would love to say that I filed a complaint with the EEOC, but the horrible thing about severe depression is that you really can’t handle extra stuff. So I got all the paperwork but I never filed it, which I regret to this day. I did, however, manage to make a complaint to Starbucks HQ about Greg’s blatant EEOC violation and I heard he got written up. Didn’t get me my job back, but it made me feel just slightly better.

Rachel Masterson:

I grew up in a small southern town, the kind with the picturesque courthouse and magnolia-lined town square, and for some reason really wanted to be a waitress in this one cafe. It was our only cafe, I suppose, but it was an antiques store during the day and had a small indoor koi pond, so my sheltered adolescent brain thought it was classy as hell.

I applied as a high school freshman, and they put me in the back kitchen. The owner was quickly revealed to be a jerk, but he had a pretty logical system (I think) that new people do the hardest jobs so the more experienced servers will empathize with them during a rush. This meant that I was a freshman nerd in the back, and all the servers were literally the most popular junior and senior girls in school. Cheerleaders every one of them, and at least one future homecoming queen. But the system worked, and everyone was nice to me at work, and we didn’t really have reason to interact at school, so it was copacetic.

One fateful night, my eighth night working there, they decided to book nearly the entire restaurant in two parties on full menu. A group of 20-25 arrived at 7:00, followed by another the same size at 7:30. On full menu. The whole place could sit maybe 75. Fucking madness. The kitchen was tiny, just me and a cool older woman, so we were inventing places to plate things and barely holding it together, but it was alright.

Food for the 7:00 table went out around 7:45, and frustratingly, the assholes at the second table flagged the waitresses down to take what they assumed were their meals. We heard some of it, and it sounded like the kind of entitled, fat, old, white, lecherous men you would expect to flaunt their relationship with the owner to get what they want. Then, the first table realized what was happening, and used their same grossly lecherous nature to harass the waitstaff for giving away their food.

Someone flagged down the owner (surprise, both tables are buddies with him), and he started throwing everyone under the bus. Whoever was in sight, he just dressed them down in front of the staff for being incompetent. Then he came to the kitchen.

The cook quit as he walked in the door, she was taking none of his shit. I was left standing in a kitchen that was still overwhelmed, a few weeks short of 15 years old, and he started moving things around telling me that I’m slow and stupid.

He touched about two plates, hesitated (because he had no idea what he was doing) and I loudly told him something like “yelling at teenage girls to impress your friends isn’t going to get them their food as fast as letting us do our jobs.” He stopped, dumbfounded, and wandered off, tirade over. The two girls in the bathroom crying heard everything and told the rest of them. We survived the night, I was put on probation for not knowing the sauce combinations (bullshit), and to everyone’s surprise they were evicted a week later for not paying rent.

My coworkers told the others what I’d said. They were more than sweet to me at school, and I never once had a problem with a popular girl the whole time I was there.

Steve Gray:

I spent a few years working at a fairly popular, mid-range seafood restaurant in Western Australia. The place’s major selling point was its location at the end of a long jetty on the Swan River. Beautiful spot–you could watch yachts sailing by, wedding parties would often arrive by boat, and more than once I saw a pod of dolphins swim past.

But the head chef was an aggressive Gordon Ramsay wannabe. My first week, I ducked into the kitchen to ask one of the junior chefs if it was okay to make a minor menu substitution for a customer. He said no problem, I turned around to head back out to the floor–and came face-to-face with a razor-sharp blade the size of a freaking broadsword, wielded by the head chef, who has a crazy look in his eyes.

“Don’t EVER interrupt my staff in the middle of service again,” he hissed.

He was an amateur comedian, too. He gave one of the younger chefs, who was Vietnamese, the nickname “Suk Cok”. Which was funny “because it sounds like a real Asian name!” The only karmic payback appropriate for this guy would have been some kind of chronic bowel disorder, but I was able to witness the next best thing.

One evening we have two young Japanese girls walk in. It’s a quiet night, with only myself and the assistant manager Bruce on staff, and they’re our first customers for the evening. The girls don’t speak much English, but they’re polite and cheerful. They each choose a crayfish from one of the tanks in the dining area. The customers are happy to be sampling genuine Australian cuisine, and they’re delightful, so I’m happy for them.

A few minutes after their order comes out I’m chatting with Bruce by the front desk when an ear-splitting scream erupts from the dining area. We race through the restaurant to find the Japanese girls backing away in horror from their table WHERE SOMETHING IS MOVING.

Crawling out from under one of the crayfish is a giant-sized cockroach. Or to be precise, roughly one-half of a giant-sized cockroach.

Yeah. Half a cockroach.

Bruce asks me to look after the customers for a moment. He walks across the room to the kitchen, slams the door shut behind him and launches into the most awesome display of verbal abuse I’ve ever been privileged to witness. His righteous fury can be heard through the closed kitchen door from a distance of about 20 feet.

Then silence. Bruce emerges from the kitchen, the head chef trailing. Bruce leads him to the customer’s table, where the head chef, his face a shade of red not normally found in nature, offers them a stammering apology. It takes him some time.

As I said, the Japanese girls don’t speak much English, but it turns out that abject humiliation is a universal language. They graciously accept his apology (before he bursts into tears, sadly).

Naturally, we go to superhuman lengths to try and compensate for this epic fuck-up for the rest of the night. Free tasting dishes, deserts, drinks–anything we could think of. I felt bad for the girls, but is it wrong that this memory still makes me smile?

(Editor’s Note: No. No, it is not wrong)

Danielle Houseman:

As a teenager I worked at a McDonald’s, and a mishap with the hash browns led to my arm being splashed with boiling oil. I had a huge burn from my elbow to my wrist, covering my entire forearm. I dashed immediately back into the kitchen and put this burn under cold water, writhing in agony.

After what felt like no time (this burn was bad; time had no meaning), my supervisor came back and said, “I’m counting this as your 20 minute break, but you have to go back now.” I showed him how my whole left forearm was now raw meat and said there was no way I could hygienically work (mind you, I am in a lot of pain and choking back tears), and an argument broke out. Eventually they allowed me to leave, but only after a very thorough lecture and I was bullied into signing a form and made to promise that I would not seek medical attention.

Yes, McDonald’s bullied a teenage girl with a serious burn into not getting any help.

Katie Jefferson:

For a brief time in college, I worked as a cashier at a small Mexican take-out restaurant. The owner of the restaurant had very specific things he looked for in a cashier. We must be young, blonde, have an inability to speak Spanish, and be willing to work under the table. Looking back on it now, I wonder why on earth I ever took this job. I must have been blinded by the prospect of free burritos.

Then one shift I was told I wouldn’t be working the cash register, but instead doing the owner a favor that day. He asked me, “You read English, right?” to which I said “Yeah…” He replied, “Good, then you can program our video cameras.” Now I am not technically savvy, so the fact that I can read English was not going to help me program anything. But it was a day away from actual customers, so I said I would do it. I then followed him behind the building to where the dumpster was, and he indicated for me to open a door (which I had never seen before) into what I lovingly refer to as “ the cum dungeon”.

Before me was the most terrifying room I had ever seen, and I was pretty sure I was going to die in there. It was a concrete room with no windows and hundreds of Playboy/Hustler pictures taped to the wall. On the floor was a bare, stained mattress and a single La-Z-boy sitting in front of a TV. I was in such shock that I don’t even remember how I ended up sitting on that La-Z-Boy and starting to program his video cameras for him. My fingers were like lighting on that remote control, and I programmed like no one had ever programmed before! The last thing I wanted was for him to open the door and find me not done.

Finally after four hours, the owner opened the door to see my progress. I told him I was sick and had to leave, and raced out of there as quick as possible, never to return. Now, as a mature adult I would have called the police to investigate, but at the time I was more worried about the pay I was losing by never going back. Sometimes free burritos aren’t worth it.

Bill Edgerton:

It was my first day working at a family-style restaurant in Poolesville, MD (which I believe has since closed down). I was hired on as a dishwasher at 15, when all I wanted to do was play video games and pine over a girl in my school who always wore a 311 t-shirt. I figured if I worked there for a few months I could save up enough money to go anywhere other than Poolesville.

As I was putting away the silverware, I put a couple steak knives with the regular knives. This was apparently a major faux pas, as a grizzled man stormed into the kitchen and into my face with one of the sparkling clean steak knives. He held it up about 2 inches from my pimply nose and began to terrify my entire existence. “Were you the dumb little shit who put a steak knife with the regular knife?!!!” said the man with the conviction of someone who had just killed his first born. “If I ever see another steak knife near a regular knife again, I’ll shove the knife into your throat.”

This was all amplified by the fact that he had a boil on the side of his neck that was the size of Myanmar. I didn’t know which of his two heads to stare at, so I just had a panic attack instead. I ran out of there about three hours into my first shift and never returned. I don’t know what happened to that man or his boil, but I hope it’s not pleasant.

Callie Cridosi:

I’ve had exactly one food service job in my life, and it was my very first job. In the spring of 1990, I was 14 years old and out looking for some summer money. There was a new bagel shop that opened in one of the ubiquitous strip malls of New Jersey, and they were hiring kids with no experience. I walked in, dropped off my resume, and got the job with instructions to show up early on Saturday morning for some training before starting the job. I arrive on time, head into the back, and meet with the owner/manager. He sits me down, and begins my working career with the following statement: “Now, thanks to our socialist president (George H.W. Bush), I am required to pay you FOUR DOLLARS AND TWENTY FIVE CENTS AN HOUR.” Emphasis his, and dripping with obvious contempt that I should earn such an outrageous sum.

This was mid-April, so just a few weeks prior the federal minimum wage had gone from $3.80 to $4.25, and he was obviously worried he’d go out of business paying me so much money for 12-20 hours of work a week. For the Youths out there wondering: $3.80 in 1990 was actually less useful than the current $7.25 minimum wage is in 2015, when adjusted for inflation. Needless to say, I did not put my all into scrubbing things as vigorously and joyously as he thought I should, so we agreed to part ways after a grand total of 3 days. I spent the rest of my high school days working in video stores and supermarkets, which somehow ended up being a vast improvement in pay and experience.

Vanessa Halliard:

This story takes places in a far off time when our relatively conservative area was getting its very first high street gentlemen’s clubs. They’d just opened one in a city about an hours drive away and the management had decided to house some of the strippers in our city for safety reasons. The housing was a high end apartment block of mostly tourist rentals separated from our historic gastro pub by an alleyway. Our clientele was a weird mix of alternative/geek students and elderly blue collar workers. Since we had no TV or radio, “stripper watch” became a major entertainment for a lot of the guys and window seats on that side of the building were in high demand.

We’d also recently gotten a new manager, an odd Harvey Fierstein lookalike with no sense of personal space or personal hygiene. When he heard that a lot of the customers and most of the staff were goth or punk he invested in some leather trousers to better ‘fit in’ with the culture. Sadly he didn’t really fit into the trousers; by the second day the zipper had given out under the strain and was permanently stuck at half mast. He liked to flirt with all the female patrons, regardless how horrified they were by his open trousers and vaguely cheesy odour. After a few weeks and many complaints to the owner the majority of the women stopped coming to the pub at all. The owner insisted he couldn’t do anything unless the manager did something substantial. He soon got his wish.

The managers had access to an apartment over the bar. One day after the lunch rush the old guy on stripper watch mentioned that the girls were back from the gym. The bar staff didn’t notice the manager was gone until a couple of cops came in asking for him—apparently they urgently needed access to the upper floor of the building. We figured he was either up there or out at the suppliers, so we let the cops go up. Turns out he was the reason they needed access—he’d decided to woo one of the strippers by means of draping himself, naked, over his office desk opposite her bedroom window. One of the cops described it as “the couch scene in Titanic but with a silverback gorilla instead of Kate Winslet.”

We never found out what the stripper though of his attempt, because she never saw it—the witnesses were an elderly tourist couple and their grandkids.

Do you have a crazy restaurant or other food-industry story you’d like to see appear in Behind Closed Ovens (on ANY subject, not just this one)? Please e-mail [email protected] with “Behind Closed Ovens” in the subject line (or you can find me on Twitter @EyePatchGuy). Submissions are always welcome!

Note: I do not want poop/vomit stories. Please stop sending me poop/vomit stories. Also, if your stories are not food-related in some way, I am unable to do anything with them. Sorry.

Image via Vladimir Skopcev/Shutterstock.