the biggest mess in your kitchen???

A walk-in cooler full of seafood that had been without power for a month during the aftermath of hurricane katrina was fouler than the foulest thing I can imagine.   It was awful.

This probably won't come close but I personally knocked over a large cart with 10 600 pans on it each one full of water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, japanese green chives and various other Asian stir fry ingredients. The entire mess covered the line from one end to the other, not really hard to clean up but certainly a big mess and a huge waste of product. The whole thing happened in slow motion.  

Makes one hell of a stir fry

Pickles. 5 gallons of pickles everywhere in the cooler. Everything we cooked smelled like pickles for a week. 

ice in the deep fryer-20 litre bucket into 2 fryers middle of service, yankee and kiwi chefs disagreeing , both big guys ,cant remember who threw the ice but i was kitchenhand and the place was shut down for 40 mins whilst me and another guy cleaned it and the chefs smoked and the guests waited!

This one was a co-worker me, Our Sysco delivery is late...again, and with it our fryer oil (should have had back up I know) he decides to change the fryer oil while its hot. He dumps the oil into a 60 Gal stock pot and instead of using another for the water that he scrubbed the fryer with, he just empties the drain right into the hot oil. Hot oil + cold water=big A** mess, under the fryer, the grill, the pantry station, everywhere. Took about an hour to put down the absorbent, sweep and mop, mop, mop, mop
 

The biggest mess in my kitchen, by far and quite consistently, is my food and beverage mana

ger when he tries to help.

He thinks he's an awesome cook, but he cooks the way old people have sex.....slow and sloppy.

Plate racks above the line stations to 'warm' the serving plates... easy access from the serving side so the dish-dogs can put them back up and not get in the lines way.

Great big kid with arms the size of a gorilla brings out two huge stacks of plates... goes to put them up on the warming rack above the pass... and knocks them all off his side onto the line side taking out the stacks near his 'new' stack.   Probably about 9 dozen plates, pasta bowls and other assorted tableware fall off onto the stainless line side.

Shards of china everywhere, line cooks with cuts, every thing with an open cover on the line side potentially contaminated.

Took over an hour to clean up with all hands on deck - everything had to be remade and all mis redone and reset.  Middle of a service of course.

The kid didn't mean it and honestly wasn't told that there was no "back" to the shelf or even a rail - he still works for us and has endured the nickname "Crash" for a long while, he's starting his first line position in a week or so.

OMG I remember that day so clearly.... what a disaster.

I spent 10 years in the military and i've seen bombs go off that cause less disaster.

PS - we now have a 'rail' that prevents people from sliding things off either side of the plate rack.