10 Ways to Avoid Getting Your Food Spit In: Number 1: Don't send your food back to the kitchen.

Simply put, if you have ever sent a meal back to the kitchen to be reheated, refired, or replaced there is a excellent chance you have had your food mistreated. The chance exists that servers, cooks, or both took liberties with the sanitary conditions they exposed your food too. That may be jarring to some of you, but it is the truth.

Sending your food back to the kitchen basically announces to the staff that you are, in their minds, an unreasonable individual. Why? Because you are making their life more difficult. Your complaint may be perfectly reasonable. In my seven years at the Steakhouse, most of the food sent back to the kitchen deserved to be. Cooks make mistakes from time to time and it doesn’t help matters that they may hold the most stressful position in the restaurant. It is easy to overlook the importance of having a qualified kitchen staff in a restaurant. They are, after all, the people who prepare all the food. Cooks are painfully aware that if they make a mistake, they ruin someone meal. On top of that, they are typically preparing dozens of meals at any given time on a busy night.

When a customer sends food back to the kitchen, many cooks view it as a referendum on their abilities and take it very personally. They misdirect their anger at the customer and the symbol of their mistake: the food in question. Cooks can’t yell at the customer so they take out their passive aggressive anger on your food.

Without a doubt, sending food back is the easiest and surest way to have your food spit. My only advice is to avoid this practice at all costs. I recognize this is not rational and unfair to the customer. Customers deserve to have a properly prepared and sanitary meal. They are, after all, paying for it. If food is not prepared to your preference, you deserve to have it replaced. However, the only way to ensure your food is not mishandled in this scenario is to completely avoiding sending food back to the kitchen and finding a new restaurant to patronize.