Tubs of mysterious gooey meat? Bottles filled with dead bugs? Get some Pepto-Bismol ready,
because here are a few of the most disgusting things that Big
Jon Taffer — and his viewers — have seen during "Bar Rescue."
It doesn't take a genius to pile chips on a plate and dump a bunch of delicious
fixings on top. But when Jon Taffer paid a visit to the YNot Sports Pub and Grub
right outside the Xfinity Arena in Everett, Washington,
he discovered that the folks in charge had figured out multiple ways to mess it up.
Since the pub saw so much traffic during big events, speed and efficiency were
particularly important. Taffer gathered ten of his friends to go undercover and visit the pub,
and the group ordered all sorts of food and drinks to determine how well-oiled
the establishment's machine truly was. The group was on a tight schedule because they
were seeing a show at the arena, but since the bumbling owners were distracted with
smoke breaks and a bizarre goldfish race, the group was forced to bail on their meal.
That was when Taffer stormed in to see what was going on for himself. He and two colleagues
attempted to try all the food the original group ordered, but the pulled pork nachos seemed to
cause a screeching halt in their appetites. Taffer found one piece of pork particularly putrid:
"That looks like what my cat threw up in my living room this morning."
If that wasn't bad enough, the melted cheese was overcooked,
which made the entire plate of nachos stick together in one stale, disgusting mass.
Sticky nachos weren't the only issue that Jon Taffer
encountered at the YNot Sports Pub and Grub: the "Bar Rescue" host made
another dangerous discovery regarding the establishment's food storage techniques.
Keeping food at the proper temperatures is perhaps the most important aspect of running
an eatery. Even if the service is slow and the servers are incompetent at taking orders,
at least those two traits won't leave people with a horrendous case of food poisoning.
That's why Jon Taffer was positively appalled at the Washington pub's lack of responsibility.
After tasting several appalling excuses for food, Taffer marched the owners of the bar into
the kitchen to see for himself exactly what was going on behind the scenes. Aside from the usual
disgusting conditions, something particularly strange stood out to him: an oddly placed wooden
door that looked more like it belonged to the front entrance of a house than in a kitchen.
When Taffer learned that the door led to the walk-in fridge, he was more than a little upset.
"It's not safe! It's at a dangerous temperature the entire time.
You're gonna f***ing kill somebody."
Honestly, it's amazing the crew at YNot hadn't already sent anyone to
the hospital already, considering their multiple egregious breaches of health code regulations.
There's a reason so many restaurants and bars show off their health inspection grades with pride:
no paying customer wants to worry about getting a dirty fork or finding a hair in their food.
It's not just dishes and countertops that need to be kept pristine,
however — every employee needs to adhere to a high standard of cleanliness as well.
Taffer, as you might expect, is huge on keeping a sanitized workspace,
but when he took a trip down to Horn Lake, Mississippi, to investigate a spot called
Joe's Thirsty Lizard Bar and Grill — renamed The Iron Horse after Taffer
stepped in — he found himself appalled at one particular way the cook decided to keep clean.
Taffer convinced the bar's manager to tell the cook — a man appropriately nicknamed
Dirty Red — that he would be fired unless he cleaned the entirety of the neglected
kitchen before heading home. It took him until eight o'clock the next morning,
but the entire kitchen was cleaned upon opening — that is, except for Dirty Red himself,
who was covered in all the gunk he had managed to scrub off his equipment. Instead of heading
home to clean himself off, Red decided to use the dish hose to take a shower in the kitchen,
stripping down buck naked and spraying away at his body until he was clean enough — at least,
for his own standards. His coworkers didn't seem particularly bothered, either:
his manager even had a word of advice for him, almost as if he'd done this before:
"Hey, tip of the day: don't get the degreaser in the pee-pee, it stings."
Luckily for Red, he managed to clothe himself before Taffer caught him in the act.
When you're sipping a cocktail at your local bar, you don't want to have to keep your guard
up for any wildlife that might interrupt your rest and relaxation. Most bar and restaurant
proprietors understand this, and try to keep their establishments free of whatever pests might try to
make themselves at home. It's something that customers often take for granted. However,
if you happen to find yourself downing drinks at KC's Neighborhood Bar and Grill in Shawnee,
Kansas, it's not out of the realm of possibility for the place to spontaneously become a petting
zoo — but it's a realm that Jon Taffer wants to stay as far away from as possible.
Taffer was quick to notice KC's pile of problems: cigarette-smoking bartenders,
expired fryer oil, and charcoal-colored hamburger patties all made Taffer varying degrees of uneasy.
The icing on the revolting cake, however, was when a raccoon sprinted its way across
a section of the bar and escaped out the door, leaving behind a path of feces for
everyone to stare at and smell as they ate and drank. One patron put it nicely:
"You might as well just have rats crawling across the table. It's disgusting."
All Taffer and his associates could do was shake their heads in disbelief as
they watched the footage from their car parked out front.
Colorado is the number two state in the country for craft beers, with more breweries than any
other state except for California. That's why Jon Taffer was particularly interested
in finding out what offerings the State Pub of Englewood, Colorado had on tap. Unfortunately,
even the best-tasting IPA could never convince him to ignore the bar's rancid condition.
While two of Taffer's undercover buddies were getting their brews on with hidden cameras,
Taffer sat outside the pub in a car, growing increasingly angry at the lack of regard the
owner had for cleanliness. The owner barehanded a bag of garbage in the kitchen and changed
a roll of paper towels in the bathroom without ever washing his hands afterward,
but there was one moment soon to come that would truly turn Taffer's stomach.
Among all the grease-crusted appliances in State Pub's kitchen were two plastic
bins filled with some kind of mystery meat that had been caked onto the inside
of the bins. When the owner proceeded to scoop out a cupful of meat, microwave it,
and dump the appalling mess of who-knows-what onto a bun, Taffer had a particularly strong reaction:
"I wouldn't serve this food to a friggin' inmate."
The owner referred to his nasty sandwiches as "sloppy joes,"
but “sloppy” might just be the understatement of the century.
It's important for a chef to taste the food they're serving before sending it out. This
ensures anything leaving the kitchen tastes great so the customers want to bring their business
back. Customers want to leave with a smiling stomach, not a doggy bag teeming with listeria.
Any chef will tell you that they'd prefer themselves to get sick from their food as opposed
to a patron, but the staff at Turtle Bay in New Orleans, Louisiana, didn't seem to get the memo.
Gumbo is a staple dish in New Orleans, so locals and tourists alike tend to have high
expectations whenever they decide to order some at a local spot. That's why it was so shocking when
Taffer's chef friend Ron tasted the day's batch of gumbo, only to discover it was not only cold,
but sour as well. Just minutes after tasting it, Chef Ron grabbed his stomach,
then made a beeline for the bathroom and began vomiting into the toilet. When Taffer confronted
the kitchen staff about the incident, they actually admitted they knew it wasn't up
to temperature before serving it. Taffer, if you can believe it, wasn't exactly happy about this.
"Close this kitchen down now! You don't have the right to sell food!"
When Jon Taffer paid a visit to Fort One Bar and Lounge in San Francisco, California, he
assumed he'd be walking into a place that had the usual types of problems he'd encountered before:
an incompetent owner, poor service and wait times, and an overall lack of cleanliness.
Well, he had no idea how right he was — especially on that final point.
As Taffer's colleague checked the bar's filtration system,
she found that thick layers of mold had formed on the walls inside the ice machine.
Yes, this place was actually serving ice that had sat inside an airtight bin caked in grayish-black
mildew for days at a time. The employees themselves were absolutely horrified at the
discovery, but they had no clue what atrocious discovery they would unearth just moments later.
As the rescuers made their way down the bar — pointing out all of the blatant flaws along the
way — they finally reached a closed storage bin. They didn't have high hopes for what
might be inside, but what they discovered made them both jump back in utter disgust:
a pair of dead mice! The employees looked at each other in complete disbelief,
with some even seeming to question their life choices.
"I can't even believe I serve people anything from here."
When it comes to bar fare, deep-fried goodies usually reign supreme — after all,
not a lot of people crave a healthy salad when they start tossing back beers. No,
people want something greasy and unhealthy to pair with their rising blood-alcohol content,
and nothing hits the spot quite like a burger and some fries.
Deep-frying has additional upsides as a bar owner, too: it's a quick and simple process that enables
paying customers to get their eager fingers on that delicious stuff quickly and efficiently.
Well, that is unless they visit The Airliner in Los Angeles, California.
When Taffer sent in rock band American Authors undercover to try some of the food on The
Airliner's menu, he wasn't at all surprised by their hesitancy once they actually saw their meals
for themselves. After several minutes of watching his musician friends discuss their disappointment,
Taffer walked in to greet the staff, then kindly asked to go back to the kitchen to see
where all the "magic" happened. Upon seeing the establishment's neglected deep fryer,
Taffer walked over and dropped in a basket of fries to show everyone just
how filthy the oil had become. The second the fries hit the oil, they began smoking
and turned into a thick yellow glop thanks to the germs that had made it their home.
There's nothing like a fresh order of fries with ketchup and a side of bacteria.
As a bar or restaurant owner, there's five words you never want to hear:
"There's a smell back here."
Unfortunately for the employees of San Diego's Caribe Nightclub — rebranded La Luz [lah LOOZ]
Ultralounge post-episode — that's exactly what they heard as Jon Taffer and his cohort rummaged
through a less-than-sanitary collection of items behind the bar. The odor seemed to be
coming from several gunky bar mats, but that wasn't what truly captured their attention.
There was an abundance of fruit flies buzzing around the establishment's
liquor bottles — an immediate indication that spilled liquor was dripping off the shelves,
attracting insects with its high sugar content. Then, upon further examination of the bottles,
Taffer discovered dozens of deceased fruit flies inside floating around in the liquor! As Taffer
and his friend just kept pulling bottle after bottle out from behind the bar, all of which had
the tiny corpses of fruit flies sloshing around in them, the faces of the employees were colored
with embarrassment — as they certainly should have been. The most disgusting moment was yet to come,
however: when the two actually poured a shot full of the fly-filled liquor and then strained
it through a towel, dozens of the dead bugs were filtered out. Taffer admitted that over the course
of his more than 30 years in the business, he had never seen anything like the fly bottles before.
It doesn't take a culinary genius to know that burgers probably shouldn't be cooked in foot-high
flames, but that didn't stop the staff at Harbor Point Bar and Grill in Richardson,
Texas from doing it anyway. Unfortunately for them — and fortunately for the fire marshal — Jon
Taffer and his kitchen expert friend Ryan Scott were there to call them out on it.
"You like burnt meat?" "It looks like the kitchen's on fire." "Yeah, it is."
"The kitchen's on fire?!"
When the bar rescuers stormed into the hazardous kitchen to see just what the heck the two cooks
back there were doing, the cooks immediately knew that they were about to get an earful,
Taffer-style. When asked why the grill was spewing flames of that size,
one of them hypothesized that it was "too hot" — a claim that Chef Ryan was very amused by.
In reality, the grill hadn't been properly cleaned since the restaurant opened,
and the leftover meat gristle that had built up over time had caused the flames. The frazzled
cooks told lie after lie to try and calm him down, but it was no use. Taffer was so irate
with the barrage of excuses that he tossed several plates of food onto the ground, and watched as the
two distraught cooks picked everything up off the floor with their tails between their legs.
While a rare steak is considered a delicacy if it's prepared right,
the complete opposite is true of chicken. Unless you want to be glued to the toilet all night,
chicken is one of those proteins you really need to cook all the way through before it's served.
Salmonella poisoning can be incredibly damaging and even fatal, which is exactly why Jon Taffer
was far from thrilled when he visited the Lucky 66 Bowling Alley in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Taffer spent an evening shift at the restaurant helping to coordinate service properly and check
on the patrons to make sure they were happy with their orders. However, when he approached one
table of six, they were quick to show the host a piece of fried chicken that was slimy and pink
in the middle. Taffer took the chicken and marched back into the kitchen to give the cooks a piece of
his mind, but actually managed to stay relatively calm as he informed the head chef of his mistake.
"Guys, if there's anything we can't do, it's serve raw chicken, right?"
Thankfully, the issue was resolved, and six people
managed to avoid potentially brutal consequences that night.
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