Leafy Greens Trigger Illness - Sweetgreen, Manhattan Beach California

3200 North Sepulveda Boulevard, Manhattan Beach, 90266 California, United States

I occasionally frequent the Manhattan Beach Village location because it's close to our home and when the salad is made right, depending on the preparation, it's good. As a matter of fact, it's so good, we overlook the bad customer service.

During this particular visit, arriving on a Wednesday, October 16th around 7 pm.

I practice fasting at least 3 days a week and I sometimes break my 24 hr. fast with a salad from Sweetgreens once a week, so I literally had nothing in my stomach prior to eating the salad. I usually order a custom "build your own" and pay attention to the appearance and freshness of the mixed leafy greens. This time they looked rather limp. I also observed the romaine lettuce had brown spots around the edges either from oxidation or spoiling. My add-ons were pickled onions, apples, cabbage, and sweet potatoes. No meat or rice but a red wine vinegarette dressing. And now that I think about it, I noticed the taste was somehow different. I figured to just add more red wine vinegarette to mask the unusual taste and since I was hungry, I finished the whole thing.

3 hrs. later around 10:30pm that night right before bed, I began to feel pain in my stomach. The pain intensified progressively during the night till around 3am the vomiting, dizziness and diarrhea started and didn't cease till 10am that morning. I was so exhausted and weakened by all the stomach convulsions and retching I couldn't do anything but lie in bed dehydrated and losing an entire day's pay from work.

Honestly, it took me 3 days to recover from this incident leaving a very bad taste in my mouth at the thought of eating salad of any kind. This may sound extreme, but I somehow feel traumatized by this ordeal and the mere thought of eating a salad of any kind is repulsive.

I don't know what you can do about this but if I may reiterate what I said in my review on Yelp is for the managers and all team members at the very least get training or re-trained on the dangers of cross contamination and proper food handling. | Symptoms: Nausea, Diarrhea, Vomiting, Stomach Pain, Headache, Dizziness