When is it safe to go back to a restaurant after you've seen a cockroach there?

When the restaurant pays it's staff a living wage.

I was once told that all restaurants have cockroaches, and decided that it's best not to think too much about such things. I may just have low expectations, but I would probably just avoid the place until I could properly block it out of my mind again.

I was eating pizza in North Beach, SF and drank a roach in my soda. Crunched down on that sucker and spit it out into my dish. I didn't pay for the pizza. It was some of the best pizza I ever ate. Went back the next week.

Seeing a cockroach once may be signs of a larger health problems there. Or it could be: nearby construction displacing a nest, cold weather forcing them indoors, sewer work/backup forcing them up, or a passanger from some other patrons filthy home. Go back, eat a mozzarella stick or 3, and if you see more then dump the dive.

Lots of beloved restaurants have roaches (and dirty kitchens). I remember watching roaches run around the floor of Thai Tom. Yes, that person should go back. But maybe they should keep a monitor on the restaurant's health dept score over time to see if they are constantly near being closed down.

A cockroach is what I called my ex- boyfriend's penis.

@1--Great answer! I live in the Deep South. Down here, cockroaches down here are just a fact of life.

2 stories:

1. back at my UW days, a fellow diner at a Chinese joint on the Ave. had a cockroach STIR FRIED IN HER FOOD. I literally felt sick. I never went back, and would not allow others to do so either.

2. back in my undergrad days, I had a rat in the coffeehouse I worked at. the owner was poisoning it, so it was going crazy, wandering behind the bar willy nilly. I had to scoop it into a box and carry it past customers to get it outside.

so, SEEING a cockroach is not that big a deal. it is a deal of some scale, however, because this is Seattle, and there are barely any cockroaches, thank Jebus. the only ones I've ever seen are in restaurants.

I'd say it's safe to go back as soon as you're psychologically ready (it's been since December, so...). You've never gotten sick from the place before, and lots of places have cockroaches that you don't see. Enjoy the mozzarella sticks in life!

I imagine this might the first time Liberty has been called a "dive," but it would be understandable that poor Andrew Friedman is so overworked caring for his staff and family and making Seattle a better place that maybe he forgets to pay 100% attention to hygiene. So yes, you should definitely go back to make sure he's not penalized for his good works, because he's cool.

Did you tell the manager on duty ? Most places that serve food have to deal with various bugs and infestations (even the goods brought in from a supplier can have weevils and other fun stuff sometimes) but the quickest way to get management to escalate this to "important" is for customers to say "I saw that!".

I'm sure the servers (who are probably picking bugs out of glasses, silverwear baskets, etc at the start of their shift) would appreciate your efforts to tell the managers.

3 choices:

- Inform management on the spot; don't make a big deal of it, keep being a customer.
- Inform the health department; stop going.
- Ignore it.

The problem with cockroaches is that the one you see is just the scout for a whole battalion. If they're in the dining area, there are more in the kitchen for sure. Given the blissful lack of cockroaches in this area, I'd lean toward telling someone.

If you don't tell your waiter you saw a cockroach, you don't give the establishment a chance to make it right by buying your lunch. If the establishment doesn't make it right, I never go back. You blew it from go.

What @1 said

The restaurant owners admit they would hire more qualified English speaking Americans if they had to pay $15/hour, and that staff would take cleanliness seriously

Talk to the cockroach. If they aren't being paid a living wage then boycott the restaurant. I'm sick of this specist crap. Do you know many kids cockroaches have?

@15 cockroaches can't vote

Except in Florida

Back in my serving days, I worked in an old wharf building that had a permanent cockroach infestation. We did our best to keep it clean - twice a year all hands had to come in after hours to pull and bag every single piece of flatware, cookware, and other equipment before the professional cleaners and exterminators came in, and then come in before the next shift to put everything back together. Still, the cockroaches came. So I say, if it's not in your food, don't worry about it, but do inform the restaurant staff so they know it's time to clean.

PS during those deep clean shifts, I made minimum wage, no tips. Restaurants rely on tipped employees to do a lot of cleaning and prep work that they don't want to pay back-of-the-house people to do. I must have cleaned 2000 pounds of prawns in my time there.

@11 This is R. who asked the question above. I did not say anything at the time. I saw it before I ordered so I just pretended to the waiter that I had forgotten an errand I had to run and then I left.

At this point if I go back is it worth saying anything in a “Heads up” kind of way?

I have never gone back to a certain much-beloved Thai restaurant on the Ave after seeing live ones too close to the wok for comfort.

@17 - yep. You and me both (to the non-tipped cleaning work, that is). The place I worked at was so gross I VOLUNTEERED to come in and clean for that shitty wage. Applebee's recently settled with a class of bartenders and servers for the non-tipped work done over some period of time. It was actually a really decent settlement.

Others had the idea: tell management. If they take you seriously then you're good. If they blow you off of deny the sighting, then don't go back.

Aren't "dives" supposed to have cockroaches?

@19

There's a sandwich place I haven't gone back to ever since I saw the person making my sandwich use the same glove to receive mail from the postal carrier who came in while I was waiting for my food.

I wouldn't go back. A pregnant roach could crawl into my backpack and then that little fucker might begin it's own colony in my home. I've had roaches before and that shit can get NASTY.

I was in a really swish international hotel once. I pointed out the cockroach on our dinner table to the waiter, who tried to hit the 'roach with an empty Coke bottle. He missed, and anyway, roaches are immune to being hit with anything smaller than a jackhammer. I enjoyed the entertainment. Better than that time I got broken glass in my dessert at a swish Seattle restaurant.

if you've only seen one cockroach in a beloved dive in your life , you're not living right.

my experience: ordered fajitas at a now long-gone mexican restaurant, and when they set the platter down, baby (nymph?) roaches came running out from the wooden platter all across the table. i nearly died.

called the health department to report (didn't know what else to do, we had already let management know and they were pretty useless, a la "want us to make you another one?")

what i learned: they did an inspection and got back to us really fast, believe it or not! - cockroaches are extremely common in corrugated cardboard. they hatch out in there. what this restaurant had done, not knowing that, was keep those wooden fajita platters stored near the back door where they had their cardboard boxes broken down to go out. the roaches followed the smell out of the box and into the wood. little tiny baby roaches, not big ones.

the inspector said that the restaurant was very, very clean - one of the cleanest he'd seen - and they didn't even see one of any kind of bug. but i just couldn't go back. i could barely eat fajitas anywhere for a long time, and i still think about it when i do now.

long story yeah but the lessons are:

a) don't keep corrugated cardboard in your kitchen, ever
b) it doesn't mean the restaurant is dirty

There are more roaches in the world than humans, you probably have a few families of them in your own kitchen.

You saw a cockroach in a restaurant because that restaurant was on Planet Earth.

Go back. Go back now. Any psychological trauma you may be experiencing is founded on an unrealistic model of reality foisted upon your brain against your will by Them.

There are always cockroaches in any place that stays warm year-round. By the way, an easy way to get rid of cockroaches up north, is to turn off the heat, and leave a window open after close during a few cold nights.

Cockroaches are nothing to worry about. Excessive cockroach infestations are only an indicator of poor cleaning practices. A few cockroaches indicate are unavoidable.

Worrying about them is using up worry-space in your head better spent on things that aren't ubiquitous and harmless. You could worry about things that are ubiquitous and harmful like the heart disease you get from eating things like mozzarella sticks, or rare harmful things like being crushed from above by a circus bear that fell out of an airplane.

@29 Oh thanks, now I have that to worry about.

Was it a very large cock-a-roach?

The old Maharaja is the only place in Seattle that I've ever seen a rat. I stopped eating there but continued drinking.

Seriously? You're worried about a roach? Do you ever leave the Sammamish Plateau? Try a week in Rio or Bangkok or virtually any interesting place in the world. In other words, grow the hell up.

I was served a cockroach in a baked potato at the Ballard Wendy's. I guess that's what I deserved for eating at Wendy's and I've obviously never gone back to that or any other Wendy's because it triggers my gag reflex just thinking about it. I grew up watching Creepshow, after all.

I wanted to say that it is ok to go back right away because you just saw them and most restaurants have them to some degree, even in Seattle, (it is very difficult to sprat for bugs in a restaurant and not generally successful for more than a week or so) but I just couldn't. If I see a single one, I'm going to picture that potato and never go back.

My wife was once served a salad that boasted a live caterpillar. It was at the super hippy organic "restaurant" next to the world's most DGAF Safeway and Rite Aid, in the U District. At least her bug was cute. But when she spilled her water glass (filled herself, from a self-serve pitcher just set on a table and practically begging people to sneeze or spit into it) and the napkin came away from the carpet black, that was the point at which it became obvious that the health inspector was overdue.

Yeah, after a roach ran across our table (our table!!) at one of my fave ID places, I haven't been back. Like the letter writer, I also didn't tell anyone because I didn't want to ruin the restaurant's reputation. That may be naive of me. But when friends suggest that place, I always volunteer something else instead. I know that they exist and are a battle in food service. But it was super unsettling. It's been 9 months and I can't quite go back yet.