Revenge Is a Dish Best Served

Rata-EW-ille!

And every single person is a Slim Shady lurking
He could be working at Burger King, spitting on your onion rings

— Eminem, "The Real Slim Shady"

A subtrope of I Ate WHAT?!, this is when a person decides to get revenge on someone by tampering with their food. This can range from slipping in an ingredient that breaks a cultural taboo (giving pork to an observant Jew or Muslim, or meat in general to a committed vegetarian), to disgusting Black Comedy pranks involving overly intimate tampering (bodily fluids), all the way to tricking someone into committing Black Comedy Cannibalism (bonus points for a Familial Cannibalism Surprise).

Unlike the sister trope Tampering with Food and Drink, the added ingredient is not meant to cause physical harm to the victim, but rather to insult and disgust them. (That said, tampering in the form of bodily fluids can carry risks).

Completely unrelated to Best Served Cold, although they can overlap to make the full quote. See also Nemesis as Customer. Contrast Faked Food Contaminant.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Count Cain plays this absolutely for drama in Doctor Jezebel's backstory, showing him to have been a sensitive child who loved his pet lamb Snark, and hated to eat meat because he didn't like the thought of animals dying to sustain him. His father told him one night that he could see Snark if he polished off his dinner. Guess what his dinner was.
• In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders, after Kakyoin defeats Enfant Terrible Mannish Boy, the following morning he finishes him off by slipping a generous spoonful of his diaper's contents in his breakfast.
• In the Pokémon: The Series:
  • In the Advanced Battle episode "Hail to the Chef", Team Rocket enter a restaurant with the food prepared by a Sneasel. After Meowth starts exchanging insults with it, his dish is made painfully spicy.
  • Team Rocket fall victim to this again in a Sun and Moon episode. After finding out about the species Ribombee's edible Pollen Puffs, Jessie annoys a wild one by demanding it feed her. James reads through further data of the Pokemon, finding out the puffs also come in poison form to use against enemies. Cue Jessie twitching on the ground as the Ribombee merrily hovers away.
• Psychometrer Eiji: Commissioner Haneyama was so unbearable to Shima when she was a new recruit that she felt compelled to wring out the water from a dirty wet rug into his coffee.

Comedy

• One Eddie Murphy comedy concert had Murphy talking about how some people make fun of accent or appearance of the owners of Chinese restaurants. In the bit the owner retaliates by making a "special Won-ton soup" for the person insulting him.
• Billy Connolly did a bit about football violence where he told the story of a supporter of one of the archrival teams Rangers or Celtic (he didn't specify which one) who mistakenly went to the wrong end of the field one day and ended up standing among the opposition's supporters, who bully him into going and getting them a drink of Bovril whenever his team scores, forcing him to leave a shoe behind to ensure he comes back. Each time he returns, the bully has crapped in his shoe, and they force him to put it back on and stand there in abject misery with shoes full of shit until the game ends. While he's going home after the game he gets interviewed by a television crew from the BBC who are doing a story on football violence and want his opinion. Staring down the camera, the man declares "In my sincere opinion, football violence in this country will never end! Not as long as they are shitting in our shoes, and we are pissing in their Bovril!"

Comic Books

• Rat-Man author Leo Ortolani once made a spoof of the new Star Wars trilogy. The character Dark Mouse, a parody of Darth Maul, was asked by his master (an expy of Emperor Palpatine) about what evil deeds he did that day, and he answered: "Did you think it was beer in that glass I gave you before?". Some time later, the master replied: "Did you think the cake you ate before was a chocolate one?"
• In The Boys, The Female gets back at a young boy who stole her ice cream by managing to urinate into it from above while he's looking away.
• In Persepolis, for a while, the author has to wait tables in Austria. When one of the guests molests her, the cook sneakily avenges her by spitting on his schnitzel.
• In an issue of Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse, an epidemic of fatal Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong turns out to be due to an Eldritch Abomination working in a bar masturbating into customers' beer.
• In Sergio Aragonés' "A MAD Look at..." section based on the border control debate, one of the strips feature two friends at a diner, with one of them loudly talking about kicking Mexicans back to their country while eating. Then they turn around and see both cooks are visibly Mexican and are watching them eat with disturbingly smug smiles...

Fan Works

• In Harry Potter and the Dream Come True Harry puts a spoonful of dirt into his relatives' dinner before serving it to them.
• In Perfectly Abnormal Harry puts a spider in the pancake batter while making his relatives' breakfast.
• Harry Potter and the Lightning Scar:
  Kreacher, knowing this was his last opportunity to do battle against the "mongrel half-blood," had made what appeared to be a delicious breakfast—enough that Harry forgot who he was dealing with, and bit into an innocent-looking doughnut. Unfortunately, that doughnut happened to be filled, not with cream or jam, but with mayonnaise. Retching, Harry tried to wash the taste out of his mouth with what looked like pumpkin juice, but which was in fact carefully-diluted muddy rainwater.
• In the Calm Before the Storm side story of The Conversion Bureau Theother Side Of The Spectrum, TCB!Big Macintosh reveals he once fed something to Diamond Tiara that gave her food poisoning as retaliation for her calling Applebloom the product of incest.
• In Lovegood, Boobs Gooder Harry once had to serve the cake at his cousin's birthday party and licked or spit on every piece he handed out.
• Honey:
  Ginny: I know. Ron? The time when you and Neville fused yourselves, and I let Malfoy in? I'm sorry about that.
  Ron: I'm not sorry I got revenge by putting boogers in your dinner the next night.

Film

• In Little Monsters, Brian's monster friend Maurice takes him on a tour of his nightly pranks. For the last house (a bully's house—by request), Maurice switches out the tuna salad in the bully's lunch with cat food and the apple juice with fresh urine. Next day, during lunch, Brian is audience to the hilarity.
• Problem Child 2 has Junior doing this with a pitcher of lemonade that he was asked to refill by two snotty twin girls running a lemonade stand. He tops off the lemonade by peeing in it. Naturally the father of the snotty twin girls buys a glass and drinks it, describing it as tangy.
• In Waiting..., a "beeyotch" makes the mistake of pissing off the waitstaff. Her food is... enhanced, so to speak. And made so that she doesn't even know what she's eating. For the morbidly curious: The cooks put pubic hair, dandruff, and spit on her food. One guy even rubs the garlic bread in his pants and all over his penis and testicles.
• In The Help a maid who's been unjustly fired gives her ex-employer a "chocolate" pie. When the victim discovers what she'd really been eating, her own mother finds it hilarious.
• Road Trip: a pretty Jerkass cook licks the sugar off some toast and shits on it before giving it back, in revenge for Kyle (the Butt-Monkey of the companions) asking (pretty politely, in an inversion of Unsatisfiable Customer) to remove the sugar. The funnier/more Squicky part is that Kyle never notices this has been done, and actually likes the taste of the toast.
• In The Color Purple (1985), Seeley spits in a drink before giving it to Mister.
• Implied in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy with a restaurant called Escupimos en su Alimento, which is Spanish for "We spit in your food".
• Fight Club:
  • There are several references to people urinating or worse into food.
    "Tyler was now involved in a class action lawsuit against the Pressman Hotel over the urine content of their soup."
  • Later in the movie:
    The Narrator: [after Marla orders clam chowder] Clean food, please.
    Fight Club Member: In that case, may I advise against the lady eating the clam chowder.
• In Fruit Chan's Little Cheung, a disgruntled prostitute drops a used tampon in her pimp's cup of tea, and he drinks it without noticing.
• Beethoven: George and Alice are having lunch with some potential investors for their business. Brad, one of the investors, partonisingly asks "Alecia" to refill his lemonade to stop her asking questions about the contract they're offering. While refilling the drink, Alice takes a quick sip and spits it back into the glass before handing it to Brad.

Jokes

• There's a joke about explorers who get Captured by Cannibals and subsequently Stewed Alive. One explorer starts laughing and explains to the other that he just pissed in the soup.
• A lawyer is given the window seat on a flight from Chicago to New York, sitting next to two doctors. Once the plane has reached cruising altitude, the lawyer undoes his shoes, leaving them under the seat in front of him. When after 30 minutes the lawyer has to go to the lavatory, one of the doctors sniggers to the other as he picks up one of the lawyer's shoes and deposits a drawing pin inside, putting it back on the floor. The lawyer comes back and offers the doctors a cup of water each, which they accept. After another 30 minutes, the lawyer visits the toilet again, and the second doctor picks up the other shoe and places a thumbtack inside, before he puts it back down. Again, the lawyer returns and offers the doctors some water. When the pilot announces the start of the descent into JFK, the lawyer slips his feet into his shoes and winces, before taking the tacks out and turning to the doctors, saying "How juvenile can you get? You put thumbtacks in my shoes, and I pissed in your cups of water. We're supposed to be professionals here."

Literature

• Margot from And Then I Turned Into a Mermaid works at her mum's fish and chips shop, where she blows snot bubbles into the gravy of customers who offend her.
• Discworld: A certain class of upper-class snobs like to label their alcohol backwards (so that whiskey is read as "yeksihw" and port as "trop") to prevent their servants from stealing sips from the bottles. In response, the butlers top the bottles up with "eniru" after they've had their fill.
• In re-prints of the novel Fight Club, Palahniuk adds a foreword. In it, he notes that many ex-waiters told him that tampering with food was Truth in Television, including one man who claimed to be a former waiter at a 5-star London restaurant who bragged that Margaret Thatcher had eaten his semen five times.
• In The Help, a servant does this to her employer. Let's just say, it's a chocolate cake, and what she puts into it is brown. She later tells the employer what, exactly, it was. And that's why you should never be mean to the people who cook your food. (Or accept food from people you treated horribly.)
• In I Love Lemonade, Quirky Turkey wants revenge on Little Baa Baa so he puts Billy's pee in some lemonade and serves it to the sheep, claiming it cost money but was free to sheep. However, Quirky Turkey added "and turkeys" and ended up drinking it himself. Little Baa avoids it because he believes it looks like pee, but Quirky Turkey had forgotten it had pee in it and seeing as it was free to turkeys, he drank it.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: Lord Manderley serves meat pies to the Frey and Bolton lords who were responsible for his son's death. Roose Bolton is very careful not to eat the pies until Manderley has some himself. The pies are secretly made with slain Frey noblemen.
• This is how Rock in The Stormlight Archive gets sent to the bridge crews. "I may have, uh, enhanced the soup".
  Teft: Wait, you put chull dung in Highprince Sadeas's soup?
  Rock: Er, yes... Actually I put this thing in his bread too. And used it as a garnish on the pork steak. And made a chutney out of it for the buttered garams. Chull dung, it has many uses, I found.
• The Twits has Mrs. Twit serve her husband worms, calling it pasta.
• In The Witches, while the unnamed boy protagonist (named Luke in the 1990 film) is infiltrating the hotel kitchen for some food-based revenge of his own, he sees several waitstaff "tenderize" the steak of a rude diner by all spitting on it.
• In re-prints of the novel Fight Club, Palahniuk adds a foreword. In it, he notes that many ex-waiters told him that tampering with food was Truth in Television, including one man who claimed to be a former waiter at a 5-star London restaurant who bragged that Margaret Thatcher had eaten his semen five times. His subsequent novel Choke has a character based on that waiter, complete with soup urination.
• In Trainspotting (book only), a girl jobbing in a restaurant is hit on by some English Jerkass tourists. She retaliates by putting all kinds of squicky stuff in their food.

Live-Action TV

• In The Big Bang Theory Penny brings this up several times when the guys have her as their waitress at the Cheesecake Factory.
  Penny: OK, so the usual, with extra spit on Sheldon's hamburger.
• In the Friends episode "The One With the Racecar Bed", Rachel admits to sneezing in the drinks she serves to people who don't tip her sufficiently. When Joey later starts working at Central Perk she passes on several pieces of advice including serving "sneeze muffins" to rude customers.
• Subverted in an episode of Trailer Park Boys, when Bubbles falsely tells Barb Lahey that the hot dog she is eating (home-made by Sam Losco) had been 'licked by cats', in order to ruin Sam's date with Barb.
• Seinfeld: George serves scrambled eggs secretly laced with lobster to Jerry's girlfriend, revealing it after she ate... many people would love this combination (she does until she finds out what it was), but she follows a kosher diet. This is his revenge for her telling his girlfriend about his "shrinkage".
• Game of Thrones:
  • When Tyrion Lannister is on trial for murder, he sarcastically confesses to a bunch of misdeeds from his childhood. One of them was jerking off in his older sister's soup. He hopes she ate it.
  • Arya serves a meat pie filled with Walder Frey's sons to the man himself, just before slashing his throat and killing him.
• Frasier:
  • In "Agents in America, Part III," Daphne gets back at Bebe for treating her like a servant by tricking her into eating a dog treat that she passed off as a cookie.
  • Roz does this on Julia Wilcox's first day at KACL after Julia rudely demanded coffee and called her "Rizzo". Julia takes a sip and immediately spits it back out.
    Julia: You call this coffee?
    Roz: [smiling] Most of it.
• Full House: At the Smash Club, after Gia is overly rude to Kimmy while ordering, Kimmy mutters "That's one cappuccino I'll be spitting in," when she gets behind the counter. She serves the drink as a "Gibbler Special," prompting Stephanie to tell Gia, "You don't want to drink that."
• Millennium: In "Somehow Satan Got Behind Me", a waiter urinates in the coffee served to a Grumpy Old Man. The old man realises the moment he drinks it and approves of such a petty vile act, because he's actually a demon.
• On Mystery Diners, a waitress with an attitude problem is affronted by a cutomer who tells her his order isn't right. Enraged that she has to get a fresh burger set up, back in the kitchen this fat sweaty waitress deliberately puts the burger bun inside her top, rubbing it against her breast and armpit before returning it to the plate — and serving the hapless customer.

Mythology & Religion

• In Egyptian Mythology, there is a myth where someone mixes Horus' semen with the dressing for a salad prepared for Set in revenge for Set's rape of Horus as a boy/young adolescent. (The idea being that by eating Horus' semen, Set was effectively raped by Horus.) The ancient Egyptian sources disagree as to whether it was Horus himself who did this or if it was his mother Isis, but either way it makes the trope Older Than Dirt. (Also, this is apparently why lettuce contains that milky latex, as the salad in question was lettuce-based.)^note The Egyptians generally connected lettuce with male fertility, both because of the latex and because the leaves themselves are so straight and hard (if the lettuce is romaine, which was what they had).
• Classical Mythology:
  • Thyestes, brother of King Atreus of Mycenae, was secretly having an affair with Atreus' wife Aerope. When Atreus discovered the affair, he found two of Thyestes' sons, butchered them, and served them at a feast for Thyestes. After thoroughly enjoying the meal, Atreus informed Thyestes of the secret ingredient, and Thyestes cursed Atreus.
  • From the same mythology, we have Procne and Philomela. They are sisters, but Procne's husband starts to lust after Philomela and rapes her then tears out her tongue so she wouldn't be able to tell the tale... so Philomela weaves it into a tapestry and shows it to Procne. Together, they kill Procne's son by her husband and serve him for dinner to punish the husband. When the husband tries to kill them both, Zeus turns all three into birds (the guy was obviously nasty, but killing and cooking a child was not something Zeus could forgive.)
  • The versions of Lycaon's story where Lycaon had a daughter, Kallisto (who was once raped by Zeus then turned into a bear) as well as his sons say the boy Lycaon served for dinner to the visiting and disguised Zeus was Kallisto's son because Lycaon wanted to punish Zeus for what he did to Kallisto. Zeus was having none of it and this is why we call werewolves lycanthropes.
• One origin myth for El Dorado states that a jealous Muisca chief killed his wife's lover and tricked his wife into eating his heart by claiming it was the heart of a deer. Upon learning the truth, she drowned herself and her daughter in Lake Guatavita. Thereafter the remorseful chief made yearly sacrifices of gold into the lake, which evolved into a coronation ceremony where the new chief would be covered in gold dust (becoming El Dorado, "the gilded one") and dive into the lake to rinse it off.

Professional Wrestling

• In the WWF in 2001, Commissioner William Regal drank some tea which Chris Jericho had urinated in. He found the taste... interesting.
• The Big Bossman fed Al Snow his (Snow's) pet chihuahua Pepper as "Pepper Steak."
• At one point, Earthquake crushed Jake "the Snake"'s pet boa, then served it as "Quakeburgers" to the commentators. Bobby Heenan was the only one to realize what they were eating before it was too late. He still ate it, being a Heel.

Theatre

• The final act of Titus Andronicus has the title character serving Tamora her own sons as vengeance for what they did to his daughter Lavinia on her orders. Shakespeare was no doubt inspired by the Thyestes example from Mythology above.

Video Games

• In Half-Life, the player has the option of exploding a fellow scientist's microwave casserole. This becomes a Brick Joke in episode two.
• Sleeping Dogs (2012): After Winston is killed during his wedding, his mother asks you to bring one of the killers identified in the massacre. When done, she proceeds to torture him until he reveals that "Dog-eyes" Lin was the mastermind. Later on, she asks you to bring him into the restaurant too, where she proceeds to feed him some soup before revealing that it was made with flesh from the killer. As you leave them, she proceeds to take her cleaver again.

Webcomics

• Unsounded: Sette happily reminisces about the time a man in her father's gang played a cruel prank on her, so she cut up his beloved pet rat and snuck it into his stew.
  Sette: [flashback] Her final thoughts were of youuu~~

Web Animation

• Lacey Games: Played for Horror. After Lacey snaps in the bad ending, she makes the day's special...something containing things like broken glass, cigarettes, and cockroaches and feeds it to the customers. It's unclear if they survive this.
• Revenge Films:
  • "My drink kept getting stolen, so I swapped out the inside for a disgusting sauce…": Fed up with Karen stealing her matcha latte cups whenever she brought them to work, the OP replaces the contents of her next cup with a disgusting mixture of sauces from her house to punish her. As a result, she ends up throwing up on her brand-new laptop before she could even use it.
  • "I made a secret plan to catch the thief who was stealing everything in the office": Amber and her coworkers were fed up with Karen stealing their possessions, so they concocted a plan to get back at her by speaking about a special diet tea in Amber's locker. As expected, Karen overheard them and went to the locker to drink the alleged tea, only to cough and gag it out as it turned out to be undiluted vinegar.

Western Animation

• South Park:
  • In "Scott Tenorman Must Die", Cartman is out to get revenge on a teenage boy named Scott Tenorman who tricked Cartman into buying his pubes. Scott tries to humiliate Cartman by tricking him into publicly eating chili containing pubes. But it turns out Cartman's plan was far more sinister, as he tricked Scott into eating chili containing his parents' ground-up corpses.
  • In the episode "You're Not Yelping", the local restaurant owners become sick of the Yelp reviewers in the town abusing them under threat of leaving bad reviews of their restaurants and get back at them by leaving little bits of their bodily fluids in the Yelpers' food.
• Family Guy:
  • While Peter uses spy equipment on an restaurant, he hears Mort muttering to himself "Please don't spit in my eggs." and then one cook bragging to another that "I just spit in this guys eggs." There doesn't seem to be any element of payback here, just a cook being an asshole.
  • Parodied in "The Kiss Seen Around the World": Neil and Meg are both interns as the same news station, and Neil gets jealous of the attention Meg pays to news anchor Tom Tucker, so he puts "something" in Tucker's coffee. That "something" turns out to be Sweet-n-Low. When Tucker finds out, he angrily throws the cup, as he had ordered Neil to fill it with urine.
  • A variation is shown in "the King is Dead." Peter takes over from Lois in directing and producing The King and I but, instead of staying true to the original story, he starts introducing various anachronistic and nonsensical elements because he thinks they're better. To make a point, Lois makes him "french toast" but instead of following the recipe she makes it using a bunch of random food items.
• American Dad!: In one episode, Hayley makes the decision to test Roger to see if he cares about anything after she gets tired of his selfishness and jerkassery. She does this test by purchasing his home star and pretending to be its queen. She keeps on annoying Roger with her queenly claims until Roger responds in a way she wanted to all while saying that she won. Roger then decides to get revenge on Hayley for testing him by killing a goat that Hayley donated to an African family and then butchering it and serving it to Hayley and the Smith family for dinner, all while disguising the dish as a lamb dish and then subtle telling Hayley what she was eating by telling her that the dish was "similar to lamb".
• Steven Universe: In "Joking Victim", Sadie learns Lars was faking an injury to get off work, and Steven offers her some "fire salt" to get even. She dumps a ton of the stuff on a donut and offers it to Lars when he comes in to work the next day, but it backfires when it turns out Sadie used so much fire salt it makes Lars spit actual fire, on top of nearly choking.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: A health inspector comes in and uses his credentials to get everything on the Krusty Krab menu without paying. When the kitchen TV broadcasts a news story about health inspector frauds, Krabs and SpongeBob go overboard on creating the Nasty Patty, including highlights like throwing it in the toilet and wiping it off with sweaty gym socks. For some reason, the 'health inspector' doesn't notice the green pustules on the bun just as the TV announces they caught the actual health inspector fraud. The good news is, the health inspector doesn't eat the Nasty Patty. The bad news is, what he does eat nearly kills him...

Real Life

• There is an urban legend in the UK about somebody getting sacked by McDonald's for masturbating in a burger.
• One incident that got on a "restaurants from hell" style TV show was where a cook was caught on CCTV urinating into the jar of tomato sauce and then using it to create takeaway pizzas.
• A high school student jizzed into a bottle of ranch, which was subsequently used by various people.
• A disgruntled coworker was caught on hidden camera urinating into the office coffee pot.
• Cracked, ever the helpful kind, gives us these horror stories.
• Piss off a bartender and then ask them to make you something good (best done while drunk as shit half an hour before last call) and you may wind up getting a "cement mixer" (a shot of Irish cream followed by a shot of lemon juice; the acidity makes the Irish cream curdle and then stick to the drinker's teeth) or, if you really make them angry, "suicide sludge" or "Jersey Turnpike" (the vile mixture that gets collected in the bar mats poured into a shot glass and sold at a premium price).
• There's the classic "spit in your food" from restaurant workers who get annoyed by an irate customers, though this is not as common as one may think due to cameras being everywhere.

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