[Shimmer]

Standing next to the opening oven door. You should see my scar.

And yes, Virginia, skin does in fact bubble when you get a third degree burn.

Of course, the burn also killed the nerves, so it didn't start hurting for a week.

Bad combo- hot things and an absentminded chef....

~~Shimmer~~

[chefjohnpaul]

Never order flambe' from a Maitre'D with no eye brows

One of our broiler cooks tossed an entire bottle of lighter fluid on the mesquite one day. It took a while for facial hair to grow back, he looked like he had a really bad sunburn for weeks. Of course the joke was that his cooking was measured on the Scoville scale.

[CWK]

Cream cucmber soup. Dare I say more?
Bill

[ross]

okay, i can top it, all...beleive me almost nothing can top this,
okay, we have ovens with their own hood systems, like a combi, and im placing ducks in to render on convection, well something drew my attention away, you know busy friday night and im int the back of a show kitchen, running food to the line studs, so i basically walked away, well the battered digital oven ran on convection at four hundred, way too hot, and burned the ducks, no problem, except the hood systems all have an accompanying fire detection system, which isnt a problem , you know the alarm goes off and you shut the dam thing down, well there is a hitch , see im in a resort here, its late, almost ten oclock at night, and all three of our restaurants are full, with a wait, and the resorts three hundred rooms are sold out to full capacity, so now, as this dumn sh*t new guys sets off the smoke alarms, every guest must be evacuated fifty yards from the resort, and all gas shut off, mandatory visit from the fire department and police with their accompanying ambulances. well after the fireman go in and go over the system and talk witht the chefs and managers and explain what happen, everyone is free to go back in and recook all the now free food for the twoo hundred pissed off free wine drinking diners, the chef was impressed with my work ethic and decided to let me live and keep my job...i wont tell what i had to do to keep it but the chefs and all told everyone that dust in the elevator shaft set off the alarm . that was two years ago, everyone that worked in the resort has gone, i remain, and in the time i have been there, i have never ever agin, burnt a single thing.

[chefjohnpaul]

I know the smoke problems, at the Hyatt we had a ventilation shaft leak and whenever we smoked chicken in the mesquite broiler the hotel fire alarm would go off and the fire dept would come. We finaly got it fixed but I suggested to the GM at the time that we should take a pic with the fire dept and run an ad for Hyatt's famous "5 Alarm Chicken". Well,......I thought it was funny....

[chrose]

I used to work at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC. Now mind you this is a landmark hotel in DC having been built in the 1800's and hosting something like every inaugeral ball except 1 since then. The hotel has been upgraded in many areas but it is still old. I remember walking to the room service office in the kitchen and walking past a small trap door in the venilation dust that ran across the low ceiling. The trap door had opened from the weight of a dead rat that had been there for awhile and was apparently stuck to the door. Nice picture.
But one afternoon as the banquet kitchen was preparing for a large late afternoon party a legendary August thunderstorm downpour came across the area and dumped on us. Why this time and not before I don't know, but the rain filled all the air vents, duct work, fire damper systems etc and poured down on the hot line. Dumping water into the ovens, stoves, hot fryers. Grease was exploding everywhere, pans of food were flooding, the power was shut down and the fire department of course showed. Nothing more than another delay. It all got cleaned up the party went off almost as planned a little late. Luckily my kitchen was spared so I could sit back and watch the fireworks.

[pollyg]

One day we were getting ready for a special winemakers dinner at work.
The first dish was a seafood consomme. We had been lovingly preparing it over two days. Vegetables and spices carefully sauteed, lots of skimming, flavour bases made seperately and added, clarification, the whole deal.
Twenty minutes before the dinner was to be served the head chef somehow knocked over the whole pot . Everyone in the kitchen stopped and stared as we watched the rich red liquid ooze toward the back door. I think I even went to grab the dustpan and brush, such was my desire to save some of the beautiful soup, though it only took another split second to register that you can't serve soup that has been on the floor, let alone in a dustpan.
In total silence everyone began cutting up veg and looking for fish stock really quickly.
We managed to make a pretty nice fish broth in the remaining 15 minutes and everyone was secretly glad that it was the head chef who knocked the soup over, otherwise our lives would have been ****.
As it was, he didn't let us joke about it for a week.

[Pete]

We had a dishwasher who once threw out 9 gallons of lobster consumme, because he thought that it was dirty water left from cleaning the steam kettle.

[Pete]

Another time, we were having a very VIP party. The wife of the guest of honor brought in a cake, so I put it in the beer & wine cooler which is kept locked most of the night and is accessed by only a few people. Well, we warned all the bartenders, but I forgot to warn one of the owners. Later that night I walked in to the cooler to find the top of the cake smashed. As I related my finding to one of the owners, his face grew pale, and in a quite voice admitted to being the one who sat on it. He had gone into the cooler to take stock of the dessert wines and while doing so sat on what he thought was a case of wine. He felt it sag a little but thought nothing of it until I told him what happened. The cake was beyond repair so our only option was to cut pieces of it and plate it on our oversized glass platters (each 4 feet long). By the time we were done no one, except the wife, knew what had happened.

[cape chef]

Petes dishwasher post made me think of something a new cook did many years agos. Now this guy had zero expereance, The sous chef in the kitchen needed a bushel of little neck clams washed and scrubed for a raw bar. He gave them to this new guy and told him the wash the clams, he procceded to dump the buchel of clams into a silverware dishwashing flat and he ran it through the commercial dish machine!!! Well, the clams sure were clean, and the chowder we made from the dish water wasn't to bad either.

[henry]

This is not earth-shattering, but I always smile when I think of it.

My son got a job at Arby's when he was 15 1/2. When he was still very new, someone ordered a cup of coffee. He got them a cup from the big coffee urn on the counter. Later the customer came back, told him the stuff was tasty, but it wasn't coffee--and could he have some coffee. Turns out it was the "au jus" that they'd put in the coffee urn to keep it warm.
Another time, same Arby's, there was an older lady employee (of course his standard of older could mean late 20's), was filling the ketchup spigot during a busy lunch time. Her container was an open bucket of ketchup. On the way back to the kitchen, surrounded by customers, she slipped. She tried to catch the ketchup bucket but it went up as she went down. My son saw it and said it was surreal and like in slow motion as the ketchup container came down, some customers tried to help the lady, but the container hit the floor, ketchup flew out splashing the customers, the counter, all over the floor, and even some hit the cieling.

H.

[Pastachef]

My kitchen disaster was when a girl at the sorority house left her pet fish in a styrofoam cup next to the dishwasher while she ran upstairs to get something. Along comes the housekeeper, who, unknowingly, dumped the cup in the garbage disposal. I heard this yelling, crying little girl, saying, "You didn't!" and the houskeeper saying, "I did!" I ran over to te disposal and found that thankfully the housekeeper hadn't turned it on yet. The girl fled to her room, crying. I had the housekeeper keep dumping cold water down the disposal while I fished around for the fish. I finally felt the poor thing squirming as I sifted hrough the garbage. Out came a healthy and unharmed fish. The girls all laughed, and ran upstairs to get the fish's owner. Happy ending

[ChefDan09]

Originally Posted by chefjohnpaul

I'll start, when I first started with Hyatt, many a year ago, I wanted so hard to please the chef so I volunteered to make a big batch of carrot mousse (the warm kind, poached in timbale) I ruined 25 pounds of carrots by purreeing the mixture using cold
manufacturing cream. Two buckets full of whipped cream with chunks of carrots, OUCH! Things only got better from that point as you can imagine.

ruined? dude, all you had to do was heat it up and melt the cream down.

<EDITED FOR OFFENSIVE CONTENT>

[Chef Robert]

Well, I was 13 and my Dad tasked me with doing nothing for our mother’s birthday dinner. I was sitting on the couch and then my mother had an issue with the computer and so he walked over to the computer to help out (angrily) and told me to cook the friend rice.

I was ok with that because I know how to make it. The issue was, I forgot how long I was supposed to cook it for. I ended up cooking it for ten minutes and then I asked him if I should stop. No. Another ten minutes. No. Another ten. No.

He fixed the problem and then walked over and screamed that I had overcooked the fried rice. L

Another time I was making miso soup and then it boiled over and I cried and dumped it down the drain.

[AngeliaB]

wow you all have brightened my day with these stories, and just to let you know there is a book about this kind of stuff called Dont try this at home. Its all stories by a bunch of famous chefs about accidents they have had in the kitchen..