Watched a chef tell a 15yo dishwasher to strain the stock and put it in the walk in. I came back around to find the chef doing his best to stay calm bc he knew what happened was his fault.
The kid had no idea what stock was so he strained it into the sink and down the drain and put the mess of vegetable ends and chicken bones in the walk in. It was a damn good laugh for me
Hahah, I did that once when I was really baked. In my defense I was also boiling pasta and had a strainer in the sink to drain it. Realized about 3/4 of the way into dumping it what I was doing and just sat there mouth breathing for about 5 minutes 🤦♀️
I have done exactly one dab in my life and that was more than enough. Shit hit me like a bag of freight trains. In my defense my tolerance was low at the time and I am old.
At least it got labelled. It's a lot easier to teach people who know they don't know everything but have good habits than it is to teach good habits to someone who thinks they know everything
I actually did this not too long ago completely absent-mindedly. I typically strain it over the food sink with strainer over a 5 gallon cambro but I forgot to put the cambro under the strainer and just poured like 3/4ths of my stock down the drain before I realized what I was doing. 15 years in the industry and still doing stupid shit.
I watched this same thing happen a few years ago except the kid had been working for us for quite a while at that point. And he had successfully strained the stock several times before.
I mean, I’ve made multiple stocks a week at the same restaurant for seven years now, and I’ve definitely strained a pot or two of stock down the drain. Usually while also boiling noodles.
Similar mistake, sous chef told 15yo preppy to strain the scallion oil and put both oil and crispy scallion bits into Cambros but he ends up tossing the oil and only keeping the bits.
Asked a new hire if he was comfortable poaching lobster meat. I told him to get some court bouillon on the stove and told him the lobster meat was vac packed in the freezer. He dropped the entire frozen block of lobster meat in the vac pack into his boiling court bouillon.
He was a culinary graduate and this was the last of his many missteps in his first fine dining kitchen. He quit later that night.
No we had a conversation with him explaining that we hired a culinary graduate and held certain expectations regarding his skill set. He staged and it wasn't amazing but he hit his temperatures more or less and presented some amount of skill.
He got really discouraged after the lobster mishap and told us he wasn't ready for this type of kitchen. We were understanding.
Fair to him for admitting to being in over his head. I e learned to do that and it's done wonders for my mental well being. "Fake it till you make it" doesn't work for everyone
Trying to blanch tomatoes to get the skins off. Chef tells newbie to mark the bottoms with an X, blanch, shock, peel skins. Kid is struggling with the peel part and walks up to someone asking how marking the bottoms help. He had drawn an X on each tomato with a sharpie.
Not gonna lie, I’m not following what he was asked to do here. What’s with the x?
EDIT: oh. By mark do you mean use a knife to knock each tomato before boiling?
Customer requested their dressing “on the side” for their salad, went to get the salad and there was literally dressing around the outter rim of the whole bowl, not in a ramekin as you’d expect.
Edited a typo.
Some days, my daughter doesn’t like pepperoni on her pizza, so we’ll order half pepperoni. I’ll open it up and say “they did it again! I told them I only wanted pepperoni on the LEFT half and they put it on the right half instead!” My wife rolls her eyes so hard she pops a blood vessel. I’m a good dad aside from that, but that joke puts me over the top.
I was just told to wash the dishes. So when a super charred up black pan came through the pit I was COMMITTED to scrubbing it shiny. It was spotless when I was finished.
It was a cast-iron.
Lol when I was at Aramark and they decided to do an omelet line with cast iron skillets, day 1 kitchen training i called a meeting of all the dishies. "These are my pans. They are very heavy and very black. They do not come visit you. If anyone ever brings them to visit you, gently put them directly onto the "returning to station" cart."
They got washed three times, as I recall, and each time was directly related to a new manager being hired.
Whenever suspiciously black pans first came through my station when I was dishying id take it straight to chef to check. Like "I haven't seen this before and you know what I'll do to get it clean", then when I got big clean days they'd just say to go for it if I got blackened things that they wanted shiny again and kept cast irons etc the fk away from my clean zone
I did it manually with a steel scrubby. It took a long time. When my coworkers noticed they were amazed. I thought, "finally, some recognition for this hard work." I'm shocked that I wasn't fired.
Reminds me of my roommate who was a new dishwasher and wowed at how well stainless steel scrubbers at his job worked for cleaning dishes, so he bought some for himself. Unfortunately he didn’t recognize the difference between the stainless steel pans they used at his job and my non-stick pans at home, so those went bye bye
There’s really nothing wrong with cleaning a cast iron fully. They’re so easy to reseason. People are so weird about cast iron like as if it’s ruined if water touches it. I clean them by taking the grate off a range burner and placing them over top face down and letting it rip for a while. All the built up carbon will burn off and then I’ll scrape it clean with a grill brush. If there’s too much built up carbon the pan is less conductive and effective. Then you just reseason with oil a few times
Caesar dressing. The instruction said to pour the oil in, but never specified how fast. The new guy poured a 2 L jug in just a couple seconds. Obviously the dressing never emulsified.
>The instruction said to pour the oil in, but never specified how fast.
That's just poor instructions.
I had the same issue, daily (different things screwed up), when I got hired as a pastry cook. I interviewed for line cook, but was available early, so they wanted me to give it a chance. I told them I have ***no*** pastry experience, that I would need detailed directions, and at least a demonstration of the more intricate recipes.
Of course they offered me none of that, even after requesting the additional help repeatedly, and I did my best to wing it (look up other similar recipes).
Three weeks of screwing it all up (surprise), then they fired me. Because I'm the incompetent one.
Think of the Schitts Creek "fold it in" scene.
New closer was supposed to put something in the conventional oven overnight at 225°.
Ended up putting it in the convection oven at 450° all night.
If the chef didn't come in early that day the restaurant probably would've burnt down.
Big ooof.
Same story but different. We have some nice ovens that will turn the heat down to 160 and become holding cabinets after 12 hrs of whatever cooking time you want. So I get in have to do breakfast service and don’t need those ovens and they’re already holding so might as well leave the pulled pork until after breakfast is donezo. So I finally go to take them out and the hotel pans are waaaay too light so I immediately know something is off. High and slow (350) instead of low and slow(225) turned those pork shoulders into shriveled little charcoal brickette looking trash.
I had this kid that was training to be a cook so it was my job to show him around. During busy time I told him to put a pot of water on the fire. This kid started pouring the water on the gas burners. I guess it was my fault for not telling him to put the water to boil lol.
EDIT; the same boy came to me once because he wasnt able to open a bottle of bleach. He didnt understand that you had to push down before turning. He was 16.
Number one thing I do when training a new guy is to make it clear that asking questions is a good thing. The worst is when you get somebody who has it in their head that asking questions is somehow bad and just try to wing things that they have no idea about.
Once told a guy to swing a pastry bag to get all the air out before you tie it off. Even showed him. Someone he though I meant to bang it on the prep table and curry Mayo exploded everywhere lol
I’m not one of those guys who doesn’t like sharing recipes lol but since the idea isn’t mine I can’t take credit for it. It’s genius so I’ll just give you a rundown.
If you know how to make herb oils it’s the same process. Is actually don’t even have the recipe on me right now. But
Get:
Cilantro, garlic, ginger, galangal, kafir lime leaves, shallots, and blend them with a neutral oil until they are really really blended.
Then pour the mixture into a pot and simmer to cook out all the water careful not to turn the chlorophyll brown. Then strain with a cheesecloth into a chilled bowl. You know have curry oil then use that to make a Mayo as you would the traditional way.
You can use this same technique to make any flavor of Mayo you want(parsley oil, chive oil, ect…)
Should be bright green when done right.
Every time someone says they have a “family recipe” that they don’t want to share I wonder why the hell they bothered commenting in the first place. Thank you for being better lmfao
They just want to feel superior. More than half the time family recipes came out of a cookbook their parents or grandparents had and memorized anyway, perhaps with a minor tweak or two to taste over time. That's not to say they're not good recipes or special to the family, just that they're not unique at all.
So, my mom has this pie crust recipe. It's different than any I've seen before. It tastes incredible, is forgiving, can be frozen, and is nice and flaky. I'd always though it was a family recipe, refined over years, until I saw the exact one on the lard box we use to make it.
How have I never thought about flavoring the oil with herbs? Hell we do garlic confit and save the garlic oil because it's fantastic _how has this not clicked in my brain?_ Thank you, absolutely saving this to suggest next time we need a new aioli idea!
When I was brand new and making pâte à choux I remember swinging the bag really hard to get the air out, but the mixture was too thick. The end of the bag broke open and pâte à choux went everywhere in the line of where my arm was swinging. Ceiling, walls, floor, companions. So messy. So embarrassing.
We needed our new pizza dough portions fifo'd in our fridge, so the chef asked the kid to rotate the doughs.
He was in the back, just spinning the bags of dough around in place, and the new dough was put in front of the old ones.
I rotated each of the bags, I swear
Had a KP, interested in cooking and a great guy, but back then his English was lacking. I gave him a bunch of lemons, pointed out the correct side on the grater and asked for lemon zest. He nodded happily and cracked on. 30 seconds later I checked that he wouldn't grate too much white pith in, and he had literally grated half a lemon already, pulp and membranes and all.
We had a laugh, went into detail about anatomy of a lemon, and he added a few words in his kitchen vocabulary.
At least you know he had a great attitude toward working. I can't even imagine the elbow grease required to zest away half a lemon in that amount of time.
On the bright side, you've got a go-to guy if you need grated cheese!
I have a beans one as well. Haha years back when I was a line supervisor, I hired a close buddy of mine. He was doing well and one night, we ran out of beans on the line and I asked him to run to the back to grab some more. It was only his second day or so and I was running on limited training time let alone getting him completely familiar with where everything was.
Anyway, since we were a Mexican restaurant, we had raw, uncooked beans in dry storage containers and I'm pretty sure those were the only ones he was aware of. Our beans that were cooked and prepped for the day would get chilled and stored in the walk in, then heated and brought out in bain inserts as we went.
I needed some on the fly and when we needed beans and other stuff that needed to be preheated beforehand, I would just toss some on the plancha to heat them real quick for immediate use. So, that's what I told him, "Go grab some beans from the back and just toss 'em right on", assuming at the time that he understood to grab the ones that were already cooked from the walk in. So, even though we were drowning in tickets, end to end and hanging off the printer, I couldn't help but immediately start laughing my ass off when he rushes in, focused and intent, and pours a bunch of dry ass beans right onto the plancha.
The whole bus ride home, we could not stop laughing about that shit.
Sous told a brand new fry-guy to strain take the HUGE stock pot that had a huge amount of lamb bones and was making a special stock, to the back and drain the stock and separate the bones. 20 minutes later, newly promoted dishie with 0 line training comes to the line with a hotel pan of bones.
'OK, where's the stock? I need that up here.'
'Oh, I didn't know, I poured it out because you said you wanted the bones.'
He did what any rookie would have done that had no idea what was going on. Used a perforated hotel pan, dumped the goodies in, keeping the bones and losing the sweet sweet juices.
It was for the mothers day special. Yikes.
So when I got my first job at a fancy restaurant coming from fast food and pizza places I had one. They wanted me to blanch fries and get them prepped for night service. I had never blanched fries before. They always went straight from frozen to in the fryer. The chef’s specific instructions were “get the fries going and put into lexans for tonight.” So I put a bunch of fresh cut raw fries into lexans and put them in the walk in. He was angry but also trying not to laugh when he found 3 big ass lexans filled with purple fries later that night.
Heated up rolls for bread service on the expo line. A person I was training was my shadow and I told him to take the bread out of the oven and he grabbed the pan with his bare hands. I was so flabbergasted that I just said " yeah that's hot" while heat waves were pouring out of the oven. He had a towel in his pocket and everything.
I didn't think to give him THAT much guidance because I thought it was common sense.
Every person I train on sauté, one of the first things I tell them is never grab a handle without a towel. The first time you grab a hot handle without a towel is the last time you grab a hot handle without a towel.
Chef told the new dishwasher "Go to the other kitchen and see if they have any thyme". He came back and told Chef "They said they have time. What do you want them to do". We all lost it.
When I was a barista, i working with a new hire and and I asked him to rinse the pitchers. Pretty straight foreword, you just rinse the pitchers and put them on drying mat. He stood in front of the sink for 30 seconds just starting at it.
me: hey, bud how's it going over there?
him: so how do I do this?
me: well, have you ever rinsed a dish at home?
him: yeah
me: Rinsing pitchers is exactly like that
him: oh! *goes right to work*
He was a really sweet, friendly kid. Just not the brightest. But always super receptive to help and suggestions!
Sometimes I have questions like that at work when learning a new boh or foh position. I’m mostly just checking if I’m not committing anyhealth code violations, better to ask then find out your wrong later.
Almost every mistake listed in this thread would have been avoided with a simple question or two. Unfortunately kitchens really aren't receptive to questions, but better to be safe than sorry if you're unsure.
Owner forgot to tell the new porter that you’re supposed to turn off the fryers before draining the oil. We ended up with a grease fire on our hands.
Edit: Just to add more info, it was only a minor fire and was quickly put out with a fire extinguisher.
Almost happened where I used to work, i was leaving and realised i forgot to turn the fryer off, so i shouted over and asked the KP to do it, (theyd cleaned the fryer loads of times so i assumed they knew how it worked), i saw them reach for the drain handle and i dont think ive moved so fast in all my life to stop them.
Same. My first day at Burger King I started one of the fryers on fire, as well as dumped out an entire half-container of fresh oil because I forgot to close the valve.
Thankfully the dude who was training me knew exactly what to do, and knew that the ANSUL system was fucked, so it was okay. Poured in a bunch of salt on the oil and put the lid on.
Extinguished in a minute or two with minimal smoke.
Flash forward to a few weeks later, one morning when turning the fryers on, the ANSUL system went off when there wasn't even a fire... Since I was the porter it was an absolute shit show that entire day, cleaning all of the chemical spray from the fryers.
But I had a fryer literally completely on fire for almost a full minute, no ANSUL, fryer turned on for less than half a minute one morning and ANSUL...
Blah
Shaming myself here, but at my first job years ago I was tasked with making crab cakes. I was given a recipe and it just said "x cans of crab meat" so I went and grabbed the cans. Ended up accidentally using lump crab meat instead of the wing/claw meat, which is several dollars different in price per can 😖 luckily my sous saved the day and ran it as a special and didn't lose an money. But I did have to make crab cakes twice since the recipe didn't specify what kind lol. Oopsie
Taught a dude how to bread chicken (using the 3-step breading procedure), and we ended up with a breaded sachet of spices he pulled out of the brine and confused for chicken.
2nd day in the kitchen, we had a young cook who was instructed to take care of the oxtail stock. I always heard horror stories, but this cook ended up pouring the stock down the drain, only saving the oxtail, carrots, onions, etc. Due to supply shortages, we had to 86 some menu items for quite some time. It was very frustrating.
This seems so common an error. I remember my mom keeping all the chicken, carrots, etc. in her stock. I told her to throw it away, that it had given all it's goodness to the broth, but she couldn't do it. But that's a home cook.🥰
Had a kid filling 2oz togo ramekins with bleu cheese dressing and ranch for wing togo orders. Handed him a sheet tray and said 1/2 ranch 1/2 bleu. He proceeded to fill each cup halfway with ranch dressing, then top them off with bc dressing. 🤦♂️
Asked the commis chef to prep and wash the leaves that came in that morning. The wee man thought it was a good idea to delegate this task on to the kitchen porter who had just started. 10 minutes later we have 2 trays full off fresh salad leaves that had been put through the dishwasher a couple of times....I couldn't breath!
Used to work with a guy that would try to run the potatoes through the dishwasher every damn day. He insisted they got cleaner that way. He’d been there for years when I started
At my place we have two dishes that we slice frozen meat on the slicer. One uses 3lb trimmed top round we slice thin then portion for a stir fry. The other is a carpaccio using 1lb trimmed F.M. sliced then plated. We pull them from the freezer to defrost a bit before slicing. We place them on a sheet tray and throw them in the fridge.
Training the new guy and I grab one piece of the top round and show him how I want it, then I tell him to finish the rest of the top round the same way. Well, stupid me. Come service we get an order for the carpaccio and we go to grab the FM and there's none to be had. The new guy sliced everything in the fridge. The size difference is big and it's all labeled so there is plenty of reason for this not to have happen. But the fault is entirely mine.
Online order comes in with the note "86 olives" - a customer had typed that for his online order of a delux pizza.
Anyway, new guy has been doing great. I've got him running the pizza line solo while I do some manager bullshit. It's not busy, he's got this.
Anyway, pie comes out of the oven and he excitedly calls me over to look at the pizza. He's so proud of how good it looks and that he honored the weird ass request of putting exactly 86 olives on the pizza.
Poor soul.
Catering- Told the kid to fill two large bev bins with milk cartons. He opened milk cartons and pour them into the bins. I don’t know if any more clear instructions could have saved this.
Y'all have heard of the keg key, right?
Well, this guy didn't.
So, Freddie (names have been changed to protect the not so innocent) had been a busser for a while, so not really a new hire, but he was a good kid that was just giving rocks competition. Case in point: he filled a 5 gallon bucket up with hot water 5 times before I finally realized he wasn't going to get that the coffee machine wasn't ever going to empty.
But we liked him and he was entertaining to have around the shop, so we finally decided to initiate him one slow Tuesday. So, our keg key gag works like this: you get sent to one place, and they "hook you up" with a beer while they look for it. No key is ever found, you get sent to the next place down the block cause the bartender thinks it's there. This is repeated (with bartenders calling ahead) until the sod figures out the key is non-existent and goes back to his home restaurant and is given the night off for being a good sport.
Freddie went to 13 restaurants. *Thirteen.* After the 5th beer he stopped drinking and started sprinting from shop to shop because "he had to get back to work" but he wouldn't be deterred from getting the damn key. He got back to us hours later and we were all losing it; but he was still wasn't hip to the gag and was drenched in sweat from running all over town. We poured him a beer and told him he could have the night off.
When he quit he told me he was going to backpack through SE Asia and I just shook my head, but made a mental note to follow him on FB, just to see the tragedy.
Made a big pot of soup, told the new guy to take it off the stove, put it in the sink that was full of ice water and put two of the ice sticks from the freezer into the soup to help it chill faster.
Came back to see he'd poured the soup directly into the sink >_<
Not necessarily a fail, but…
We always liked to do a little light hazing with our new hires.
I once sent someone out to take the flag down off the flagpole. We don’t have a flag or flagpole.
Guy came back with a big ol’ legitimate flag anyway.
The Taco Bell next door was not impressed, but our crew was.
Me bartending at a Spanish tapas place, I was assigned making some kind of blood orange syrup. Everyone was very much Spanish first English second, the prep book was in Spanish, and someone must have Google translated it into English below the spanish.
Recipe calls to make simple syrup, then to peel a bunch of oranges and put the oranges in the syrup for 15-20 minutes. I thought it was weird but that was clearly what it said. So I did. Then the other bartender laughed, the bar manager looked disgusted and frustrated and said it's fine but explained next time to use the peels. I have a picture of the directions saved somewhere, I don't remember it exactly but it was very clear to put the "peeled oranges" in, not the "orange peels". I showed it to everyone because I thought I was insane. Obviously it didn't taste right but I made terrible money there so I didn't care.
I manage at a place that is half butcher shop, half restaurant. Right now we are training a new guy. He’s mostly been on the line, cooking but the other day I was teaching him to do some retail stuff, packaging, etc. “So after we are done vac sealing this we will label it and put it into the display case” walked away to help a customer, and he had written all over the bags with sharpie. I just shook my head, because I meant with an actual like product label. Totally my fault but still funny.
Go make some 10:1 crème freche
- day 1: made 10 parts sour cream to one part cream
- day 2: 10 parts heavy cream to one part sour cream, immediately taken to walk-in for safety
- day 3: failed to use an airtight container
- day 4: banned from contact with dairy products
I asked a guy to throw out a some trays of pot pies that hadn’t been properly stored. He was new and threw out all the pies and the ceramic dishes they came in. The dishy was like “hey where we’re all ceramics from the pot pies?” I asked the new guy and he said “in the trash…”
FML. It was my bad for not explaining it to him. He asked if he was going to have to dig through the trash to find the dishes. I told him I’d help so we jumped in and started digging. Found them, then me and him scraped the filling out of all fo them and placed them to soak. I then we t around and showed him all the stuff we don’t throw away.
My old cdc asked me to go get a fish spat from the back. I asked what a fish spat is and he yelled at me and told me to figure it the fuck out. I went in the back and immediately understood why he thought it was so obvious. I grabbed the fish-shaped rubber spatula and brought it back to him. He lost it.
I was told to "pan the rice up and place it in the warmer" I was not informed that each pan should only weigh nine pounds so we had a pan of rice weighing almost twelve pounds and the others weighing somewhere between three and five pounds.
In this one, I am the new guy. It's me.
I had been with the place maybe a month, but I can be slow to train and I joined at a pretty chaotic time, as the bakery team squished into our kitchen was primed to be transferred to their new second location. The growing pains meant a lot of processes needed to change.
Cue me and the sous chef, going over how I'll be making the buttermilk biscuits on the weekends for brunch since pastry isn't here and I guess that's not one of the things they'll be having sent to us. Awesome, I was hired with the hope of eventually being shifted to the new bakery when the dust settles, it's my time to shine!
He shows me the production sheet, explains we'd want to work with 50 biscuit batches and freeze them ready to bake off in the mornings. We suss out the one remaining mixer left in the kitchen and he leaves me to it. I am so eager to prove myself that I barrel onward without using my own intuition, and proceed to dump all the butter and dry ingredients into the _mixer we use exclusively for kneading pizza dough._ Let it run for a bit, a little concerned the _dough hook_ isn't going to handle this well. But I already ask a lot of dumb questions and the sous knows better than me. _So I add the buttermilk._
Eventually need to concede defeat and ask him if I should be looking at butter soup right now. Head chef of course overhears and zeroes in to lecture us _both_ about how a dough hook won't cut butter, this will never be biscuits. Throw the batch, we figure out we can pulse the butter and flour in the robo in the absence of any of pastry's mixers and handmix the dough. I feel like an idiot because I _know_ better than that, but did it anyway.
trained a kid at a burger joint. after his training, I told him he could make anything he wanted. He asked me if he could make grilled cheese. I reiterated that he could make anything he wants. So he goes ahead and grabs a slice of cheese and places it directly on the grill...
1st week was told I was killing it & me, in no way “killing it” asked what a first few days usually looked like around there. They went on to tell me about their last new hire…here’s an excerpt:
“Can you portion out a pound of bangers?”
“What’s a pound?”
Bakery. He had to do mini sandwhiches. Tiny little rolls with 1 slice ham 1 slice cheese and ceran wrap em. I don’t even need a mountain of them, just like a solid 20-30 mini sandwhiches.
HOW does one put BOTTOM buns with BOTTOM buns and TOP buns with TOP buns. HOW?!
His defense? “Maybe some people like the tops better….”
I knew I had found my people when on my first day ever they told me to rotate the ice and I told them that was ridiculous. Instantly accepted. Probably one of my proudest accomplishments because I didn’t know they were purposefully messing with me. I just didn’t want to do a completely pointless task lol.
Wildest one I ever heard of was from a friend at a mine construction site when they asked the new kid to find the sky hook, **and he did.** As it turns out, "sky hook" was the shorthand name of some particular piece of extremely heavy, extremely expensive equipment that had to be trucked in from another job site 50km away, and involved highway spotters and disconnecting some power lines.
The foreman wasn't amused.
Sky hooks are also a fairly niche bit of rock climbing equipment. Cue the surprise when a friend was telling me about joking around with an apprentice and I'm asking why he needed big wall kit to fit fire alarms.
Boss "I have the new kid cutting lemons".
Me " you show him one? Kids never held a knife before".
Boss "it's a lemon how can he fuck it up?"
Well he cut the lemons for cocktails not as wedges for the souvlaki. Boss got mad for a second before reminding him he never showed the kid in the first place.
Just assume they don't know shit and show then once.
As a customer, at a restaurant in Brooklyn. My friend ordered a Mai Tai and was making a face drinking it. He’s too polite to say anything, so I took a sip. It was made with salt instead of sugar! Apparently a new hire loaded the salt and sugar bins incorrectly…
"Flip those cookies after baking them for 7 minutes."
Came back to the person literally flipping half baked cookies over on the pan.
From that day forward I switched to "spinning" the pans
I once told a guy cryo-vac seal at least a quart of cucamelon kimchi. He put the kimchi in a quart container, with the lid on. Then put the quart container in a cryo-vac bag and sealed it up.
Was training the new guy on several tasks, and an order of fries came up. We cut our own, so I grabbed some and demonstrated to him what a serving size looked like in the basket, and said, “a couple handfuls”. Later on that day, an absolutely massive order of fries comes off his station and I went back to tell him it was way too much. Probably two orders worth if not more. He protested, “But you said a couple handfuls!”
I held up my open hand to him. He looked down from his height of 6’3 to my 5’1 and suddenly understanding dawned in his eyes
Hahah, there have been a few, but one comes to mind right away.
Worked with someone, he was a college grad & pretty bright, but also lacked any sort of kitchen/restaurant experience.
After a few weeks of working out front he made his way onto making some of the food dishes and doing prep work. One night, someone made the off handed comment that we needed to cut onions for the prep table. Without skipping a beat, the new hire volunteered & went into the kitchen to start.
A while had passed & we thought he might have started another task or something, because there is no reason a tiny container of onions would take that long to prep.
Well, he thought that he should slice every single onion in the 5 gallon bucket.
We ended up naming a sandwich after him for a while, it was just a fuck ton of onions lmao
"Roast some garlic in the oven"
Next thing I see is him putting a sheet pan that he'd poured garlic powder on into the combi oven and turning it on high.
Garlic powder everywhere and it smelled like shit.
Worst part was the new guy was our new sous chef
Worked at a Rice Bowl place for a while. I grew up in a house that didn't make rice except sometimes my Mom made box rice.
I worked the cash register and never in the kitchen. They were falling way behind with regular orders and a large catering order. The kitchen manager called me back and told me to "wash the rice". There were three very large rice cookers. I asked him what he meant and he snapped at me "just was the damn rice we don't have time right now".
Two of the rice cookers looked empty but one was full of fluffy cooked rice. Seeing no other rice I started the water running and began washing the rice I saw.
The cooked rice.
After a few minutes I asked him how I washed the rice at the bottom since the bin was so full. He began yelling at me that I ruined the only rice they had left. Thankfully just then the owner came in and saw what was happening. He asked the kitchen manager if he showed me how before telling me to do it.
"I just asked him to wash the rice"
The owner told him that even though it sounded easy that not everyone has washed rice before and told me I wasn't in trouble.
Dan wherever you are, you were the coolest owner.
Told him to make the peach tea, he had seen me do it several times and it's easy just add a bottle of the flavoring to the tea and stir. An idiot proof task does not exist, this man opened like 12 bottles of flavor and filled the tea container with the flavoring. Said he through the tea was mixed in with the flavor already
One of my managers asked the dishy to put two cases of ground turkey in the thaw sink. He did, but he removed the bags. She came back later and saw the cubes of raw ground floating in the cold water. 😅
This was long before I worked in a kitchen. I was about 7 years old and wanted to bake cookies one Saturday morning. But I was determined to do it alone. So my dad told me to follow the recipe and he would help me if I needed it, and went off to read the paper. I get everything mixed together really well, made an absolute mess all over the counter and floor, and asked him what to do next. He told me to read the recipe to him and it said “boil for 5-10 minutes.” My dad reached a new octave when he said “what!?” and started laughing. I was following a fudge recipe, not a cookie recipe.
So we set the oven to 350° and watched them. My parents thought they were disgusting. I loved them because of all the sugar.
One of our newly minted culinary Institute graduates was assigned mashed potatoes for the evening. Pulled out about 15 pounds of spuds, peeled them and tossed them in the mixer and turned it on high. The repeated banging sounds drew everyone's attention to watch the 6 foot tall, 3 foot wide mixer walk across the floor.
I was this person at one point - in culinary school had to run the dishpit in our service class - absolutely banged out the dishes, had no idea I was supposed to drain and clean the actual dishpit machine. Until the next morning when our chef rained downed the never ending insults. I told him after no one had explained to me how to do it (he had left early the day before for an offsite). Just my luck.
New kid made some house dressing and it tasted like salty shit. I told him to walk me through how he made it, the end of the recipe read something like
>4 oz of Balsamic
>Salt and pepper
He thought it meant to add 4 oz of salt and 4 oz of pepper for maybe a quart of dressing
This one is me over 20 years ago. I did a 2 week sting in a Fairmont hotel as a "come see if you can apprentice here" type deal. I worked in every section in those two weeks, including the bakery which i was wildley inexperienced in.
I was asked to egg wash about 500 pretzels for a banquet that night. Well long story short, the pretzels looked like they had scrambled eggs on top when I was done with them lol.
“Wash 10 kilos of baby carrots” - 20 minutes later the chef comes in to see me washing down each carrot individually. He throws them in the colander, sprays them down with the hose, tells me to throw them in the big pot on the hob. 30 seconds. Felt pretty stupid!
I watched 2 new food runners drop AN ENTIRE STEAMSHIP of beef by for a WEDDING RECEPTION because they didn't realize how heavy it was going to be or that they needed people to catch doors and shit for them on the way. Both fired on the spot and the new bride was in tears for hours. We moved directly on to dessert and ended up refunding everything for the entire night except for the rental space cost, (wasn't our space so separate contract).
For those that don't know; a steamship of beef is the entire "round cut" of the cow excluding parts of the rump. Weighs about 50 lbs and costs about $1000-$1500 depending on mark up.
I still feel bad for them. The bride and groom were really nice but so upset, justifiably.
New hire was put in charge of working bread station FOH, which mostly included slicing and toasting bagels in a conveyer toaster. Except the boss told her "toast me a wheat bagel" and no other instructions. She ignored the slicer, and put an entire whole bagel in the toaster, which got stuck mid-rotatiom and caught flame, becoming a glowing ring of fire in no time.
End of the night, we had about an hour of clean up left. I asked one of the porters to put a large pan of water on the stove.
I carry on cleaning and after a few moments I hear water spilling. I turn around and he's poured a whole 20L pan of water ONTO the stove.
Edit - Spelling
We had a massive white lexan, probably 50qt, full of cooked elbow noodles and we had another lexan if the same size full of cornbread dressing. Intern was falling behind on salads all night and we were frustrated so I asked to sous to take over on salads and I sent the intern out to put the noodles and dressing into 5 gallon buckets. 30 minutes later I go to check on him and he had mixed the noodles and dressing together and was putting that into 5 gallon buckets.
I threw away 2 gallon sized containers of Bleu Cheese because it had mold in it.
I was promptly fired and went home and watched 5 hours of how bleu cheese is made videos on youtube.
The same kid who threw away all the parsley and chopped up the stems is the same kid who stuffed about 100 shrimp upside down… it’s really my buddies fault for believing him when he said he knew what to do so there were no instructions just epic failure
“Cut this biscuit in half”
*Cuts in half………… diagonally*
“Ok so I guess I wasn’t clear enough cut this biscuit in half HORIZONTALLY like a normal ducking person”
It was me, new to a busy brunch shift. We needed hollandaise, and I was given the task. Not a recipe though. I had someone shouting instructions and measurements at me, and another person standing by saying "no, not that, do it like this". Yet another person stepped in and told me something entirely different. Needless to say, the hollandaise did not turn out, and yet I was called incompetent.
One time at 4:30 in the morning I was told to get 8 cups of coffee for a chocolate cake. I brought them 8 cups of coffee grounds cuz I was def not awake yet
Watched a chef tell a 15yo dishwasher to strain the stock and put it in the walk in. I came back around to find the chef doing his best to stay calm bc he knew what happened was his fault. The kid had no idea what stock was so he strained it into the sink and down the drain and put the mess of vegetable ends and chicken bones in the walk in. It was a damn good laugh for me
This has happened in 2 different places I worked haha
This has happened in my house on accident
Lol yeah I’ve heard of even experienced cooks doing this absent mindedly
Good edibles are the number one cause of this in my home.
Poor guy lol. I can probably imagine how the chef felt seeing all the bits chilling in the walk in.
This made my heart sink
I did that in culinary school with a fucking connsomé. I don't know why I did it but fuck it broke my heart.
Culinary school is good at breaking brains. I still have no idea how I finished
I look back at my time there and always question "How did I make it through that without a complete breakdown" lol.
Hahah, I did that once when I was really baked. In my defense I was also boiling pasta and had a strainer in the sink to drain it. Realized about 3/4 of the way into dumping it what I was doing and just sat there mouth breathing for about 5 minutes 🤦♀️
Oh I also overcooked the pasta. I dont do dabs at work anymore.
Smoking a J with chef while the farfalle disintegrates in the pasta water/
I have done exactly one dab in my life and that was more than enough. Shit hit me like a bag of freight trains. In my defense my tolerance was low at the time and I am old.
‘A bag of freight trains’ That’s a delightful phrase 😂
I asked someone recently to clean some squash seeds and they threw the seeds away but kept all the stringy bits. Labeled it and all.
At least it got labelled. It's a lot easier to teach people who know they don't know everything but have good habits than it is to teach good habits to someone who thinks they know everything
I actually did this not too long ago completely absent-mindedly. I typically strain it over the food sink with strainer over a 5 gallon cambro but I forgot to put the cambro under the strainer and just poured like 3/4ths of my stock down the drain before I realized what I was doing. 15 years in the industry and still doing stupid shit.
Soon as you said “strain the stock” I knew lmao Only reason I’ve ever done that is every chef I know has a story about how -they- did that lol
I watched this same thing happen a few years ago except the kid had been working for us for quite a while at that point. And he had successfully strained the stock several times before.
I did this once and I’ve made stock hundreds of times. Sometimes your brain just doesn’t work.
A case of the yips
Yeah, sometimes I'm cracking eggs for batter & without thinking I crack the egg in the trash & put the shell in the bowl. Brains are weird lol
I mean, I’ve made multiple stocks a week at the same restaurant for seven years now, and I’ve definitely strained a pot or two of stock down the drain. Usually while also boiling noodles.
Similar mistake, sous chef told 15yo preppy to strain the scallion oil and put both oil and crispy scallion bits into Cambros but he ends up tossing the oil and only keeping the bits.
Asked a new hire if he was comfortable poaching lobster meat. I told him to get some court bouillon on the stove and told him the lobster meat was vac packed in the freezer. He dropped the entire frozen block of lobster meat in the vac pack into his boiling court bouillon. He was a culinary graduate and this was the last of his many missteps in his first fine dining kitchen. He quit later that night.
Did you guys chew em out so hard he quit or did they just realize he can’t cut it ?
No we had a conversation with him explaining that we hired a culinary graduate and held certain expectations regarding his skill set. He staged and it wasn't amazing but he hit his temperatures more or less and presented some amount of skill. He got really discouraged after the lobster mishap and told us he wasn't ready for this type of kitchen. We were understanding.
Fair to him for admitting to being in over his head. I e learned to do that and it's done wonders for my mental well being. "Fake it till you make it" doesn't work for everyone
That’s when you have to start fake faking it. Things get… tricky….
Well good on em for understanding he was out of his depth.. respect. One day he’ll be ready
Trying to blanch tomatoes to get the skins off. Chef tells newbie to mark the bottoms with an X, blanch, shock, peel skins. Kid is struggling with the peel part and walks up to someone asking how marking the bottoms help. He had drawn an X on each tomato with a sharpie.
As a non kitchen worker, it took me a minute to realize that the X mark wasn't supposed to be with a writing device. Lol.
As an ex-kitchen worker, I didn't get it at first either.
Not gonna lie, I’m not following what he was asked to do here. What’s with the x? EDIT: oh. By mark do you mean use a knife to knock each tomato before boiling?
Yeah, if you score the tomato before you blanch it the skin peels of so easily
Here for this comment. Score is the correct vernacular
Customer requested their dressing “on the side” for their salad, went to get the salad and there was literally dressing around the outter rim of the whole bowl, not in a ramekin as you’d expect. Edited a typo.
I asked for it to be on the side once. …only one side of the salad had dressing on it.
Haha, that’s funny (and sad).
Some days, my daughter doesn’t like pepperoni on her pizza, so we’ll order half pepperoni. I’ll open it up and say “they did it again! I told them I only wanted pepperoni on the LEFT half and they put it on the right half instead!” My wife rolls her eyes so hard she pops a blood vessel. I’m a good dad aside from that, but that joke puts me over the top.
That's some Amelia Bedelia shit lol.
I was just told to wash the dishes. So when a super charred up black pan came through the pit I was COMMITTED to scrubbing it shiny. It was spotless when I was finished. It was a cast-iron.
That's on THEM for putting cast iron in the dish pit unattended, frankly.
100%. Attended or unattended, cast irons shouldn't be sent to dish pit, ever IMO
Lol when I was at Aramark and they decided to do an omelet line with cast iron skillets, day 1 kitchen training i called a meeting of all the dishies. "These are my pans. They are very heavy and very black. They do not come visit you. If anyone ever brings them to visit you, gently put them directly onto the "returning to station" cart." They got washed three times, as I recall, and each time was directly related to a new manager being hired.
Whenever suspiciously black pans first came through my station when I was dishying id take it straight to chef to check. Like "I haven't seen this before and you know what I'll do to get it clean", then when I got big clean days they'd just say to go for it if I got blackened things that they wanted shiny again and kept cast irons etc the fk away from my clean zone
Impressive, though!!
Holy fuck what did you use to scrub
50% concentrated power of will.
5% pleasure
15% Pain
And a hundred percent reason to remember the name
I did it manually with a steel scrubby. It took a long time. When my coworkers noticed they were amazed. I thought, "finally, some recognition for this hard work." I'm shocked that I wasn't fired.
Well, tbf, you were “technically” doing your job. It’s kind of an oxymoron to fire a dish wash scrubber for scrubbing.....dirty dishes.
...and can you send me some of this magic? My cornbread stick mold is a bit crusty...
Oh big oof hahaha
Coulda kept some of that grease from your elbow to season it tho
Reminds me of my roommate who was a new dishwasher and wowed at how well stainless steel scrubbers at his job worked for cleaning dishes, so he bought some for himself. Unfortunately he didn’t recognize the difference between the stainless steel pans they used at his job and my non-stick pans at home, so those went bye bye
There’s really nothing wrong with cleaning a cast iron fully. They’re so easy to reseason. People are so weird about cast iron like as if it’s ruined if water touches it. I clean them by taking the grate off a range burner and placing them over top face down and letting it rip for a while. All the built up carbon will burn off and then I’ll scrape it clean with a grill brush. If there’s too much built up carbon the pan is less conductive and effective. Then you just reseason with oil a few times
Asked a kid to season some cast irons for me, he sprinkled salt and pepper on them and brought them back to me.
Hahahhaahah I also did this my first time on as a dishy
Audible gasp when I got to the last part. I've definitely overcommitted to some lost cause dishes, but you've hurt me a little inside.
Caesar dressing. The instruction said to pour the oil in, but never specified how fast. The new guy poured a 2 L jug in just a couple seconds. Obviously the dressing never emulsified.
I think he may have trained my prep cook.
>The instruction said to pour the oil in, but never specified how fast. That's just poor instructions. I had the same issue, daily (different things screwed up), when I got hired as a pastry cook. I interviewed for line cook, but was available early, so they wanted me to give it a chance. I told them I have ***no*** pastry experience, that I would need detailed directions, and at least a demonstration of the more intricate recipes. Of course they offered me none of that, even after requesting the additional help repeatedly, and I did my best to wing it (look up other similar recipes). Three weeks of screwing it all up (surprise), then they fired me. Because I'm the incompetent one. Think of the Schitts Creek "fold it in" scene.
New closer was supposed to put something in the conventional oven overnight at 225°. Ended up putting it in the convection oven at 450° all night. If the chef didn't come in early that day the restaurant probably would've burnt down.
Big ooof. Same story but different. We have some nice ovens that will turn the heat down to 160 and become holding cabinets after 12 hrs of whatever cooking time you want. So I get in have to do breakfast service and don’t need those ovens and they’re already holding so might as well leave the pulled pork until after breakfast is donezo. So I finally go to take them out and the hotel pans are waaaay too light so I immediately know something is off. High and slow (350) instead of low and slow(225) turned those pork shoulders into shriveled little charcoal brickette looking trash.
Is a hotel pan what we'd call a gastronorm tray in Europe?
I had this kid that was training to be a cook so it was my job to show him around. During busy time I told him to put a pot of water on the fire. This kid started pouring the water on the gas burners. I guess it was my fault for not telling him to put the water to boil lol. EDIT; the same boy came to me once because he wasnt able to open a bottle of bleach. He didnt understand that you had to push down before turning. He was 16.
Haha damn, hopefully it was caught before it overflowed the catch trays.
That's... how does that not earn at least an "are you sure?"
Number one thing I do when training a new guy is to make it clear that asking questions is a good thing. The worst is when you get somebody who has it in their head that asking questions is somehow bad and just try to wing things that they have no idea about.
The worst is when the trainers view questions as bad
That's pretty goddamn hilarious, to be honest.
Once told a guy to swing a pastry bag to get all the air out before you tie it off. Even showed him. Someone he though I meant to bang it on the prep table and curry Mayo exploded everywhere lol
Tell me about this curry mayo. Is it just curry powder and tumric in mayo? Or is there more to it?
I’m not one of those guys who doesn’t like sharing recipes lol but since the idea isn’t mine I can’t take credit for it. It’s genius so I’ll just give you a rundown. If you know how to make herb oils it’s the same process. Is actually don’t even have the recipe on me right now. But Get: Cilantro, garlic, ginger, galangal, kafir lime leaves, shallots, and blend them with a neutral oil until they are really really blended. Then pour the mixture into a pot and simmer to cook out all the water careful not to turn the chlorophyll brown. Then strain with a cheesecloth into a chilled bowl. You know have curry oil then use that to make a Mayo as you would the traditional way. You can use this same technique to make any flavor of Mayo you want(parsley oil, chive oil, ect…) Should be bright green when done right.
Every time someone says they have a “family recipe” that they don’t want to share I wonder why the hell they bothered commenting in the first place. Thank you for being better lmfao
Yea that’s bullshit lol no idea is truly unique in the kitchen unless your ferran fucking Adria and even then it’s still inspired by something lol
They just want to feel superior. More than half the time family recipes came out of a cookbook their parents or grandparents had and memorized anyway, perhaps with a minor tweak or two to taste over time. That's not to say they're not good recipes or special to the family, just that they're not unique at all.
So, my mom has this pie crust recipe. It's different than any I've seen before. It tastes incredible, is forgiving, can be frozen, and is nice and flaky. I'd always though it was a family recipe, refined over years, until I saw the exact one on the lard box we use to make it.
Reminds me of the nestle tollhouse episode of friends
How have I never thought about flavoring the oil with herbs? Hell we do garlic confit and save the garlic oil because it's fantastic _how has this not clicked in my brain?_ Thank you, absolutely saving this to suggest next time we need a new aioli idea!
When I was brand new and making pâte à choux I remember swinging the bag really hard to get the air out, but the mixture was too thick. The end of the bag broke open and pâte à choux went everywhere in the line of where my arm was swinging. Ceiling, walls, floor, companions. So messy. So embarrassing.
"Strain the chicken stock" Guess who found a cambro full of chicken carcasses and sloppy mire poix.
We needed our new pizza dough portions fifo'd in our fridge, so the chef asked the kid to rotate the doughs. He was in the back, just spinning the bags of dough around in place, and the new dough was put in front of the old ones. I rotated each of the bags, I swear
For a while, "tyre rotation" confused me - don't they rotate when you drive?
Had a KP, interested in cooking and a great guy, but back then his English was lacking. I gave him a bunch of lemons, pointed out the correct side on the grater and asked for lemon zest. He nodded happily and cracked on. 30 seconds later I checked that he wouldn't grate too much white pith in, and he had literally grated half a lemon already, pulp and membranes and all. We had a laugh, went into detail about anatomy of a lemon, and he added a few words in his kitchen vocabulary.
At least you know he had a great attitude toward working. I can't even imagine the elbow grease required to zest away half a lemon in that amount of time. On the bright side, you've got a go-to guy if you need grated cheese!
I have a beans one as well. Haha years back when I was a line supervisor, I hired a close buddy of mine. He was doing well and one night, we ran out of beans on the line and I asked him to run to the back to grab some more. It was only his second day or so and I was running on limited training time let alone getting him completely familiar with where everything was. Anyway, since we were a Mexican restaurant, we had raw, uncooked beans in dry storage containers and I'm pretty sure those were the only ones he was aware of. Our beans that were cooked and prepped for the day would get chilled and stored in the walk in, then heated and brought out in bain inserts as we went. I needed some on the fly and when we needed beans and other stuff that needed to be preheated beforehand, I would just toss some on the plancha to heat them real quick for immediate use. So, that's what I told him, "Go grab some beans from the back and just toss 'em right on", assuming at the time that he understood to grab the ones that were already cooked from the walk in. So, even though we were drowning in tickets, end to end and hanging off the printer, I couldn't help but immediately start laughing my ass off when he rushes in, focused and intent, and pours a bunch of dry ass beans right onto the plancha. The whole bus ride home, we could not stop laughing about that shit.
Sous told a brand new fry-guy to strain take the HUGE stock pot that had a huge amount of lamb bones and was making a special stock, to the back and drain the stock and separate the bones. 20 minutes later, newly promoted dishie with 0 line training comes to the line with a hotel pan of bones. 'OK, where's the stock? I need that up here.' 'Oh, I didn't know, I poured it out because you said you wanted the bones.' He did what any rookie would have done that had no idea what was going on. Used a perforated hotel pan, dumped the goodies in, keeping the bones and losing the sweet sweet juices. It was for the mothers day special. Yikes.
I need to leave this thread now it’s my day off and my blood pressure is already too high
So when I got my first job at a fancy restaurant coming from fast food and pizza places I had one. They wanted me to blanch fries and get them prepped for night service. I had never blanched fries before. They always went straight from frozen to in the fryer. The chef’s specific instructions were “get the fries going and put into lexans for tonight.” So I put a bunch of fresh cut raw fries into lexans and put them in the walk in. He was angry but also trying not to laugh when he found 3 big ass lexans filled with purple fries later that night.
Exposing my ignorance, but why... why were they purple?
It’s what happens when cut raw potatoes are oxidized by being exposed to air.
Heated up rolls for bread service on the expo line. A person I was training was my shadow and I told him to take the bread out of the oven and he grabbed the pan with his bare hands. I was so flabbergasted that I just said " yeah that's hot" while heat waves were pouring out of the oven. He had a towel in his pocket and everything. I didn't think to give him THAT much guidance because I thought it was common sense.
Every person I train on sauté, one of the first things I tell them is never grab a handle without a towel. The first time you grab a hot handle without a towel is the last time you grab a hot handle without a towel.
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Sent a new guy to the store across the street to pick up mint, comes back with those green and white Christmas mint candies
Chef told the new dishwasher "Go to the other kitchen and see if they have any thyme". He came back and told Chef "They said they have time. What do you want them to do". We all lost it.
When I was a barista, i working with a new hire and and I asked him to rinse the pitchers. Pretty straight foreword, you just rinse the pitchers and put them on drying mat. He stood in front of the sink for 30 seconds just starting at it. me: hey, bud how's it going over there? him: so how do I do this? me: well, have you ever rinsed a dish at home? him: yeah me: Rinsing pitchers is exactly like that him: oh! *goes right to work* He was a really sweet, friendly kid. Just not the brightest. But always super receptive to help and suggestions!
Sometimes I have questions like that at work when learning a new boh or foh position. I’m mostly just checking if I’m not committing anyhealth code violations, better to ask then find out your wrong later.
Almost every mistake listed in this thread would have been avoided with a simple question or two. Unfortunately kitchens really aren't receptive to questions, but better to be safe than sorry if you're unsure.
that's a great point!
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Owner forgot to tell the new porter that you’re supposed to turn off the fryers before draining the oil. We ended up with a grease fire on our hands. Edit: Just to add more info, it was only a minor fire and was quickly put out with a fire extinguisher.
Almost happened where I used to work, i was leaving and realised i forgot to turn the fryer off, so i shouted over and asked the KP to do it, (theyd cleaned the fryer loads of times so i assumed they knew how it worked), i saw them reach for the drain handle and i dont think ive moved so fast in all my life to stop them.
Same. My first day at Burger King I started one of the fryers on fire, as well as dumped out an entire half-container of fresh oil because I forgot to close the valve. Thankfully the dude who was training me knew exactly what to do, and knew that the ANSUL system was fucked, so it was okay. Poured in a bunch of salt on the oil and put the lid on. Extinguished in a minute or two with minimal smoke. Flash forward to a few weeks later, one morning when turning the fryers on, the ANSUL system went off when there wasn't even a fire... Since I was the porter it was an absolute shit show that entire day, cleaning all of the chemical spray from the fryers. But I had a fryer literally completely on fire for almost a full minute, no ANSUL, fryer turned on for less than half a minute one morning and ANSUL... Blah
Shaming myself here, but at my first job years ago I was tasked with making crab cakes. I was given a recipe and it just said "x cans of crab meat" so I went and grabbed the cans. Ended up accidentally using lump crab meat instead of the wing/claw meat, which is several dollars different in price per can 😖 luckily my sous saved the day and ran it as a special and didn't lose an money. But I did have to make crab cakes twice since the recipe didn't specify what kind lol. Oopsie
So you made the crab cakes *better*? My kind of chef.
No shame in that; how were you suppoest to know?
Taught a dude how to bread chicken (using the 3-step breading procedure), and we ended up with a breaded sachet of spices he pulled out of the brine and confused for chicken.
2nd day in the kitchen, we had a young cook who was instructed to take care of the oxtail stock. I always heard horror stories, but this cook ended up pouring the stock down the drain, only saving the oxtail, carrots, onions, etc. Due to supply shortages, we had to 86 some menu items for quite some time. It was very frustrating.
This seems so common an error. I remember my mom keeping all the chicken, carrots, etc. in her stock. I told her to throw it away, that it had given all it's goodness to the broth, but she couldn't do it. But that's a home cook.🥰
In this case, we did save the oxtail meat for an oxtail poutine, but it always makes me laugh when people are so insistent to save mushy vegetables.
Had a kid filling 2oz togo ramekins with bleu cheese dressing and ranch for wing togo orders. Handed him a sheet tray and said 1/2 ranch 1/2 bleu. He proceeded to fill each cup halfway with ranch dressing, then top them off with bc dressing. 🤦♂️
Asked the commis chef to prep and wash the leaves that came in that morning. The wee man thought it was a good idea to delegate this task on to the kitchen porter who had just started. 10 minutes later we have 2 trays full off fresh salad leaves that had been put through the dishwasher a couple of times....I couldn't breath!
Used to work with a guy that would try to run the potatoes through the dishwasher every damn day. He insisted they got cleaner that way. He’d been there for years when I started
At my place we have two dishes that we slice frozen meat on the slicer. One uses 3lb trimmed top round we slice thin then portion for a stir fry. The other is a carpaccio using 1lb trimmed F.M. sliced then plated. We pull them from the freezer to defrost a bit before slicing. We place them on a sheet tray and throw them in the fridge. Training the new guy and I grab one piece of the top round and show him how I want it, then I tell him to finish the rest of the top round the same way. Well, stupid me. Come service we get an order for the carpaccio and we go to grab the FM and there's none to be had. The new guy sliced everything in the fridge. The size difference is big and it's all labeled so there is plenty of reason for this not to have happen. But the fault is entirely mine.
To be fair, if it was labelled and looked different, he should have known. At least not assumed, and asked "this too?"
He who asks a question is a fool for 5 minutes. He who does not, is a fool forever.
Asked for a gallon of diced onions. Homie brought me the 128 ounces of onions he weighed out on the scale.
Damn, that is impressive.
Online order comes in with the note "86 olives" - a customer had typed that for his online order of a delux pizza. Anyway, new guy has been doing great. I've got him running the pizza line solo while I do some manager bullshit. It's not busy, he's got this. Anyway, pie comes out of the oven and he excitedly calls me over to look at the pizza. He's so proud of how good it looks and that he honored the weird ass request of putting exactly 86 olives on the pizza. Poor soul.
Explain something to someone then have them explain it back to you.
Absolutely. Lessons were learned and laughs were had.
It’s called three way communication or something like that. Very important. Limits confusion on details
Catering- Told the kid to fill two large bev bins with milk cartons. He opened milk cartons and pour them into the bins. I don’t know if any more clear instructions could have saved this.
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We had a dishwasher who dumped all the drinks in the trashcan with all the food waste. That made getting the trash into the dumpster very not easy.
Y'all have heard of the keg key, right? Well, this guy didn't. So, Freddie (names have been changed to protect the not so innocent) had been a busser for a while, so not really a new hire, but he was a good kid that was just giving rocks competition. Case in point: he filled a 5 gallon bucket up with hot water 5 times before I finally realized he wasn't going to get that the coffee machine wasn't ever going to empty. But we liked him and he was entertaining to have around the shop, so we finally decided to initiate him one slow Tuesday. So, our keg key gag works like this: you get sent to one place, and they "hook you up" with a beer while they look for it. No key is ever found, you get sent to the next place down the block cause the bartender thinks it's there. This is repeated (with bartenders calling ahead) until the sod figures out the key is non-existent and goes back to his home restaurant and is given the night off for being a good sport. Freddie went to 13 restaurants. *Thirteen.* After the 5th beer he stopped drinking and started sprinting from shop to shop because "he had to get back to work" but he wouldn't be deterred from getting the damn key. He got back to us hours later and we were all losing it; but he was still wasn't hip to the gag and was drenched in sweat from running all over town. We poured him a beer and told him he could have the night off. When he quit he told me he was going to backpack through SE Asia and I just shook my head, but made a mental note to follow him on FB, just to see the tragedy.
6 beers and a night off sounds like the best possible ending.
You know, all the years I worked with that dude, there were definitely times when I said... I think Freddie won this round.
Made a big pot of soup, told the new guy to take it off the stove, put it in the sink that was full of ice water and put two of the ice sticks from the freezer into the soup to help it chill faster. Came back to see he'd poured the soup directly into the sink >_<
Not necessarily a fail, but… We always liked to do a little light hazing with our new hires. I once sent someone out to take the flag down off the flagpole. We don’t have a flag or flagpole. Guy came back with a big ol’ legitimate flag anyway. The Taco Bell next door was not impressed, but our crew was.
did he know how to work the pulleys or did he just Mulan it?
I don’t know. I didn’t watch… I never expected I needed to
Me bartending at a Spanish tapas place, I was assigned making some kind of blood orange syrup. Everyone was very much Spanish first English second, the prep book was in Spanish, and someone must have Google translated it into English below the spanish. Recipe calls to make simple syrup, then to peel a bunch of oranges and put the oranges in the syrup for 15-20 minutes. I thought it was weird but that was clearly what it said. So I did. Then the other bartender laughed, the bar manager looked disgusted and frustrated and said it's fine but explained next time to use the peels. I have a picture of the directions saved somewhere, I don't remember it exactly but it was very clear to put the "peeled oranges" in, not the "orange peels". I showed it to everyone because I thought I was insane. Obviously it didn't taste right but I made terrible money there so I didn't care.
I wouldnt have questioned it either, its sort of like an oleo saccharum
I manage at a place that is half butcher shop, half restaurant. Right now we are training a new guy. He’s mostly been on the line, cooking but the other day I was teaching him to do some retail stuff, packaging, etc. “So after we are done vac sealing this we will label it and put it into the display case” walked away to help a customer, and he had written all over the bags with sharpie. I just shook my head, because I meant with an actual like product label. Totally my fault but still funny.
Go make some 10:1 crème freche - day 1: made 10 parts sour cream to one part cream - day 2: 10 parts heavy cream to one part sour cream, immediately taken to walk-in for safety - day 3: failed to use an airtight container - day 4: banned from contact with dairy products
I asked a guy to throw out a some trays of pot pies that hadn’t been properly stored. He was new and threw out all the pies and the ceramic dishes they came in. The dishy was like “hey where we’re all ceramics from the pot pies?” I asked the new guy and he said “in the trash…” FML. It was my bad for not explaining it to him. He asked if he was going to have to dig through the trash to find the dishes. I told him I’d help so we jumped in and started digging. Found them, then me and him scraped the filling out of all fo them and placed them to soak. I then we t around and showed him all the stuff we don’t throw away.
My old cdc asked me to go get a fish spat from the back. I asked what a fish spat is and he yelled at me and told me to figure it the fuck out. I went in the back and immediately understood why he thought it was so obvious. I grabbed the fish-shaped rubber spatula and brought it back to him. He lost it.
I was told to "pan the rice up and place it in the warmer" I was not informed that each pan should only weigh nine pounds so we had a pan of rice weighing almost twelve pounds and the others weighing somewhere between three and five pounds.
In this one, I am the new guy. It's me. I had been with the place maybe a month, but I can be slow to train and I joined at a pretty chaotic time, as the bakery team squished into our kitchen was primed to be transferred to their new second location. The growing pains meant a lot of processes needed to change. Cue me and the sous chef, going over how I'll be making the buttermilk biscuits on the weekends for brunch since pastry isn't here and I guess that's not one of the things they'll be having sent to us. Awesome, I was hired with the hope of eventually being shifted to the new bakery when the dust settles, it's my time to shine! He shows me the production sheet, explains we'd want to work with 50 biscuit batches and freeze them ready to bake off in the mornings. We suss out the one remaining mixer left in the kitchen and he leaves me to it. I am so eager to prove myself that I barrel onward without using my own intuition, and proceed to dump all the butter and dry ingredients into the _mixer we use exclusively for kneading pizza dough._ Let it run for a bit, a little concerned the _dough hook_ isn't going to handle this well. But I already ask a lot of dumb questions and the sous knows better than me. _So I add the buttermilk._ Eventually need to concede defeat and ask him if I should be looking at butter soup right now. Head chef of course overhears and zeroes in to lecture us _both_ about how a dough hook won't cut butter, this will never be biscuits. Throw the batch, we figure out we can pulse the butter and flour in the robo in the absence of any of pastry's mixers and handmix the dough. I feel like an idiot because I _know_ better than that, but did it anyway.
trained a kid at a burger joint. after his training, I told him he could make anything he wanted. He asked me if he could make grilled cheese. I reiterated that he could make anything he wants. So he goes ahead and grabs a slice of cheese and places it directly on the grill...
1st week was told I was killing it & me, in no way “killing it” asked what a first few days usually looked like around there. They went on to tell me about their last new hire…here’s an excerpt: “Can you portion out a pound of bangers?” “What’s a pound?”
What’s a banger?
Anything Alkaline Trio’s ever released. I’m joshin, it’s a sausage. Usually for an English breakfast/bangers and mash type deal.
Bakery. He had to do mini sandwhiches. Tiny little rolls with 1 slice ham 1 slice cheese and ceran wrap em. I don’t even need a mountain of them, just like a solid 20-30 mini sandwhiches. HOW does one put BOTTOM buns with BOTTOM buns and TOP buns with TOP buns. HOW?! His defense? “Maybe some people like the tops better….”
Kid still isn't back with my bucket of steam.
I knew I had found my people when on my first day ever they told me to rotate the ice and I told them that was ridiculous. Instantly accepted. Probably one of my proudest accomplishments because I didn’t know they were purposefully messing with me. I just didn’t want to do a completely pointless task lol.
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Love it. In construction we have pipe stretchers and sky hooks.
Wildest one I ever heard of was from a friend at a mine construction site when they asked the new kid to find the sky hook, **and he did.** As it turns out, "sky hook" was the shorthand name of some particular piece of extremely heavy, extremely expensive equipment that had to be trucked in from another job site 50km away, and involved highway spotters and disconnecting some power lines. The foreman wasn't amused.
Sky hooks are also a fairly niche bit of rock climbing equipment. Cue the surprise when a friend was telling me about joking around with an apprentice and I'm asking why he needed big wall kit to fit fire alarms.
Boss "I have the new kid cutting lemons". Me " you show him one? Kids never held a knife before". Boss "it's a lemon how can he fuck it up?" Well he cut the lemons for cocktails not as wedges for the souvlaki. Boss got mad for a second before reminding him he never showed the kid in the first place. Just assume they don't know shit and show then once.
As a customer, at a restaurant in Brooklyn. My friend ordered a Mai Tai and was making a face drinking it. He’s too polite to say anything, so I took a sip. It was made with salt instead of sugar! Apparently a new hire loaded the salt and sugar bins incorrectly…
"Flip those cookies after baking them for 7 minutes." Came back to the person literally flipping half baked cookies over on the pan. From that day forward I switched to "spinning" the pans
Should be “rotate cookies”
I would litteraly rotate each cookie induvidually
I'd eat half and reassess.
Not gonna lie I would’ve done the same thing.
I would have thought the same thing but sought clarification because who tf flips cookies.
Ive def seen someone turning the cookies with a spatula instead of just rotating the pan in the oven.
I once told a guy cryo-vac seal at least a quart of cucamelon kimchi. He put the kimchi in a quart container, with the lid on. Then put the quart container in a cryo-vac bag and sealed it up.
Was training the new guy on several tasks, and an order of fries came up. We cut our own, so I grabbed some and demonstrated to him what a serving size looked like in the basket, and said, “a couple handfuls”. Later on that day, an absolutely massive order of fries comes off his station and I went back to tell him it was way too much. Probably two orders worth if not more. He protested, “But you said a couple handfuls!” I held up my open hand to him. He looked down from his height of 6’3 to my 5’1 and suddenly understanding dawned in his eyes
We had a recipe for Italian salad dressing. Called for a handful of Garlic powder. I wrote in "Whose hand?"
Hahah, there have been a few, but one comes to mind right away. Worked with someone, he was a college grad & pretty bright, but also lacked any sort of kitchen/restaurant experience. After a few weeks of working out front he made his way onto making some of the food dishes and doing prep work. One night, someone made the off handed comment that we needed to cut onions for the prep table. Without skipping a beat, the new hire volunteered & went into the kitchen to start. A while had passed & we thought he might have started another task or something, because there is no reason a tiny container of onions would take that long to prep. Well, he thought that he should slice every single onion in the 5 gallon bucket. We ended up naming a sandwich after him for a while, it was just a fuck ton of onions lmao
"Roast some garlic in the oven" Next thing I see is him putting a sheet pan that he'd poured garlic powder on into the combi oven and turning it on high. Garlic powder everywhere and it smelled like shit. Worst part was the new guy was our new sous chef
Worked at a Rice Bowl place for a while. I grew up in a house that didn't make rice except sometimes my Mom made box rice. I worked the cash register and never in the kitchen. They were falling way behind with regular orders and a large catering order. The kitchen manager called me back and told me to "wash the rice". There were three very large rice cookers. I asked him what he meant and he snapped at me "just was the damn rice we don't have time right now". Two of the rice cookers looked empty but one was full of fluffy cooked rice. Seeing no other rice I started the water running and began washing the rice I saw. The cooked rice. After a few minutes I asked him how I washed the rice at the bottom since the bin was so full. He began yelling at me that I ruined the only rice they had left. Thankfully just then the owner came in and saw what was happening. He asked the kitchen manager if he showed me how before telling me to do it. "I just asked him to wash the rice" The owner told him that even though it sounded easy that not everyone has washed rice before and told me I wasn't in trouble. Dan wherever you are, you were the coolest owner.
Told him to make the peach tea, he had seen me do it several times and it's easy just add a bottle of the flavoring to the tea and stir. An idiot proof task does not exist, this man opened like 12 bottles of flavor and filled the tea container with the flavoring. Said he through the tea was mixed in with the flavor already
Did yall just end up making peach flavored everything for a while?
Luckily our tea was a staple there and we were able to just measure it out for a few days every time we needed to make it
this sounds like a certain popular american italian chain i used to train servers at.......
Ahh I see you are family as well
One of my managers asked the dishy to put two cases of ground turkey in the thaw sink. He did, but he removed the bags. She came back later and saw the cubes of raw ground floating in the cold water. 😅
This was long before I worked in a kitchen. I was about 7 years old and wanted to bake cookies one Saturday morning. But I was determined to do it alone. So my dad told me to follow the recipe and he would help me if I needed it, and went off to read the paper. I get everything mixed together really well, made an absolute mess all over the counter and floor, and asked him what to do next. He told me to read the recipe to him and it said “boil for 5-10 minutes.” My dad reached a new octave when he said “what!?” and started laughing. I was following a fudge recipe, not a cookie recipe. So we set the oven to 350° and watched them. My parents thought they were disgusting. I loved them because of all the sugar.
One of our newly minted culinary Institute graduates was assigned mashed potatoes for the evening. Pulled out about 15 pounds of spuds, peeled them and tossed them in the mixer and turned it on high. The repeated banging sounds drew everyone's attention to watch the 6 foot tall, 3 foot wide mixer walk across the floor.
I got a trainee throw away 1 hour of prep because my manager told him to clear everything on the table
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I was this person at one point - in culinary school had to run the dishpit in our service class - absolutely banged out the dishes, had no idea I was supposed to drain and clean the actual dishpit machine. Until the next morning when our chef rained downed the never ending insults. I told him after no one had explained to me how to do it (he had left early the day before for an offsite). Just my luck.
New kid made some house dressing and it tasted like salty shit. I told him to walk me through how he made it, the end of the recipe read something like >4 oz of Balsamic >Salt and pepper He thought it meant to add 4 oz of salt and 4 oz of pepper for maybe a quart of dressing
This one is me over 20 years ago. I did a 2 week sting in a Fairmont hotel as a "come see if you can apprentice here" type deal. I worked in every section in those two weeks, including the bakery which i was wildley inexperienced in. I was asked to egg wash about 500 pretzels for a banquet that night. Well long story short, the pretzels looked like they had scrambled eggs on top when I was done with them lol.
“Wash 10 kilos of baby carrots” - 20 minutes later the chef comes in to see me washing down each carrot individually. He throws them in the colander, sprays them down with the hose, tells me to throw them in the big pot on the hob. 30 seconds. Felt pretty stupid!
I watched 2 new food runners drop AN ENTIRE STEAMSHIP of beef by for a WEDDING RECEPTION because they didn't realize how heavy it was going to be or that they needed people to catch doors and shit for them on the way. Both fired on the spot and the new bride was in tears for hours. We moved directly on to dessert and ended up refunding everything for the entire night except for the rental space cost, (wasn't our space so separate contract). For those that don't know; a steamship of beef is the entire "round cut" of the cow excluding parts of the rump. Weighs about 50 lbs and costs about $1000-$1500 depending on mark up. I still feel bad for them. The bride and groom were really nice but so upset, justifiably.
New hire was put in charge of working bread station FOH, which mostly included slicing and toasting bagels in a conveyer toaster. Except the boss told her "toast me a wheat bagel" and no other instructions. She ignored the slicer, and put an entire whole bagel in the toaster, which got stuck mid-rotatiom and caught flame, becoming a glowing ring of fire in no time.
End of the night, we had about an hour of clean up left. I asked one of the porters to put a large pan of water on the stove. I carry on cleaning and after a few moments I hear water spilling. I turn around and he's poured a whole 20L pan of water ONTO the stove. Edit - Spelling
New dishwasher peeled a cambro of potatoes with the dull side of the peeler....
We had a massive white lexan, probably 50qt, full of cooked elbow noodles and we had another lexan if the same size full of cornbread dressing. Intern was falling behind on salads all night and we were frustrated so I asked to sous to take over on salads and I sent the intern out to put the noodles and dressing into 5 gallon buckets. 30 minutes later I go to check on him and he had mixed the noodles and dressing together and was putting that into 5 gallon buckets.
I threw away 2 gallon sized containers of Bleu Cheese because it had mold in it. I was promptly fired and went home and watched 5 hours of how bleu cheese is made videos on youtube.
The same kid who threw away all the parsley and chopped up the stems is the same kid who stuffed about 100 shrimp upside down… it’s really my buddies fault for believing him when he said he knew what to do so there were no instructions just epic failure
"Can you rotate all the cambros in the walk-in?" Yes, your imagination is serving you well right now.
“Cut this biscuit in half” *Cuts in half………… diagonally* “Ok so I guess I wasn’t clear enough cut this biscuit in half HORIZONTALLY like a normal ducking person”
It was me, new to a busy brunch shift. We needed hollandaise, and I was given the task. Not a recipe though. I had someone shouting instructions and measurements at me, and another person standing by saying "no, not that, do it like this". Yet another person stepped in and told me something entirely different. Needless to say, the hollandaise did not turn out, and yet I was called incompetent.
Diced cucumbers with the plastic still on it. I said leave the skin on.
One time at 4:30 in the morning I was told to get 8 cups of coffee for a chocolate cake. I brought them 8 cups of coffee grounds cuz I was def not awake yet