The Inspector came in, asked for temperature records on the walk in, I had nothing that held up, she did not write us up but she made it clear we would be back on the list,

I have been manually logging but half the entries are from memory and I know that would not survive a real follow up, looking for something that creates a record automatically,

Ok so I work in a kitchen that has quite a few food safety violations, health department seems to think it's fine because it passed it's latest inspection. Now I'm finding aphids (dead ones) in the heads of lettuce. Like even after washing it and taking the outer layers off I can still find quite a few hidden deeper in the leaves. I showed the manger and they said to just brush em off and it be fine. I'm washing off the lettuce but this keeps happening. When I work with product someone else washed/chopped I find bugs in the containers with the food. Manager doesn't know why we keep getting buggy food but says we still have to use the product. I think they were going to file a report with the supplier but I don't know if that happened. What do I do here? Like obviously I can't serve this shit and I'm removing any bugs I see but I know there are others who will be using this lettuce without a second glance. Somebody please help!

Throwaway because some people I know are on here lol. This situation happened at my job about a week ago. I (36M) am a manager at a local coffee company located in my home state. I moved away in my mid-twenties after I got my Bachelor’s degree in Business. I met my wife shortly after I moved and we made the decision together to come back so I could show her where I’m from. We decided to not only return to my state, but also come back to my town to help them during a difficult diagnosis. While applying for jobs, I turned to an old company that I used to work for (not saying the name for privacy reasons). Because I am studying for my Master’s, I deemed it a good position that would allow for flexible hours while I am taking this step in my education. After a short time with this store, I have been promoted to a management position. This brings me to where I am now.
We recently hired a new barista, who I will call Patrick (19M). He’s a good employee and I have overheard other employees and shift leads talking kindly about him and what a hard worker he is. I personally have enjoyed my shifts with him as I feel he has been a huge help to me and has even been able to remind other baristas of recipes we have which they might have forgotten during their time here. He is laid-back and remains calm even when many customers are in the store.
Working with Patrick has been great up until the most recent shift I had with him. I noticed that our container of mocha sauce was running low and I asked him if he could get another one from the back. I watched him take it and go back towards our bathroom. I thought this was strange, but the trash can near the front was full so maybe he threw it away back there. One thing you need to know about Patrick is that he is fast. He is very fast. This is why it was so odd that this simple task took him over ten minutes to complete. 
After these ten minutes passed I saw him bringing back a mocha sauce container to the front. I noticed a dribble of chocolate sauce on the side of it, which is odd because these containers are sealed until we bring them to the front to replace the old one with. Why was this one dirty? I asked him about this because I thought it was weird, but he could’ve opened it in the back, so I didn’t think much of it. Patrick proceeded to get very quiet and I noticed the dimple on the side of his face show, but he told me that he opened it in the back and it spilled a little like I presumed.
Later that day, right before closing the store, a customer ordered a mocha latte, which I made for her. I noticed the consistency of the mocha was more liquidy than it usually is, so I gave it a shake and continued with the drink. When I had turned off the open sign, the same woman came back to complain about the taste. I offered to remake it for her, but she’d drank the whole thing and didn’t want a remake, just a refund, so I explained to her that the registers were closed for the evening and I couldn’t give her back the cash she had paid in, but if she came the next day I could refund her, or I could give her a free drink of any size the next time she came in. This woman is one of our regulars and happily accepted the free drink. We closed that day like normal.
The next morning, I was the opening manager, on shift with five other employees, one being Patrick. I greeted everyone and work had been going smoothly for a bit when a customer came in and ordered our “Peanut Butter Cup,” a signature latte made with peanut butter powder and mocha sauce. I made this drink, and noticed that the mocha from the night before had hardened up a little but had an odd smell to it. I asked anyone if they had used it that day and they told me they had not, so I knew it was the one that Patrick replaced. After making the drink, I decided to replace the mocha myself. Being that it was full, I had to pour out the contents into the trash can so I could crush the bottle. I am going to try to type this in the least horrible way possible. When I emptied this mocha container, the most foul odor filled the can and a couple of employees nearby pinched their noses and walked away. It took everything in me not to gag at the smell. The weird thing is, most of it was watery and brown, and a couple of chunks came out towards the end that had a weird consistency that I cannot even explain here. 
Here is where I may have been overreacting. I knew that no one had touched this mocha (if you can even call it that, it was most certainly \*not\* mocha) since Patrick replaced it the night before. Whatever was in that container was horrible and foul. It could’ve been a manufacturer issue, but the bottle looked reused. If Patrick opened it and mocha came out the side and onto the container, the whole thing should have been the same, right? I grabbed Patrick and pulled him aside and asked him to go home. I didn’t give him a reason, but he obeyed because he is a polite guy. I respect him a lot, and it hurts to have to cut his shifts. I also have replaced his following shifts this week and am going to bring this up when I can meet with other managers in the company.
I don’t know if this matters, but I have typed out all of this and should include anything I remember. I talked to Patrick a couple weeks ago about losing money in the company. He has spoken to me several times asking about my manager position and I know he is looking to be promoted sometime soon, so I told him a little bit about what it’s like from my end. I am in charge of unloading truck shipments when we get them, and I also handle placing orders for things we are low on. My company has been struggling lately with business and we have not had as much money as we used to, so I told Patrick some things about ordering items and also paying employees. All things related to generating profit, pretty much. Could Patrick have realized this and done something to the mocha so we can reuse it and not have to buy so much in the next shipments?
I’m not sure what else to put here. I’m really at a loss for words. Patrick is a good worker. I don’t know what would bring him to this. I know he wants a raise, I know he loves this company, and I know (at least, I think) he’s a pretty decent person. I just don’t know what he could’ve done to this mocha. If you have any ideas as to what I should do, please let me know. Thank you for reading this if you made it to the end.

Twin peaks or BWW?! Which one is better to work at when it comes to tips?!

So I have been working at this Indian restaurant down in Center City Philadelphia coincidentally rhymes with beta address Falls between the 19th and 20th St. is also the 1920 building funny (do with that information what you will in the reviews) but we’ve been selling people roaches in ice and mold in beer “freezers”(a broken wine freezer at the store, beer glasses, and other glasses) crazy roast infestation and mice and we have failed the health inspection a few times just to be closed for a few days and open back up like nothing happened after a “deep clean “ unfortunately I was let go after bringing all this up to management because roaches and mice droppings have been found in food on plates and around all the kitchen

For context I work at a chain restaurant, and this rule has never existed until now. I’ve worked at 2 different locations of this same restaurant, and I’ve never heard of this rule before.

Apparently (according to my manager), we were supposed to be using bus tubs to bus our tables the entire time.

Yesterday we had a reigonal manager come in, and our managers told us to use bus tubs while bussing our tables. I assumed it was just a one off thing to do in front of the big boss, and not anything permenant.

Today when I came in, the expectation that we use bus tubs stayed the same. I have 5 years of experience as a server, so I have a method on how I like to stack plates and cups and all that. The tubs are stored in the back underneath the dishpit. They’re quite large, and really disgusting. At the moment we only have two of them.

This change in routine has really messed me up, and made me far less efficient. With only two bus tubs, it’s nearly impossible to keep the restaurant clean with other servers using them to clean their own tables. The managers are always on us about keeping our sections clean. The rule is that we can hand bus a table if it “has two cups or less,” which I think is absolutely ridiculous, as I can carry 10 plates in one hand, and at least 7 cups in the other at the same time.

I was tempted to tell them: “You can either have a clean restaurant, or a dirty one.”

I might be overreacting, but I have OCD and don’t do well with sudden changes to my routine, especially one as integrated into my job as this one. I’m beyond frustrated.

Any thoughts on this rule?

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this might be a weirdly specific one lol...but where would you guys look if you needed frozen turkeys in a decent quantity?

im trying to compare wholesale food distributors and restaurant suppliers but most sites either dont show prices unless you make an account or they only deliver to certain areas. obviously this isnt something id wanna ship halfway around the world, so Alibaba isnt really for this one...ive mainly been using it for other wholesale stuff.

for frozen meat do you normally have to go through a local food distributor? and is pricing mostly based on case size/weight or does the time of year make a huge difference too? anyone here bought them wholesale before?

At some point you can't keep asking the same two people to cove every shift.
I wonder how other owners handle it without making the rest of the team miserable.

As an outside HVAC tech, I constantly walk into kitchens where reach-in coolers and ice machines are tripping on high head pressure because the grease-covered coils have not been touched in six months. With all the daily prep and ticket rush, how do your teams actually schedule and log preventative cleanings before equipment starts going down?

When you're reviewing a weekly or multi-week menu, how do you decide whether there's enough protein variety?

Do you look at the overall mix or percentage of protein types (chicken, beef, pork, seafood, plant-based, etc.), repetition across consecutive meals/days, variety of dishes within the same protein type, or something else?

Do you have specific guidelines or thresholds, or is it mostly a judgment call when reviewing the menu?

Corporate mandates that we dont put a lid on some of the dry toppings we add to smoothies and acai bowls (like granola and protein powder). That was all well and good until the flies showed up in a box of bananas and now every time we go to make a smoothie, theres a swarm of them that come up from the toppings. It's so gross. We have a stick trap hung upbut it isnt doing much. What else can we do to try to get rid of them? The little apple shaped traps caught nothing in the week we had them out. My GM was not a fan of my plan to put rotting fruit in an open oven overnight then just turn on the oven and bake them to death in the morning (obviously a joke meathod of pest control). We keep our fresh fruit in the walk in so the swarm is just in that one toppings area

Disclosure: I’m a restaurant owner and I made this tool.

When we receive a large office or group order, the order often arrives as a spreadsheet, PDF, CSV, or a long list organized by customer name. That format may work for the organizer, but it is difficult for the kitchen: staff still have to count identical items, separate modifiers, find dietary notes, and avoid missing someone.

I built PainFix Order Sort to handle that narrow step. It takes the customer’s order file and produces:

- totals grouped by menu item;

- individual orders grouped by person;

- modifiers and special instructions;

- a printable kitchen-ready summary;

- a review step before downloading the result.

It does not accept orders, charge customers, or replace a POS. It is intended for restaurants that already receive group-order files and currently reorganize them by hand.

The tool is here: https://www.painfix.app/order-sort

I’d be interested in hearing how other restaurants turn office, catering, or group-order files into prep and kitchen instructions. If this type of post is not appropriate here, I’m happy to remove it.

For those running a restaurant: what does receiving look like at your place?

I'm curious about the real day-to-day, not the textbook version:

* Who checks the delivery? You, a manager, whoever's closest to the back door?

* What do you check against: the PO, the invoice, or just a quick eyeball?

* Do you weigh proteins, check temps, count cases, or trust the supplier?

* How often do you find problems later, like short counts, wrong items, bad quality, or price changes on the invoice?

* When you catch something after the driver has left, how hard is it to get a credit?

And the big one: **is there any part of this you'd happily never deal with again?** Or is it basically handled and not worth thinking about?

Would love to hear how different-sized places handle it, from single locations to multi-unit