A number of readers responded to last week's column on sending food back with one lingering concern: If I send something back to the kitchen, will the annoyed cook spit in my soup?

When you go to a restaurant, you are putting your trust in people you don't know to prepare your food. While I obviously can't guarantee that no chef will ever pollute anyone's meal, I believe that most cooks probably have too much respect for themselves and their profession to stoop to that level.

Whenever I talk to members of the food-service industry, I am reminded that most people become professional cooks because they love food and they love feeding people. They want diners to enjoy their food and to want to return to the restaurant. At good restaurants, staff often treat complaints as an opportunity to change someone's opinion about the restaurant.

Even when a staff member finds a customer incredibly annoying, he or she typically just wants to get that customer out of the restaurant as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Even if one cook was tempted to exact revenge on an infuriating customer, the constant presence of other cooks and supervisors is a formidable deterrent. They're a lot more likely to mock a customer and to talk about spitting in their food than actually doing so.

One final thought: If you're going to a restaurant where there's so much tension or lack of rapport between staff and guests that you're seriously concerned about what might happen to your food, why would you trust them to prepare it in the first place?

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