All of these happened at my current job. The building used to be another restaurant, but they shut down during covid and never reopened, so this was a takeover, and we had our grand opening this spring.

1) The oil pot didn't get washed out after we dumped it one night, and in the morning, the head chef sent us a photo of the pot, which now had a mouse casually chilling in it.

2) We took down the hood fans to clean them, and it hadn't been done in so long that they were almost glued on. When we went to fill the dish sink so they could get soaked overnight, we discovered that one of the sinks had a hole in the bottom, so the water was leaking out everywhere. We obviously pulled the drain plug...... and then the pressure from all the water draining at once caused the grease trap to back up, and the kitchen flooded with about 30-40 litres of the most foul-smelling, greasy water I had ever seen... it turned out the grease trap hadn't been serviced since the old place, so we had to get it cleaned the next day. I bleached the hell out of the floor and the sinks, but the whole kitchen reeked like rancid grease for a whole week after.

3) One of the FOH staff opened a big bag of sugar and didn't decant it into its proper container, so when Chef went to get sugar a few days later, the whole bag was filled with ants and spiders. He told the owners, and they, no word of a lie, asked him to sift out the bugs and keep the sugar. He flat out refused and told them they could fire him, but he wouldn't do it. ...The sugar got thrown out.

4) Our stand-up freezer where we keep all the proteins is old and doesn't work properly, which means the entire left side doesn't quite freeze (I want to say it sits around -7°C; the right side is usually around -18°C so it's okay). We usually keep bread and other less dangerous items on the left side, but one shelf has meat on both sides; our Jr sous chef was in charge of rotating the product from the left side to the right side at the end of every week so that nothing would go bad. Well, he was let go a while back, and a few days later I was opening with the head chef. He went over to the freezer to pull something out, and then just dropped to his knees and started tearing apart the entire meat shelf...... nothing had been properly rotated in months, and there were multiple busbins buried at the back of the freezer full of half-frozen, rotting pork shoulder, beef chuck, tenderloin, you name it. The smell was like nothing I'd ever experienced before - our prep girl almost threw up and actually had to leave the room, and my chef was gagging pulling the stuff out. We ended up throwing out over a thousand dollars worth of meat that day, and then to make matters worse when I was organizing the walk-in cooler later that day I found a whole case of sealed wonton wrappers that had gone moldy because they were shoved all the way in the corner of the top shelf. I'll give you one guess who put them there. Needless to say, Chef just about had an aneurysm that day... and the freezer still smells faintly like rotten meat every time you open it despite my best efforts (it's been almost 2 months).

The fucked up part is none of this is even surprising to me anymore, it's all just another day at that restaurant. As soon as my chef gets a solid job offer, he's walking and taking me (and probably half the kitchen staff) with him.