Restaurants Are Full Of Drugs, Del Taco Just Shares With Customers

A couple in Lakewood, Colorado recently found a bag of marijuana in a take out order from their local Del Taco and, for some reason we don’t understand, turned it in to the cops. Now it’s national news instead of the greatest day of their week. The pot was traced back to the young man who served this duo, twenty-six-year-old Dennis Klermund, who originally denied any knowledge of the contraband, but later admitted it was his when the cops found another bag of the stuff in his employee locker. Not the sharpest knives in the kitchen drawer those potheads, but this does bring up an interesting point. Are restaurant employees a bunch of druggies? Food service workers belonging to this message board in Portland, Oregon give a resounding sniiiiiiiifffff.

Barman: It is true that the nose candy is very popular among restaurant workers. Late hours, mostly single people, a lot new to town or jumping from one place to the next, all contribute to the cause. Very true about the posher the place, the bigger the problem. I guess management can’t tell or turns a blind eye if you are especially a good server. In my experience working with these people the service and food don’t especially suffer. The kitchen can be a different story. A lot of the BOH [Ed:?] staff are into pot. This can make for screwed up orders and ‘Dude, I forgot’ situations. It is real bad when you get into the real hard drugs. I have worked with a couple bartenders that were on heroine and/or crack. That is a trip and not a fun experience. And yes, this was at one of the nicer steak houses in Portland. The management knew or heavily suspected the use and had talks, but the bartender is still at the place. They won’t fire anybody because they are ‘corporate’ and are afraid to fire people, don’t want to pay unemployment. I guess they would rather make their guests and employees suffer than ax someone and pay them unemployment. Anyway, just my 2 cents as an experienced restaurant worker in P-town.

Then of course, there’s celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain’s racy 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential in which he confesses of a time in 1981, working for a trendy SoHo, New York restaurant, where having a potpourri of drugs in the kitchen was de rigueur.

We were high all the time, sneaking off to the walk-in [refrigerator] at every opportunity to ‘conceptualize.’ Hardly a decision was made without drugs. Pot, quaaludes, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms soaked in honey and used to sweeten tea, Seconal, Tuinal, speed, codeine and, increasingly, heroin, which we’d send a Spanish-speaking busboy over to Alphabet City to get.

If they’re doing it in the finest dining establishments, one can hardly blame a lowly taco slinger from Lakewood, Colorado for needing a toke to get through the day, can one? Well, we guess one kind of did. Klermund faces charges of possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia. Oh and Del Taco manager Ulises Montero says Klermund doesn’t work there anymore.

Colo. couple get marijuana with order of tacos [SF Gate]
Drug use in restaurants [Portland Food and Drink Forums]
Anthony Bourdain [Wikipedia]