'Hold the toe cheese'
An assertion of unsanitary behavior inside a North Carolina restaurant might have been met with a shrug if there hadn’t been a twist to the situation. And even then, there were some strange specifics. A diner insisted that she saw a female employee sit down in the dining room of a restaurant in Winston-Salem and matter-of-factly whip out a nail clipper. But the gizmo wasn’t for her fingernails. Rather, the woman used the few minutes of downtime to trim her toenails, right there in the seating area.
The accusation might have been regarded as far-fetched if the customer hadn’t thought to take out her phone and videotape the personal grooming. Authorities had to acknowledge what happened, but said there was nothing they could do. Clipping one’s toenails in a dining room is not a violation of the health code, since the woman presumably washed her hands afterward and no food was in risk of contamination. Plus, the restaurant insisted that the woman was not an employee, but rather a relative visiting from Asia who did not grasp American norms.
Now, if she’d done the trimming in the kitchen, that would have been a different story, the authorities said. The incident was such a nothing to them that the name of the restaurant was withheld to prevent it from embarrassment or a backlash.