The Extra Ingredient Is Glove

Let’s wrap up the week with one final story (for now, anyway) about the nasty service we typically get at restaurants. I’ll avoid identifying this restaurant by name, again choosing only to note that it rhymes with Schmexas Schmodehouse.

A couple years ago Mrs. Smoot, Little Smoot and I headed to our local location for a meal. We ordered our food, and they brought out my salad and some dinner rolls. Little Smoot was eating her dinner roll when she bit into something strange. I looked at it and thought that somehow a piece of lettuce from my salad had gotten stuck to one of her rolls.

But I looked at it more closely and realized that this thin, white-ish thing she pulled out of her mouth wasn’t lettuce. No, it was a portion of a rubber glove, of all things. Mmmm… mmm! Just the kind of thing to make us really look forward to our main course! How in the world does part of a rubber glove make its way into a dinner roll? I can only hope that the cooks are using these gloves when they’re baking the bread, and they’re not using the gloves to conduct some sort of twisted surgical procedure in the back room.

As a disclaimer I should note that we are not the kind of nutcases who hide disgusting things in our food in hopes of cashing in with a large lawsuit. No, there really was part of a rubber glove in the bread. We pointed out this gem to our stunned waiter, and throughout the rest of the meal a parade of people came over to apologize to us. It was kind of amusing, really, because we could literally look around and see various employees whispering the story to each other as they were gesturing toward our table.

Toward the end of the meal our waiter came over and told us, “We’ll be taking something off the price of your meal for this.” He paused for a moment and added, “We’ll be taking a LOT off your meal.” Actually, they didn’t charge us at all, which seemed appropriate. We do go back to this restaurant rather often, and we generally have good experiences there. We have joked with waitresses about this experience since then, and many of them actually say they’ve heard about this incident, even though it was a few years ago. We’re legendary!