A former five-star restaurant waiter has dished out the surprising things employees don’t want customers to know about.
Malcolm Cills, from the US, previously worked in every area of restaurants across New York City, ranging from a waiter and a food runner to a busboy and bartender.
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In his brutally honest video, Cills reveals the “lies” waiters at his workplace would tell unsuspecting diners – and what really happens to leftover food once it returns to the kitchen.
“I used to work at restaurants… and let me just tell you guys some stuff,” Cills said in his TikTok video.
“First off, chefs usually hate customers. I don’t know how to describe it but any type of (dish) that comes back to the kitchen like the waiter goes, ‘Oh chef can we get a little bit of mayo on the side? The customer asked for it.’
“The chef would literally be like, (screaming) ‘F***’. Calm down bro, they’re just asking for some mayo.”
As a waiter, Cills claimed his colleagues used to “lie” to customers when they asked him questions about the menu.
“When people ask, ‘Oh, what do you think about this dish?’ We’re always going to say it’s good,” he said.
“We’re always going to lie and make something up. ‘I think you should go for the Caesar salad.’ Like, I’m just going to say whatever dish pops up in my head.
“(But) I don’t know anything about any of the (dishes).
“We learn, kind of like memorise things, but if you ask us, ‘Oh is that healthy?’ I’m just going to be like, ‘Yeah, it’s actually one of our healthiest options.’ Total lie.”
‘Waiters lie to everyone’
When he was working at a five-star Japanese restaurant, Cills claimed his manager instructed waiters to tell customers the ingredients were delivered fresh daily.
“They were like, ‘Tell all the customers that our sushi is delivered here every week, fresh from Japan.’ It actually came every two weeks. I don’t know why, but we just lie,” he said.
“Being a waiter, you lie to everyone.”
Another thing he used to lie about was the freshness of the juice.
“People would be like, ‘Is the juice you guys have on the breakfast menu… freshly squeezed?’ ‘Yes…’ No, it’s not,” Cills confessed.
“It’s not freshly squeezed and guess what? You’re not going to be able to tell, okay. So drink up.”
He said staff would wait in the kitchen to eat any leftover food that returned.
‘We eat off the plates’
“All the waiters and all the staff were hanging out in the kitchen eating fries off of your plate,” Cills said.
“Like we’d take a fry, eat it off the plate. We eat a lot of the food.
“We steal stuff in the restaurant all the time, too, like food and storage containers.”
His video has been viewed more than 250,000 times – with many restaurant workers agreeing with his confessions.
“Oh my god, when the customers want to ‘talk to the chef’. ‘Sir he just spent your whole dinner cursing your life in the back – please don’t make me get him’,” one waiter revealed.
Another said: “Straight facts. As a server sometimes I lie for no reason, the lies just come out.”
One jokingly re-enacted a scenario: “Customer, ‘How’s the salmon?’ Me: ‘Free range, grass fed’. Customer, ‘I’ll take it’.”
Another confessed: “I’ve witnessed a steak fall on the floor and a cook put it back on the plate and send it out. No one is safe.”
One revealed: “The eating from customers’ plates part – too accurate.”
Another said: “The freshly squeezed orange juice always kills me.”
‘Don’t tell our secrets’
One chef added: “Chefs get angry because we’re busy. I try to be kind and stay calm during service but it’s hard sometimes.”
While another restaurant worker revealed: “Don’t tell our secrets.”
However, not everyone could “lie” – with one employee saying: “I never lied. I would always tell them the truth, even if it was less money – it gets them to trust you. Then they spend more.”
Another added: “I feel like I try to be honest as much as possible, especially if something is not good. But with wine, it’s over. I’m lying about that.”
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