9 Signs That You Chose a Bad Place To Eat

Having a meal in a restaurant is supposed to be a good thing. The staff is there to take care of you and to make your dining experience a good one. No one wants to have a disappointing meal, so here are nine red flags to warn you that the restaurant you chose might be a bad one.

The menu has a lot of options

If a menu has more pages than a Harry Potter book, you might want to reconsider your restaurant choice. How can a restaurant that serves sushi, enchiladas, AND meatloaf possibly keep ingredients for that kind of variety? Do you want to be the first customer in two years to order the crab cakes? If so, please do enjoy the taste of freezer burn.

You’re being ignored

The host doesn’t make eye contact with you as you’re taken to your table and then no server shows up for five minutes. This is a good indicator that no one at that restaurant cares about customer service and that maybe you should find someplace else to eat.

The salt and pepper shakers or anything else on the table is dirty

Cleaning a salt shaker doesn’t take a whole lot of effort. A ketchup bottle rim that’s crusted over so much that it looks like a scab is also relatively easy to clean up. But if no one is bothering to clean those things, what do you think the kitchen looks like?

The restaurant smells like bug spray, bleach or air freshener

When you walk into a restaurant, you want to smell things that make you hungry like herbs, browned butter, or bacon. Or maybe tofu or sautéed veggies. If your olfactory senses are slammed with the smell of chemicals when you first set foot inside a restaurant instead of food, maybe it’s a good idea to question what smell they are trying to cover up.

The food is already made when you get there

Pans and pans of pasta sitting in the steam table of a buffet line is an obvious call that the food isn’t as fresh as you should want it to be. Don’t you deserve to have food that was made just for you? And if you hear the tell-tale beeping of a microwave coming from the kitchen, get out now and don’t look back.

The restaurant is empty

If the restaurant opens at 5:00 and you arrive at 5:02, don’t put too much stock in the lack of customers. However, if it’s Saturday night at 8:00 and there’s only one other customer eating there, take the advice of the people who aren’t there: go someplace else.

The menu has photos of the food

No one needs a stock photo of a cheeseburger to know what a cheeseburger is. Besides, the food you order is never, ever, with 100% certainty, going to look anything like those daguerreotypes in the menu. Save yourself the disappointment and order off a menu that has, you know, words.

Dirty restrooms

See #3 above. If you have to walk through puddle of urine on your way to wash your hands at a sink that has caulking that looks like it lost at the Battle of  Mold Mountain, do not even think about what the walk-in cooler looks like.

The restaurant is called Applebee’s

Enough said.