When eating at a restaurant, have you ever encountered hard raw/undercooked onions diced into the sauce?

Asked by Buttonstc (27605) August 25th, 2015 from iPhone

There was a recent question regarding tipping waitstsff which brought this situation to my memory.

There is a nearby favorite restaurant/diner where the vast majority of the cooking is from scratch (not microwaved frozen crap) and usually really good.

They have a number of menu items with tomato sauce (variations on spaghetti, etc.) and from time to time and far more frequently than I care to, I encounter chunks of raw onions among the rest of the sauce which is properly cooked. It appears that these were presumably added after the majority of the sauce has already been simmered properly(perhaps trying to extend the sauce?) because they are so hard and unpleasant to encounter.

This irks me to a degree I can’t adequately describe and necessitates the dish being sent back and my ordering something else entirely.

Obviously I’ll still tip the waitress my usual 20+ percent since it’s clearly a kitchen problem. But there is really no effective way to make the kitchen bear the consequence, unfortunately.

Am I the only one who thinks that raw onions are for salads where you expect them to be hard and crisp, NOT in a slow simmered sauce?

I can’t understand WHY cooks would do this. If you need to add to the sauce because you’re running low, then why not purée the hell out of those onions before dumping them in?

Of course I’ve made certain to mention this to the manager and even the owner (who is on premise frequently enough and will often stop by tables to see how things are going.)

But it still keeps happening. Not every time, of course, but often enough so that i’m just extremely reluctant to order anything with tomato sauce (even tho their Eggplant Parm. is so delicious).

Am I just being overly fussy to expect an absence of uncooked or undercooked onion chunks in tomato sauce?

Or would you be irked by it as well? Have you ever encountered this in any of the places you frequent?