Restaurant Employees Share Their Most Hated Item On The Menu Item

It wasn't that it was hard to make, but frozen Cokes. Basically, you know, slurpees. But in summer. Holy shit. In summer. In the mornings we'd get the two or three biggest cardboard boxes in the store and pre-assemble up to a hundred frozen coke cups, as they could be hard to put together when you were in a rush/had slippery hands. Then, once the clock ticked past 3:15, we'd be inundated with cars full of students coming from school to get their frozen coke fix, not to mention the front counter. We only had four pumps for the frozen coke, and after the first twenty or thirty, the mix would need to be left to refill and refreeze.

Most days we got upwards of a hundred orders of frozen coke, and then we got new flavours in, which meant we lost two pumps of Coke and got new flavours, and then it meant the orders became half-coke, half-whatever flavour we had that week, or one third coke, one third flavour one, one third flavour two. And then we brought in the jumbo frozen cokes, frozen spiders, and on days above 30 degrees....I still refuse to go to fast food places on hot days.

The best times were when we'd have a drive-thru queue of 20+ cars and people would still join the queue and complain their frozen coke wasn't frozen enough...man, fuck frozen coke.

nicolauda

At taco bell I hated making a 12 pack of soft shells. Hard shells were easy. You took 4 or 6 in one hand, threw meat in them, lettuce, cheese, wrap them up--hell, even the wrapping was easy.

Soft shells come from the fridge spot, so they're cold and you have to one by one put them onto the grill to warm for a few seconds. They were usually so small you'd burn your hand a little. Then they were floppy, so you couldn't just do a sleeve of them at once, you had to do the meat, lettuce, cheese, wrap, repeat 12 times.

Sometimes people would order 24 or 36 at once, all soft shell. It was awful.

Edit: I was remembering where we kept the tortillas wrong. They went from the fridge to a warmer, but we still had to "toast" them on the grill 1 by 1.

Packrat1010

When I worked at Pizza Hut back in the mid 90s, we had a pizza called the Triple Decker. It was a blend of six cheese that was sealed between two thin crusts. It only came in the medium size.

These things were a bitch and a half to make.

First, you rolled out a thin crust, place it in the pan, use the perforating tool (imprinted little holes in the crust, to keep it from bubbling up during baking), and then add a cup of the shredded six-cheese blend filling. Then you'd roll out another thin, perforate and cut a 3-inch hole in the middle, place it on top of the cheese and other thin crust, then using the sealing/trimming tool, seal the two crusts together.

It wouldn't have been so bad if they were made as they were ordered, but you had to make so many up front, and on top of that, make so many thin crusts at the same time. In the time it took to make one Triple Decker, I could have easily whipped out five thin crusts.

I got yelled at frequently for working so slow, and being behind on one or the other. I was so glad when they quit selling them.

PatrickRsGhost

Kinda fast food. We have a chimichurri chicken. It's a massive... glob of boneless chicken in a vacuum sealed bag which is extremely fragile. You microwave it for 7-8 minutes, and then when it's done you take it out and put it onto the grill for the finishing grill marks. Always breaks, always end up serving 3-4 shredded half grilled horrible chunks of vile chicken. Hate doing it.

MorroWtje

I used to work at Dunkin, and I can confirm that Big and Toasteds were the worst sandwiches to make. They’re the biggest sandwiches with the most ingredients, and require you to use all your ovens.

The worst is when a family of 7 would all order one, with hash browns, while you’re the only person working in the store (no manager) and there’s a line out the door demanding you take their order while you’re at the sandwich station. Awful.

The only plus side was that we had a regular who would consistently refer to the bread as “Kentucky Toast” and would sometimes order just the toasted bread with nothing on it.

Firate

I worked at a Starbucks inside of a Vons. Making the drinks is super simple but the worst had to be a strawberry banana smoothie.

Most of the time we didn't have bananas or protein powder ready. I had to run to the opposite corner of the Vons for a banana and then thr backroom for protein powder. Then while opening the banana, you are not allowed to touch it, I normally fumbled around with the peel of the banana at an extra slow pace as to not touch it. Got easier after the 5th or so run across the country to the other side of Vons.

So, while Frappachinos are annoying when you order 4 different types, the fucking smoothie takes like 5 minutes longer to make.

GalaxyPhi

Few people will know this, even Canadians, but Tim Hortons briefly test-marketed quesadillas in some Ontario cities.

This is a pretty basic coffee/donut/sandwich shop for those who don't know.

They were made of tortillas with microwaved veggies, chicken/steak prepared in a double boiler, chipotle powder, shredded cheese, and cream cheese. We would assemble and grill them into warm, cream cheesy/beefy/fowl messes.

They took an easy 7 minutes to make, down to four minutes for our quickest staff. People would order 6 at a time in our drivethrough.

I'd rather spend a month in a room with a Canadian Goose than live that hell again.

Jeep3rs

Panda Express: grilled teriyaki chicken. Not that it's bad regularly. But a new batch of teriyaki chicken takes almost 20 min to finish. Where as orange chicken takes 5-8 min to finish.
Most days we depend on predicting how many customers are going to order it in the next 20 minutes, so when a huge crowd comes in that only wants teriyaki chicken, it can effectively shut us down.

Georgey22

Former assistant manager of Dominos, where I sold pizza and pizza accessories.

The pan pizzas were horrible to make if it was any of the specialty pizzas (deluxe was okay, mainly the extravaganzas). Adding so many toppings onto a pizza with dough with little density was disastrous, but the worst was a customer wanting a pan Extravaganza with extra of every topping. When we got the pizza out of the pan it folded in half from being unable to support such ingredient fuckery. I called the customer back and explained what happened and suggested a better option, who proceeded to tell me how I should just cook the toppings separately from the rest and then place it on (which wouldn't work as the cheese on top is supposed to act as an emulsifier).

betterplanwithchan

Every Starbucks employee in the world hates making frappuccinos

Edit: since this blew up, let me explain. Frappuccinos take longer to make than any other menu item. This is fine. the thing is, they usually get ordered in groups. This is also fine. But people come in, and they do this, and they get impatient. That's where it gets annoying. And that it slows things down for the whole line, so people who ordered faster drinks also get impatient.

The baristas are working as fast as they can. You ordered a time consuming item. Have more patience than a 12 year old(even though you ordered something that is probably for a 12 year old)

pterodactyl

Multiple onion rings back to back at whataburger. There is only one fry spot specifically for onion rings and fish. If its one medium or large onion ring no big deal but then sometimes you get the next person after the onion ring order gets onion rings as well and with that your fucked. and unlike the fries where you can mass fry them but onion rings you cannot because they dont hold as well as fries so you have to specifically fry them when they are ordered. And they come at different sizes as well so you gotta balence out the small ones with large ones. The onion rings all together are frustrating and they aint even all that great, everything else from whataburger is great and worth a trip to texas but for onion rings there are better options in my hometown.

LylatInvader

I work at subway and the most hated thing to make is pretty much any sandwich that’s supposed to be toasted like steak, teriyaki, or chicken bacon ranch, and the customer doesn’t want the bread toasted. So we have to get the meat on parchment paper and warm it up in the microwave then use our hands to put the very hot meat on the sandwich.

Or just a meatball on flatbread with all the veggies.

MicahOsborn17

Former Coldstone employee here. ANYTHING with chocolate ice cream, because for some reason, only that flavor would freeze into a rock. Anything else (cake batter, vanilla, etc.) would freeze to a normal ice cream consistency, and would be was to scoop and mix. Working with chocolate ice cream was like breaking apart a brick.

shines_likegold

Former Disney World Cast member.

The sand pail. By a motherfucking long shot.

For $10.64, you get an actual sand pail, the sort of cheap bucket you'd find in Walmart, filled to the fucking brim with soft serve ice cream. One of these alone would go through about 1/6th of a carton of product. Then, you sugar nuked it with hot chocolate and caramel, oreos, sprinkles, and whipped cream. Serves four.

Or it's supposed to serve 4. But you forget, this is Murica, where we've turned diabetes into a national pastime. So you'd get groups of 5-10 college students, all ordering their own pail, and the machine wouldn't make new ice cream fast enough to make the ice cream, and the line is halfway across the park, and your bitch of a manager hasn't even given you your 15 min yet, even though you're 6 hours into a 10 hour shift, and...

Sorry. that kind of got away from me there.

John_Durden

Former Papa Murphy's employee here. My managers were generally pretty anal about portion sizes, so anything with pepperoni required a lot of counting. Pretty much every other topping could be doled out quickly with measuring cups, but when you order a large Cowboy, those 35 pepperoni have to be counted individually. If you order a family size pepperoni pizza, just start counting to 80, because that's the bare minimum amount of time it will take to make your order.

LumberjackIlluminati

Former McDonald's worker:

Burger King's "Have it Your Way" ads had done their job and had caused a seismic shift under the Golden Arches (and across the fast food industry as a whole). Gone were the days where we made sandwiches in one way, no substitutions, and we stacked 'em deep in the warming drawers and went about our lives.

No, now, we had to make everything fresh and we had cater to special requests and, worst of all, we had to be nice about it. The job had gotten worse.

However, during this time, this little thing we called the Internet started popping up on it, and your grandmother had discovered e-mail. More to the point, she had discovered e-mail forwarding. And one of the things your grandma loved to forward was a list of tips for getting freshly-made food at McDonalds.

It included gems like "Ask for no ketchup; they put ketchup on automatically on all their burgers, so they'll have to make a fresh one to make it without ketchup." This, of course, was true, but, irrelevant, as we now made every sandwich fresh. Customers could be as picky as they wanted to be and we would just make it without complaint.

One other tip, though, that is still being utilized today, is the (in)famous: "Ask for unsalted fries so they have to make a new batch"

If you do this, here is what will happen: you will be asked to step aside (or pull out of the drive thru, as applicable) because this will take a few minutes.

We will drop a new basket of fries, and, while they're cooking, we bag/box up the fries in the warming bin. Then we'll half-heartedly wipe the (enormous amount of) excess salt out of the bin.

When the fries are done, we dump the basket in the bin. Then, we'll pull your bland potato sticks off the top of the screaming-hot pile, bag them up, and hand them to you. Then we salt the rest (in a triple-arch fashion) and continue with our lives.

Here's the thing, though: since those fries didn't get salted immediately out of the fryer, the layer of fat and the last wisps of steam that are on the surface of the fry when it comes out and helps to hold the salt wasn't there, so, all the fries in that batch will taste under-salted.

And your fries? Hot, yes, but not as hot as they should be for proper salt adhesion. You can add all the salt to the bag that you want, shake it until your arms fall off, and it will still taste like bland-ass potatoes covered in tiny rocks.

So, now you've ruined, like, eight orders of fries--including your own--because you think you want the "freshest" fries, to the exclusion of everything else. You don't. You would much rather have moderate temperature fries that were salted at the right time. But, if you really wanted to have still sizzling fries--and you wanted them to actually taste good--you could have just asked for fresh fries. We would have been just as happy to drop another batch, probably more so because we can salt them at the right time and not have to wipe out the bin.

But no, you had to be "clever". Instead of asking people for what you want, you had to be the person with inside knowledge, the trickster, the puppet master.

Seriously, though, if you want fresh fries, just ask.

GreenGlowingMonkey

Not exactly fast food, but at my old bagel store job, we baked everything on premise. This meant that people could see which bagels were fresh out of the oven. If you wanted to make an enemy out of any of us who worked there, you'd ask for the bagel fresh out the oven to be toasted and scooped out. Didn't matter what else was put in it.

When I say these were the hottest things I've ever handled in my life I'm not kidding. We're talking bagels right from a nearly 400 degree oven going straight into a toaster. Utterly baffling. We had to handle these with our hands/paper towels/wax paper whatever but it never helped. The heat seared right through them. Scooping them was worse, because even if you scooped before toasting, the super hot dough stuck to you and burned intensely. To this day I have massively decreased sensitivity to hot surfaces, which is why I often inadvertently burn myself when cooking. (This is a common plight among food service workers.)

We'd always try to dissuade customers from doing this, not only because it was physically painful, but because it massively slowed down the line, forcing us to wait for bagels to toast. But alas, it was to no avail because people were adamant about toasting scorching hot bagels. Only one customer in my years working there changed his mind about doing this because he felt bad that I'd burn my hands. I still regret not giving him his order for free.

Titronnica

I work at Auntie Anne’s, and for the most part, everything is pretty easy to make. The one thing that everyone collectively hates though is the Mini Pretzel Dogs. Sure after a while you can get good at rolling them, but when they come out of the oven and a good bit of the wieners fall out of their wraps, it’s such a pain to cup

genericallywhite

I worked at Dominos and the brooklyn style crusts are the worst to make-

For other pizzas, we take an appropriately sized dough ball and basically stretch (aka slap) it to the right size, but for the brooklyn ones we take a small dough ball and stretch it out by hand into a large, basically guaranteeing that some parts are gonna be way too thin or rip. It also takes fucking forever to make one quickly, which sucks because we're expected to get completed pizzas in the oven in 1-2 minutes, so if I only have the crust after 2 minutes it slows everything else way down.

teasoaked