Mama Kat Thursday: Worst Eating Out Experiences

The Mama Kat blog writing link-up prompt for today is, "What is an unpleasant experience you had eating?"

I can immediately think of two horribly unhappy eating-out experiences!

The first happened early-on in our marriage while we were still living in the Washington D.C. area in the early 1980's. We had decided to try a Chinese restaurant in College Park. It wasn't a buffet. Chinese all-you-can-eat buffets hadn't come into vogue yet. This was a traditional sit-down, order-from-a-menu, moderately expensive Chinese Restaurant.

 One of their specials that evening was "Chinese Style Crab." Now I had no idea what this was, but it sounded interesting, so I ordered it. What I got was a platter of small, nearly unrecognizable crab parts in a dark barbecue-like sauce. I picked through it, hardly able to find anything edible in it.

When we left, I told Hubby I was still really hungry and could we stop at a McDonald's? I'm pretty sure I gobbled down at least two fish sandwiches and fries! 

That was the first and only time I ever had to go to McDonald's to get full after a restaurant meal.

The other unhappy eating experience happened to Hubby. It's so memorable to him he won't have anything to do with a Thai restaurant. We were in Panama City Beach and pulled into a small, local Thai restaurant. This was back in the mid-1990's when there wasn't a whole of eating options in the area yet. 

The restaurant wasn't very busy. We were almost the only people there. (A sign probably.)  They had a "fish with garlic & lime" listed on their chalkboard as a special, so Hubby ordered that, while I ordered a regular menu item. My meal arrived a short time later, but Hubby's didn't. I finished my meal. He still didn't have his fish. We waited and waited. The server wasn't attentive and communication with her when she did appear tended to involve a bunch of darting back and forth to the kitchen. We couldn't get any definite information on his meal other then it, "was cooking."

Nearly two hours passed before the server finally presented Hubby with a long foil-wrapped object on a platter. 

Hubby opened it to find a whole fish that had been steamed with lime slices and garlic staring up at him with it's glassy dead eye and Hubby stared back, aghast. 

One thing you never give Hubby and that's a whole fish.  He can't stand it. His limit on fish is actually McDonald's fish sandwich--if must eat fish.

But there we were---he was starved, so he unhappily picked what meat he could off it. 

We should have been told right away what this "fish special" was, how long it would take to prepare and whether we wanted to wait that long.

Hubby surely would've ordered something else if he'd known. I think, though, it was only of those situations where both the servers and the cooks didn't speak English very well.

So, there you have it---our two worse memories of eating out!

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What's the worse eating our experience you've ever had?

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