A visitor from the U.S. got more than they asked for at a Toronto hotel restaurant when they ordered a cheeseburger on Monday night that was served with a waiver on the side.
After reading the article, I’m on the hotel’s side.
If someone asks for meat to be prepared in a way that Health Canada says is below the optimal temperature to kill pathogens, then the customer is putting themselves at risk and should bare any liability.
If someone asked for unpasteurized milk, raw eggs, or live seafood, I’d expect them to get the same waiver.
Seems quite sensible.
I would be as well were it not for one small detail, and it’s that the waiver was presented after they started eating.
No, still on the restaurants side. Like yes, it was a mistake and they should have presented it earlier, but asking for a burger to be done medium isn’t a common thing here in Canada. They might not have thought about the waiver until then.
Edit: my point here is that this article is presenting the waiver itself as some kind of wrongdoing or indictment about the restaurant’s quality/safety. To me, this seems wrongheaded and the timing of the waiver being brought out seems more like “whoops we forgor” thing than a “desperately covering our ass” thing – since again, medium burgers aren’t really a thing here.
I’m not going to fault the hotel for trying their best to please customer requests and the customer being Pikachu shock faced when he’s asked to not sue the restaurant for accommodating his McDeath Burger extra value meal.
There’s a literal west coast burger chain that serves medium as standard. Just cause you don’t ask for something doesn’t make it uncommon.
Who eats that fast. Like something doesn’t add up. They brought the food but came back afterwards.
Now I’m confused.
Rare has pink in the middle, and so at risk.
Medium is cooked through, no pink, and safe.
Well is just a hockey puck.
Where in the world is “medium” undercooked?
Title feels a bit click-baity, but truly I think the waiver is reasonable. If you want food prepared outside our food safety standards and laws, you should have to waive the right to sue if you get yourself sick and die. Whether it will actually hold in court is contestable.
Absolutely. One could argue that the restaurant went out of its way to provide a customer food request, but many restaurants refuse to cook ground beef at anything below well-done.
Personally, as a Canadian, I would never eat anything less than that for a hamburger, but I cook my steaks near blue at home.
I’m an American living in Canada and I think the law and mentality around it are silly.
That said, you’re right. Those are the codified rules, and because they are codified, the hotel has taken the necessary steps to protect themselves, while going out of their way to provide this to their customer. They could have just told them no, just like every other establishment does.
Yeah so we’ve got this thing in Canada called public healthcare and we ended up paying for people getting e.coli and mad cow disease because they decided they knew better, so no these regulations aren’t silly.
Here in BC, anything but well done burgers are illegal in restaurants. We have steak tartar, but you need to cut the exterior layer of meat away and grind it right before serving. You might get away with doing the same for burgers, but no one does it that I know of.
I’ve heard of a restaurant in North van that does it, I can’t recall its name though.
At one point Vera’s burgers would because they sourced their own beef, but im not sure if that survived them expanding 10+years ago. They did start north shore so maybe it was Vera’s
It absolutely was Vera’s that’s why I liked to go there. They used to have a sign that warned you you had to ask for well done.
I worked at Outback Steakhouse (outside the US) and we were never allowed to serve burgers that weren’t well done. I’ve had to explain many times that it is due to the risk of illness from uncooked/processed meat and people still choose to be upset.
I thought the science says a steak can safely be rare, but not hamburger? Still a weird thing to get upset about. Although I’ve been to dinner with people I thought were reasonable only for them to turn into fuckheads with waiters. I think some people just get really dickish when they are customers. Fuck em.
Its any ground meat. Bacteria cant penetrate a steak to contaminate it, so as long as the outside is cooked enough its safe. When you grind up meat to expose all of the meat to outside conditions, plus any bacteria left on the grinders themselves, so it has to be fully cooked.
Except there are raw ground meat dishes. Beef tartare is raw ground beef and the Mettbrötchen is raw ground pork. So it certainly can be consumed safely.
The USDA guidelines for food safety are extremely conservative when it comes to spoiling. On one hand it makes sense because we don’t want businesses to gamble with their customers health for higher profits. But it also means people are quick to dismiss them because so many of the guidelines are broken daily without incident.
I’m a guy who likes a medium-rare burger and loves mett and I know the risks involved since it’s ground meat with tons of surface area and I don’t blame the hotel one bit and would have signed the waiver unlike this prima Donna.
