Dinner with the family should be a relaxing experience. When you’ve got good food and good conversation, there’s little more you can ask for. A man from New York, however, recently had a night out that scarred him for life.
The man enjoyed a celebratory dinner with his daughter and granddaughter and prepared to leave the restaurant with a full belly. But when he looked at a message printed on his receipt, he felt sick to his stomach…
On June 17, 2018, Curtis Mays enjoyed a Father’s Day dinner with his daughter and granddaughter at the Bohemian Hall beer garden in Astoria, Queens, below. The night started out pleasantly…
The waitress, Curtis recalled, “was very nice…she comes up to the table [saying] ‘Hi, how are you doing?’” with a smile on her face. He ordered a fat cheeseburger, well done with toasted bread. He had no idea that the evening was about to go downhill.
The waitress brought out the wrong dish, so Curtis sent it back to the kitchen. When he and his family finished eating, he asked for the receipt to make sure he hadn’t been charged for the incorrect dish.
Below his burger on the receipt, someone put a special request for the chef. It read: “please spit in it too.” Curtis, left, was repulsed. “I ate my burger already,” he said. “I felt like I was gonna throw up.” So he called the waitress over.
Eye Witness News / YouTube
“I asked [the server],” Curtis said, “‘Why would you do this?’ And she couldn’t explain it. She said she didn’t do it, so I was like ‘Who prints out the receipt?’” The waitress said that she did. This enraged Curtis.
“So you did it?” Curtis demanded. At a loss for words, the waitress just walked away. Entitled to answers, Curtis called for the manager, who nodded along to Curtis’s story.
The manager asked, “How can we compensate you?” But Curtis didn’t have an answer. “I was like, ‘How can you compensate somebody for spitting on your food? I ate this already.’” A platter of cheeseburgers wouldn’t cut it. So what would?
Despite never having a problem with the waitress before, the manager fired her. Somehow, that nasty message ended up on the order slip, and, at the very least, either she or the chef should’ve caught it. Next?
Joyce Kim / Bloomberg
The manager compensated Curtis for the Father’s Day dinner, though judging by Curtis’s disgust, the refund didn’t exactly make his night. Still, the manager assured him it was unlikely the chef actually spit in his food.
At the end of the day, Curtis handled the situation well. Others have potentially had their food spit in, too, and pursued more aggressive solutions. Take another New Yorker, Ken Yerdon, for instance…
Ken and his wife Julie dined at a busy Chili’s in Clay, New York, back in July of 2014. Unfortunately, the couple’s dining experience was less than ideal: their food was undercooked, and they never received the fries they ordered.
Then, before they left the Chili’s, the couple asked for drinks in a to-go cup. “We weren’t rude or anything,” Ken Yerdon said. In fact, when they left the restaurant, they handed their waiter—24-year-old Gregory Lamica, right—a nice tip.
But on the drive home, the lid to Ken’s to-go drink popped off the Styrofoam cup. “I looked in and there was some spit in the cup [below],” Ken said. “It was really bad.” So Ken took his wife home and drove back to the Chili’s.
There, he spoke with a manager and received a refund before running into his waiter, Gregory, who was crying in the parking lot. He accused the waiter of spitting in his drink, but the young man denied it. So, unlike Curtis, Ken escalated the situation.
Ken called the state police a few days later and explained the situation. The cops knocked on Gregory’s door to question him. Again he denied he spit in the drink, and he agreed to a DNA swab to prove it.
Three months later, authorities received the DNA tests results. The tests confirmed Ken’s suspicions: it was, in fact, Gregory’s spit on the inside of his cup. So police brought the young man down to the station.
There, the waiter confessed. He did spit in the cup. The courts charged him with disorderly conduct and sentenced him to a one-year conditional discharge and a $125 surcharge. But Ken wasn’t done.
A year after the incident, Ken filed a lawsuit against Gregory, Chili’s, and the owner of that specific restaurant’s location for negligence and retention of an incompetent employee. As a final note, Ken added, “we won’t be going back to Chili’s.”
In response to Ken’s ruthless pursuit of personal justice, Chili’s agreed it was disgusting. But, they added: “it should not overshadow the more than 100,000 Chili’s team members taking great care of our guests every day.”
Curtis Mays had every right to be disgusted by the note on his receipt, but he showed great restraint at the Bohemian Hall. In the video below, you can see just how angry he was!
Hopefully, Curtis found the nerve to go out for dinner again after the disgusting situation on Father’s day. You can bet he’ll be peeking under burger buns for the rest of his life.
Share this disgusting restaurant story with your foodie friends below!