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by Theodores 3280 days ago
During my younger years I spent a summer working in a hotel with restaurant, doing hard manual labour for a pittance. What surprised me was what went on in the en-suite toilets of the hotel rooms. The guests had eaten very expensive meals during the previous evening and on the 'Bristol poo scale' I would say that things had usually got to the diarrhoea end of the chart.

The culprit? Nouvelle Cuisine.

Absolutely no corners were cut in the kitchen, there were no bad practices whatsoever. Everyone took pride in their work and there were never any problems with inspections from the authorities or reviewers. The kitchen and the restaurant were horror story free. Yet the toilets told their own story.

We did get one bad review from a guest that had to be 'torn out of the book', this was actually a very good review in that the guest had taken time to look at the food served from a nutrition point of view. Turns out that Nouvelle Cuisine is not all it is cracked up to be, it might look pretty on TV but in reality it is not what you want to be eating. Too much of the food was highly processed.

For instance, take the humble pea. Normal people eat peas that come out of the freezer to be boiled/steamed and then served. However, in Nouvelle Cuisine (at this anecdotal hotel) were 'fresh', in their pods. The peas would be shelled, then the outer skin of each pea would be removed. Then the peas would be shoved through some sieve to make some type of mush. This would go on hours before tea-time, for some lackey in the kitchen it was a major chore taking hours to do. I never was one to partake in these silly foods but I imagine those peas sat around all day - albeit covered with clingfilm and in the refrigerator - to then be heated/served somehow with the silly and expensive luxury dead animal stuff.

I would be surprised if it was these glorified mushy peas that resulted in the in-toilet explosions, however, strange food upsets people's guts if they are not used to strange food.

The clientele did not get absolutely trolleyed, there was never any signs of rooms trashed by partying and I was surprised people didn't make mention of gut problems.