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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That was a mistake, I'm sure. Puts the hotel at a greater liability (i.e. the customer refuses to sign), but someone eating undercooked meat would already know the risks, so this wouldn't stop them from eating it.
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.
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
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.
It wouldn't even hold up in this case: the waiver holds Hilton not liable when the guest eats food not prepared by the restaurant, when the guest is clearly eating food prepared by the restaurant.
Oh fuck off, your stupid and unsafe eating habits are your own fucked up problems, the hotel has nothing to do with this. Of course it's a Redditor too, fucking weirdos, holy hell
Reit007 said the server explained that because the kitchen at the Hilton Toronto Airport Hotel & Suites always cooks their burgers well-done, they should sign the waiver first.
The disgusting part of this story is a corporate mandate on well-done burgers.
You can have ground beef below well done, but it has to be fresh ground in clean equipment. Most restaurants that don't specialize in burgers/beef aren't fresh grinding mean on order. If you eat medium at a place that doesn't offer it you're responsible for your own decisions.
you can have undercooked beef because bacteria can’t penetrate that far below the surface (opposed to chicken), if it is ground then that safety net isn’t there
Its 160°F in center mandate, or you would lose your food service license. Why would a hotel risk that for one customer that wants it cooked below standards
It's not a corporate mandate, it's a provincial government mandate that exists in the whole of Canada as far as I know (food safety for restaurants being under provincial jurisdiction) and for good reasons, the risks associated with undercooked ground beef aren't worth it to please the small % of clients who would want it.
You want your patties medium? Buy a whole piece of meat, remove the outer layer, ground it and cook it, don't expect restaurants to do that for you.
In Germany they sell ground beef that is save to eat raw. So either get save meat or, if your ground beef is not safe, bring this up directly when someone orders a medium or rare burger and not after the person already started eating.
The only thing is why not get the waiver with the appetizer, before it's served or together? That's the negligence on the Hilton Restaurant's part and really doesn't have meaning if this user did happen to get E.Coli. Ordering medium ground beef at a non-specialty venue is kind of stupid to begin with.
That's probably the intention but it's so rare (haha) to order undercooked patties in Canada that they might not even have known a waiver was necessary.
As a consumer, I would see the presence of such a waiver as a prompt to think about what necessitated this in the first place. Perhaps this kitchen isn't as clean as it could be, and something happened to prompt this level of (legal) caution. Yeah, it could have been an overzealous patron looking for a payday, but maybe someone had a legit case?
They asked for meat to be cooked at a lower temp than Health Canada recommends. It makes sense that you need to sign stuff if you tell the kitchen to do something that isn't recommended.
you want people to be able to sue over everything, this is the result.
id have signed, cuz i both enjoy meat and not suin' people for nonsense i caused.
e: i have in the past ordered 'as rare as you can legally make it'. most of the time i get stupid looks and they bring it rare, but sometimes they just nod and bring me a brick
they had already started eating when the server handed them a waiver.
Not to mention, the eater is dumb if they get a hamburger that's less than well done. Ground beef has much more surface area for pathogens to creep into. So unless you watched them cut up and grind the meat, after watching them properly sterilize their equipment, order that burger well done.
i read an article about a crybaby who ordered a burger rare, which everyone knows is outside the scope of safety fucking everywhere, and then whined when presented with having to take responsibility for the choice he was already eating.
or are we to believe this is his first experience ordering rare??