A Brazilian tourist dining on the Adriatic coast of Italy says her breakfast came with an instruction she was never meant to see: a note on the bill telling the chef to burn her eggs and spit in them.
“I’m still in shock, I can’t believe this happened to me,” the woman, who gave her name only as Maria Clara, told local media.
Clara was visiting the Victor Lab restaurant on Viale Ceccarini in Italy’s Romagna region with her family on Aug. 19, according to the local outlet La Voce di Cesenatico. She ordered scrambled eggs, juice and coffee, and found the eggs runnier than she liked.
When she politely asked for them a little more cooked, she says the server scoffed that the kitchen doesn’t serve raw eggs. The plate came back still soft, and with a side salad she had asked them to leave off. “I let it go because I didn’t want to argue,” she recalled.
The message on the receipt
It was only when the bill arrived that she saw the kitchen ticket’s printed instruction — an annoyed note telling the chef to burn the eggs and spit in them. She photographed it and included it in a one-star Google review.
Clara said she first took it for a joke, but the family grew frightened at the thought their food might actually have been tampered with and confronted the managers.
The culprit turned out to be a 17-year-old server who had been on the job only a few weeks. Clara says he went white, grew visibly nervous, and apologized, insisting the note was an inside joke with the chef. When he tried to throw the receipt away, she warned him she would call the police.
An apology, then a TikTok
The restaurant later apologized beneath her review, calling the behavior “absolutely inappropriate” and saying it in no way reflects the values and professional standards the business works to uphold. The server’s youth and brief tenure, management added, “does not diminish the gravity of what happened.”
The contrition was undercut days later when the restaurant’s TikTok account posted a video in which the owner played a demanding customer ordering a dish with “spit” — complete with a poll asking followers whether the teenage server should be fired.
“Sometimes it almost makes you laugh when you watch it, but this isn’t a laughing matter. It’s serious,” said Clara, who asked that her surname be withheld after receiving death threats and racist abuse online.
Reporting in this story is based on coverage by La Voce di Cesenatico and the New York Post. The photographs are stock file images, not photographs of the restaurant or meal described.
