I don't remember any exact restaurants that have caused me any horrors, but maybe I'm just lucky. I know what may (and does) happen behind the kitchen doors, but then again, I know (in here) they make official checks at restaurants if anybody complains it's not all right, and therefore I more or less trust that I don't die there. If the steak happens to drop to the floor and they re-fry it a bit, I don't expect to notice that -- most of the harmful things in the steak either die at the frying, or don't die anyway and have been there already prior to the fall, so it's not going to be a clean steak anyway
and I like to think that it's better to get some bad "ingredients" (bacteria, flu, things like that - not deadly harmful) at times and keep your body defense up to date, than live madly overclean life and die the first time a regular flu catches you.
Having eat some porridge in the woods, cooked under partial rain, with small bugs flying over and dropping dead at the porridge I can say it's not that bad. Actually the small insects and whatever crawlers went there just produced a slightly more meat-ish flavour to the otherwise dull cooking. So I take it that small errors in a kitchen aren't going to kill me too soon
Of course I don't take it as a good thing that many kitchens are so horrible, and I would rather eat well done food than such that has been used to clean the floors and shoe backs of the cook, but as long as it stays in the limits of "not lethal", I try to understand the conditions the people mostly have to work in - hurry, non-thankful and suspicious customers, not too high wage, ...
Well now that I think about it, actually I do remember one place where I did get ill. McDonald's fast food "restaurant". I know how strict they are about their employees, habits and what is told outwards (and that when an accident happens, they rather bribe the customer than let it out to the rest of the potential customers), so I don't wonder if they're not telling everything..anyway, some years ago I was eating there and as soon as I got back home, quite everything came back up. I didn't feel ill before the visit, nor the next day, but the time between eating and printing the stuff back was quite bad. Of course I can't say for sure it was McDonald's, but on the other hand, I haven't figured anything else out either
and later there was news, somebody saying that McDonalds had used rat meat in their steaks. Nobody could confirm that, and they of course denied it, but it just brought up the little incident to me..hehe
