Food/Restaurant/Cooking Hijinks and Horror Stories

[johnsmith45678]

Over the years I worked in restaurants, I saw and participated in a lot of experiences that added to the fun, the hilarity, and the horror. Off the top of my head:

- One old man was notorious for sending his soup back because it wasn't hot enough. During one episode after which he still sent it back a couple of times after it had spent many mintues in an oven cranked to 500F, the chef drained some of the (French Onion) soup off and ladled in oil from the deep fryer. The soup didn't come back and the Maitre'd said it took the man about 20 minutes to eat the soup!

- We used to empty out eggs, fill the shells with food coloring, and splatter each other with the intent of maximum coverage. Various body parts would be colored for days.

- Untold number of food fights, with a wide variety of foods.

- We also used to cover the kitchen telephone ear piece with honey and other various substances, then call that phone from the chef's office.

- One GM was always unpleasant to the sous chef. As a result, he usually got an extra serving of phlegm in his Caesars salads.

- One time I had swept up a large pile of stuff from the kitchen floor. One of the chefs took a prime rib out of the oven and set it on a garbage can, from which it fell shortly thereafter - right on top of my pile of garbage. The same GM was right there and told me to brush the prime rib off and place it on the counter (from where it was subsequently served). I've witnessed quite a few other applications of the "five-second rule" over the years.

- One time we took anchovy paste (which was brown and also looks rather nasty) and decorated the toilet and bathroom with it. The dishwasher who had to clean it up was quite upset and was convinced it was sh*t.

- We used to send new bussers off to find the "napkin folding machine." It usually took them tens of minutes to half an hour before they figured out there was no such thing. We also used to send new dishwashers off to find some plate polishing machine (or something like that).

- Loading up various employees' meals with various hot spices.

I feel there's a ton more I'm forgetting - in just about every place, cooking seemed secondary to pulling pranks. Please share yours!

[McDuff]

I tapped out lines of flour one night and convinced a waitress it was really good blow.

A dead rat in a take out container for another waitress.

The elliptical breaded cardboard passed off as veal parm, which caused a fistfight.

the toilet covered with cling wrap.

the shoes and pants strategically placed in a stall in the men's room, which had the manager wondering for hours.

the raw egg slipped into the pan of cooling hard boiled eggs.

[chefpeon]

'K.

Here's my best.

I've told this one quite a while ago, so here it is in "re-run".

I worked in a deli/bakery/cake shop a few years ago, and I was the pastry chef in charge of the high end desserts, cakes, and wedding cakes. We made our cake layers with a specialty bakers hi-ratio shortening called "Fluid Flex". The stuff LOOKS and FEELS just like Vaseline. I marveled at this. Then I had a great idea, just before I hired an assistant to help me in the busy season. They were coming right out of pastry school, and I was pretty sure this trick would work.

I tore the labels off one of the Fluid Flex buckets, and, washed the outside well. Since working with Photoshop is one of my hobbies, I created a brand new label that said, "Baker's Vaseline" with the whole Vaseline font and logo. I added stuff in like, "not for sale to the general public" and "petroleum.....baker's friend since 1919"......etc. The label looked totally authentic. Then I re-typed the sponge cake recipes, and replaced the words "Fluid Flex" with "Baker's Vaseline".

A few days after my assistant had worked in the shop and was fairly well oriented, I asked her to make me a big batch of sponge cakes. I showed her the recipe book and flipped to the correct page. She went about scaling her ingredients, and we all were watching her face very closely.

She got to the part about the Baker's Vaseline. She kind of did a double take and then, with book in hand, came up to ask me, "Where is, uh, the "Baker's VASELINE?!?!?", So I said, "Right over here!" and pointed out the bucket. She was pretty intimidated, this being her first real bakery job and all, so she took the bucket, with a very strange look and scaled it out. You could see her growing disgust as she handled it and also read the entire label. When she was putting the cakes in the oven, she managed to say, "I never learned about using petroleum products in school.......is this a new thing?? I mean, it's really............edible?" I said, "No, it's not new....been using it for years....never had a complaint! Maybe your chef just didn't keep up to date with the industry....."

We led her on for a few days. When it came time for her to split, fill and ice up some of the cakes she had baked, we cut into one, just to "make sure" she'd done it right. We all gobbled into a piece and offered her some....of course, she said "No thanks...."

That's when I let her in on the secret of "Fluid Flex". Dragged out a bucket with the real label.

The look of relief was priceless!

[suseyblue]

'K. 

That's when I let her in on the secret of "Fluid Flex". Dragged out a bucket with the real label.

The look of relief was priceless!

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How sure are you it *wasn't* vaseline? :lol: Does Rose Berenbaum use this stuff?

[chefpeon]

How sure are you it *wasn't* vaseline? :lol: Does Rose Berenbaum use this stuff?

No, I'm sure RLB doesn't use Fluid Flex, and has probably never used Fluid Flex.

Perhaps I'm "blasphemous" for even saying it makes a moist tender cake. But it does.

But you know, home bakers are constantly wondering why they can't make a cake like

the "bakery" does. Well, I'll tell ya, that's one of the "secrets".

[Sugarella]

- One GM was always unpleasant to the sous chef. As a result, he usually got an extra serving of phlegm in his Caesars salads.

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An extra serving? Why, what was the usual serving?

[johnsmith45678]

- One GM was always unpleasant to the sous chef. As a result, he usually got an extra serving of phlegm in his Caesars salads.

←

An extra serving? Why, what was the usual serving?

←

Usually the same. ;P

We also did the plastic wrap and stuffed pants and boots on the toilet. At the same place with the cranky old dishwasher - he kept coming back up saying some SOB was camped out on the toilet.

Another time some busboy mixed together bleach and ammonia (= chlorine gas!) - he had to go to the hospital and the kitchen had to be evacuated while it aired out.

[deltadoc]

- One GM was always unpleasant to the sous chef. As a result, he usually got an extra serving of phlegm in his Caesars salads.

At a restaurant I worked in during high school, the fry cook almost waited in anticipation (as we all did) every Friday night, some guy out in the parking lot (we had carhops in those days) would always send his cheeseburger back and say it wasn't cooked enough.

The SOP for dealing with this was to scrape off the old cheese, put the patty back on the flat grill, flip it a couple of times, and then the fry cook would put his cleared throat "chef's surprise" onto the patty, then covered it with a new piece of cheese. He'd use the spatula to spatula some grease onto the cheese to melt it onto the patty good.

Re-wrapped the cheeseburger and then we all ran to the side window to watch the carhop redeliver the special cheeseburger to this guy. This happened almost every Friday night for several years that I worked there.

We cracked up laughing so hard.

However....I never send food back when eating out!!! And if I do complain, its always AFTER I eat, and then I make sure I never go back to that restaurant again!

doc

[jsmith]

I don’t have much experience working in restaurants, but several years ago I was paid under the table as a dishwasher in a now closed restaurant. Three incidents stick out in my mind:

I would start work an hour or two after service began, frequently arriving to a huge pile of dirty dishes in the sink. I would wash like crazy and after about two hours I would be caught up and just dealing with new dishes. I came in to this one day. A couple hours later I reach the bottom of the sink and what do I find but a bowl of prawns (put there to defrost and long forgotten about). I showed them to the chef… he took one look at them, rinsed them off, and threw them in a frying pan, eventually ending up on someone’s plate. I guess the cooking would kill most bacteria, but I had been washing dishes over them for two hours, plus the time they spent before I got there.

Another time all the chef was making a sauce in a frying pan. All the burners were in use, and he needed one so he took the frying pan off the stove, put it on the floor (uncovered of course) and left it there for five minutes while we busily rushed around it.

Another time (still same place) he butchered a large piece of meat beside the area where the dishes come out of the dishwasher. I’m not talking about nice controlled cuts either, there was a lot of hacking and splattering going on less than a foot from the just cleaned drinking glasses!

edited to reflect merging with parent topic

Edited November 10, 2006 by jsmith (log)

[BarbaraY]

And has nobody sent a novice to get a "grill stretcher"?

[Matcha Eyes]

While working in a cheesecake bakery one summer, I had to make a pastry dough in a massive Hobart mixer. The dough had to be loaded into big buckets for storage and the only way to get this really dense dough out of the bowl was to do it with my hands. One morning I was feeling pretty weak, but still felt determined to pull out more dough than I can handle. I don't even weigh 100 lbs. so I obviously lost the fight with the dough, fell head-first into the mixing bowl and had to have the other employees help scoop me out of there.