A Brazilian tourist says she was left aghast after a waiter at a restaurant in Italy's Romagna region wrote "burn the eggs and spit on them" on her receipt, after she had simply asked for her eggs to be cooked a little more.
Maria Clara told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, one of the country's oldest and most widely read national papers, that she had been polite when she made the request. "I was polite. I simply asked if it was possible to have the eggs a little more cooked," she said. Romagna, a region on Italy's Adriatic coast, is a popular destination for tourists during the summer.
Ms Clara said staff responded rudely, telling her they did not make raw eggs. "In the end, they arrived very soft, but I didn't ask for them to be recooked. I let it go because I didn't want to argue," she said.
It was only when she checked her receipt that she saw the note. She said she initially thought it was a joke before becoming scared, prompting her and her group to ask to speak to the manager.
Manager called after waiter 'went white'
Staff first told the group no manager was on site, before another waitress intervened and fetched one. The employee who had written the note was reportedly around 17 years old, and reportedly "went white, very nervous" when confronted.
"He apologised and said it was a joke between him and the chef," Ms Clara said. She said the teenager then tried to take the receipt back and throw it away, but the group refused. "We told him not to do it and that otherwise we would call the police," she added.
Ms Clara said she could have understood anger if she had been rude, but insisted that was not the case. "If I had been rude, I could at least understand someone getting angry. But I wasn't. I simply asked, as politely as possible, for slightly more overcooked eggs."
The employee was removed from the restaurant, but the incident did not end there.
Restaurant mocks incident on TikTok
Ms Clara later discovered the restaurant had posted a video on its TikTok account that appeared to poke fun at the episode. In the clip, the restaurant's owner plays an exaggeratedly demanding customer who orders a dish "with spit."
A poll posted beneath the video asked followers whether the sacked employee should be forgiven and rehired. Many commenters said the incident was unforgivable, while others urged the owner to give him a second chance.
Other kitchen workers admit doing the same
Among the hundreds of comments, some took the story further, with people claiming to work or have worked in restaurant kitchens saying they had spat on the plates of customers they found particularly irritating.
"At first we thought it was something absurd, written as a joke. Then we read people saying, 'I did it too.' And we started to think that these things really do happen," Ms Clara said.
Ms Clara said she had since received death threats and racist comments after the story went viral. She maintains that even the most difficult customer should not have to fear the contamination of their food by waiters.
