10 Dirty Restaurant Tricks

Restaurants are known to cut a few corners for the sake of their bottom lines. Slashfood sheds some light on dirty little industry secrets, including:

Using cabbage instead of seaweed: An ex-maître d’ at an upscale Chinese joint says the chef assumed his celebrity clientele wouldn’t know the difference. He was right.
Topping off beer pitchers with seltzer: “The drunker the guys got, the more seltzer they got,” says one sports bar insider.
Refilling pricey bottled water from the tap: “Where I worked we served Voss,” says one waitress, “because it has the easiest screw top to re-seal.”
Serving rotten meat: Steakhouses routinely hold bad meat until someone orders it well done.
Serving caffeinated coffee as decaf: One Philadelphia waiter reports returning to the kitchen with a cup of caffeinated coffee after a customer complained. “The head waiter took the cup from my hand, handed it right back to me, and said, ‘There—now it’s decaf.”