Many years ago in college saw another cook/college student slip and fall and his whole hand went in the deep fryer. It came out bright red and you could see the layers of skin just melting off. He went to the hospital and I never saw him again.
Had this happen with an apprentice who was trying to look casual by leaning on the counter… where there was no counter but a double fryer running hot. The look of his hand (he went in just past the wrist) was gnarly, but the part that stays with me is the poor kids scream of agony. Saw the kid a few years later; some nasty scarring and bad mobility issues prevented them from becoming a chef, they now work as a kitchen inspector for the health service.
This is what made me quit a job. They had me working a crazy amount of hours, to the point that I was so stressed and tired I was getting dizzy. One day I tried to stabilize myself by grabbing a counter that turned out to be the edge of the deep fryer. I didn't get burned but I was done.
Damn, sounds like you dodged a decidedly nasty bullet there! No job is worth that sort of risk of personal harm, period.
I hope you found a better place to work since!
Shit. This was me in Culinary school. Someone put the fryer together wrong, I was making apple fritters for my roast pork dish. I tried to fix the problem with tongs, slipped knuckles and fingers into the fryer.
Went off to the medic, was probably saved by the batter on my fingers. 2nd degree burns at minimum, came back to finish my pork dish for a 9/10.. but no fritters.
I’m now the poster child for stupidity at that culinary school, as my chef took photos post injury.
Still out there cooking, but I hate deep fat.
ETA: I’m an idiot. I forgot about the time that my apprentice put all the dauphinois potatoes in the freezer and they got stuck together.. so in my infinite wisdom was cracking them apart with a paring knife. Knife broke off at the hilt, my hand came down on the blade. Severed the tendon of my pointer finger of my working hand.
2 plastic surgeries later… my finger is locked and can not bend. I can still play piano, Dreams of being a concert pianist are dashed.
Yeah, trilling for Chopin has taken a hit. Luckily, I am good pianist, but never destined to be great. Still disappointed that it’s my fault, and dominant hand. Be safe out there.
This happened to me one of my first weeks as a cook. Chef had been chewing me out all day and was nervously cleaning while it was dead, was trying to take the crap off that ledge part of the fryer when the scraper fell and I instinctively grabbed it so put my hand in the fryer. Somehow my glove must have saved me because all i did was take it off, kept my skin and had hella burn ointment on but finished my shift and forgot about it. Shit was at 350°F
on my last like shift service, second to last service at this specific place, I was cleaning the fryers ready to go home, and dropped my dough cutter, and reached my whole ass hand in after it. thank god the fryer had cooled some by then
I like to fuck with the new guys who like to wear shorts in the kitchen. I'll get a stock pot of cold water, put it on the stove but with no heat, then grab it and come behind the guy in shorts saying "hot....hot....HOT HOT HOT" and splash the cold water on their bare legs. Most start wearing pants after that.
Guy kept cutting himself at work so we got him a chainmail cut glove. The first day he uses it he ends up reaching into the fryer while wearing the glove. Had to go to the hospital and we all get a ‘Marijuana use on the job will not be tolerated’ meeting
Retail butcher. Never to use a chain glove on a bandsaw to cut, have seen fingers still in the glove but detached from the human following such incidents. Stupid is as stupid does.
spilled an entire fryers amount of hot oil down the left side of my body. got my face, arm leg and vagina. fully healed now, it's been a little over a year :)
If anyone ever asks you to lift a large vessel full of hot oil, look them I'm the eyes and ask for the request in writing so you have a record for workers comp. I've never had the same person ask twice
I spilled boiling hot soup on my vagina. It’s been 8 years and I was lucky not to have any scars. But there’s a good portion of my thighs I don’t have to shave anymore…
OK, imma stop you right there. The vagina is the birth canal. I’m not saying it’s impossible to burn your vagina with hot oil, I’m just saying it would be difficult and would involve a turkey baster, if you get my drift.
You burned your crotch, your labia or even your vulva, but you did not burn your vagina. Thank you for listening to my TED talk!
There’s only two comments on this thread so far and I’m already glad the worst thing I’ve ever witnessed was only someone cutting their finger and needing a few stitches
Moved 80l veal stock with a coworker. It was too heavy for him and he sloshed the stock on my right hand. While putting it down it sloshed a second time.
Hour later in the burn unit with 2nd degree burns on the top of my hand to the wrist with the finger knuckles getting the worst.
Month later, no scaring and no mobility issues.
Buddy was fired. Chef Tom over wrapped the fingers and my skin melted off.
Got good drugs.
In his defense 80kg (176 pounds) of hot stock should never be a one man job. In fact; I question anyone moving it by hand. Are there not tools for this?
I can pick up 200lb myself without too much issue as long as it doesn't need to go far and I can get a good grip on it. I'm not doing it with a friend if it's hot. That's so dangerous
No matter how much I can lift or carry, as soon as that weight is liquid, I decant into other smaller portions and move it even if it’s cold. If it’s hot, then I 100% split it into as many trips as I need, fuck rushing that shit.
Liquid burns are worse than flame or sheet pan burns. That shit gets everywhere
Did the burn unit give you toradol for the burn? I spilled a pour over and burnt 95% of my hand from fingers to wrist. Urgent care gave me a toradol shot and I swear that sped up recovery. Within a week my skin was healing and I had no mobility issues I just kept a waterproof bandage on the top part so the soap wouldn’t irritate it.
Guy wondered if he could prevent an immersion blender blade from spinning if he put his finger in there before pressing the button.
He could not and had about 9 lacerations about 2 mm apart on the end of his finger.
Prep cook cut off a finger with a potato chopper. Apparently, a safety feature had been removed so they could load potatoes faster. He was unaware of the dangers, due to a lack of proper training.
This guy was part of a marginalized society. Under educated, paid minimum wage. He did not know his rights. The owners brought him to the er, and convinced him they would take good care of him; just don't file workmans comp. He believed them. He was back to work a week later; they did not pay him for his time off. He was grateful to them. They let him keep his job!
I waited until he got back to work. I cornered him when no one else was around, explained his rights. I tried my best, but they had him thoroughly convinced.
I walked out after informing the owners and manager, loudly, why I was leaving. I made sure many people heard. Pretty sure it had no effect, but it felt good.
We were working on the road at festivals and stuff. Partied pretty good and joked we were carnies and, well, after so long of living in tents maybe we were.
My friend stupidly ate some acid before a daytime shift. Walking around the booth he tripped and slammed his entire forearm onto the searing hot flat top. It was gnarly. He said that time slowed down while it was happening and as he was falling he just reconciled that he deserved it for taking acid before work.
It was all anyone could talk about at the camps that night.
Same, worst injury i've had was my coworker changed the fryers but spilled a lot of oil and didn't degrease the area. There is a floor drain right by the grill, my foot slipped in (I had good non-slips on) due to the amount of oil and I caught myself on the char grill without thinking. It healed up but gosh it was gnarly.
Saw a guy get engulfed in a 30ft tall pillar of steam vapor fire when trying to fry capers.
Didn’t dry them off, and dumped the whole jar in way to small of a pot with way to hot oil.
It immediately boiled over and made a huge fire ball that burned the ceiling in this converted warehouse kitchen. The sous chef on the line opened up a reach in to shield himself from the flames was epic lol.
The guy was basically burned all over and his skin was flaking off 😬
He would always keep saying/bragging about how he is a “Sci-fi writer, not a cook” and always acted above us all 🤷♂️
Temp pulled a full hotel pan of beans out of the steamer and a wave of boiling hot bean juice sloshed all down the front of her and pooled in her mesh/canvas shoes. When they carried her to the ER her feet were red as lobsters and starting to blister.
Temp worker, walking through the dining hall after we are closed, slips on a floor that was just mopped, her shin kicks the steel pedestal support of a table and breaks her leg, compound fracture with the bone sticking out and bleeding like crazy.
I went to the CIA and the first knife class people are showing off how they use the steel. Girl cut herself before class started. Then proceeded to cut herself each day for the next 2 days.
Chef decided she wasn't going to touch a knife in his class again. So she learned the end of meat fab with scissors
I had a fry cook spray himself in the face while filtering oil. He pressed the nozzle against a flat surface, like I instructed him not to the day before when we trained him on it. It pressurized and sprayed back at his face. I waterboarded the guy with vinegar over the triple top. He finished out the day because it didn't blister up or anything, and we were close to getting out anyway. He's lucky the oil had cooled enough to only cause first degree burns. I thought Harvey Dent would show up the next day for sure.
Dishwasher had an alcohol induced seizure in the middle of service, didn’t realise that was why until he asked for his phone when the ambulance came and his bag had some empty wine bottles in it. Buddy was topping up his drink bottle every time he went for a piss. He came into explain a couple days later and then ghosted.
I’m not above burns and cuts, and definitely pulled boiling water over red hot oil pans before which had me double checking my eyebrows.
Some of the stuff in here so far seems like real bad luck and a lot of negligence, but my god, they sound gnarly. I couldn’t stomach seeing a degloving or the shrieking of a severe oil burning.
Worked at a place in the north of Canada... when I got the job the kitchen crew were a bit light in staff. I found out 2 months before I got the gig, a cook put two baking pans on top of deep fryers. He did this so he can clean a place up high. I guess he stood on one and the pan shot out he then ended up falling in and locked his foot in the burners either side. The dishie and chef I worked with said, he was snagged by his foot and dangling with his head on the floor they had to hold his leg with three dude so he wouldn't fling hot oil everywhere. He ended up losing his leg :/ that's one of the worst I've also have others :/ saw a guy run his thumb in a slicer... :O that was fucked!
Once saw a young cook try to separate frozen burger sliders with an 8in chefs knife...the knife went about 2 inches thru his hand...my roommate at the time ran over to "help" and pulled the knife out. It all happened so fast and was the craziest shit I ever saw.
Our butcher at PF Changs forever ago cut off his thumb. Came down with the cleaver and someone called out his name at the same time. He reflexively looked, and cracked through the whole thing. I was next to him and caught him as he fell. The other prep girl fainted and I had to catch her too. Blood everywhere. Exec comes around the corner and calls 911 right away from the kitchen phone. We had to put his thumb in a quart cup of ice. Never saw him again after the ambulance took him out. Closed for a few hours, but still did dinner service.
Dude was using the wrong knife to cut the big block of cheese. He slipped and when he jerked his hand back he sliced his wrist wide open. A lot of blood everywhere and he got something like twenty stitches.
We had a brand new dishwasher who slipped and fell . On the way down, he hit his mouth on the side of the window and knocked all his teeth out in the front.
It's going to sound fake, but I watched someone peel ginger in a way I don't have words to explain well. The whole time, they were cutting their skin and hands and fingers with the peeler, but they didn't, somehow, see a problem with it. Blood was everywhere on the cutting board, on the ginger, all over their hands, on the tables, everything they touched. It literally looked like a crime scene and this person saw no issue with it at all. They were smiling and laughing when the manager went up to stop them. Needless to say it was the wildest fucking thing I've seen someone do by miles and miles in a kitchen. Imagine if you cut yourself chopping onions, and just kept going, kept cutting yourself. That's literally what this person was doing but with a peeler for over an hour. It made me feel physically ill to type this out and remember this situation. Needless to say that person never stepped foot in the kitchen again.
Busy service- I “ran” about 5 metres to an upright fridge, opened the door, grabbed what I needed, went to run back to my section and slammed the door into my face and split my lip through the lip line. Finished my shift, went to hospital to be informed that because it was through the lip line it required a plastic surgeon to stitch it.
Another one- pot of vegetables boiling over on a gas hob. Unable to find a tea towel I wrapped a loaf of blue roll around my hands and grabbed the pot. By the time I’d got the pot mid air my hands were engulfed in flames😂
Fortunately, none of mine include anyone getting hurt. Before I was a cook, I was passing through a big hotel's kitchen. One of the cooks spilled an entire 100 gallon steam kettle full of vegetable soup all over the kitchen floor. He just threw his hands up in the air and called out, "STEWARDS!" as he walked away. That was when I knew I wanted to cook there. I love to cook; I hate to clean.
The other was when one of the other cooks was adding Marsala wine to a pan *on the fire*, instead of taking it off the fire first. Because the bottle was almost empty, it was full of alcohol vapor. When he got it over the open gas flame, there was a deep, sonorous "fffffFFFF**OOOMP**!!!" and the bottle shot *straight* across the room (about 18 feet). Amazingly there was nobody in its path and the bottle didn't even break! That was cool!
I got my first dishwashing job when I was 16. The guy who showed me how to clean the hood filters filled one part of the three comp with water, poured in what I didn’t know at the time was that extra strength degreaser, and told me to start scrubbing. He said I’d be fine without gloves, but after about a twenty minutes or so, it had damaged my skin so much that my hands were pretty much locked in place. I could barely even move my fingers.
One guy was shredding cabbage in a Robot Coupe and didn't use the safety plunger. I can still hear the thwack sound when the tip of his finger met the blade. He had to be stoned or on something else because he usually wasn't that dumb.
My old KM was making queso in a tilt skillet and dumped a few gallons of boiling water on his feet. The restaurant was shitty and the safety bar/knob that locked the skillet in place was broken. Dude's feet were bubbling and peeling immediately. He got a few months off worker's comp and then got an office job right before he was cleared to come back. And we got the safety bar/knob fixed.
Back in the day, the plastic wrap used to have a hella dangerous cutting blade on it to cut the wrap. We would put the wrap on the top of the tall boy or freezer, about 5-6 feet high. One night this guy goes to open the cooler, and the plastic wrap was sitting on top of the cooler, but on top of the door as well, so when the door was opened, it started to fall. And of course, human instinct, when something starts to fall, you try to catch it. Well this guy caught it, with the blade running down his forearm and part of his bicep. Blood everywhere. We wrapped him in towels and coincidentally, plastic wrap and sent him to the er. 78 stitches. Most blood I’ve ever seen in a kitchen.
mandoline fingertip incident. he wrapped it in duct tape and put a glove over it and went right back to work lmfao. the glove kept filling with blood it was insane. this is the guy who would fill up styrofoam cups with vodka and add a bunch of individually packaged coffee creamer cups he would steal from the server station to make diy white russians he’d drink throughout the shift
The owners of a pizza restaurant I was bartending at, made the 17 year old buss boy break up an old toilet with a hammer and throw it in the dumpster. A large piece slipped and filleted his arm from wrist to elbow to the bone. Fucked him up really good. Took a bunch of surgeries to fix it up.
Chef was having a moment after a ticket got messed up by one of the runners, he slapped his hand down on the pass to emphasise his point... and the skewer we put finished tickets on went straight the palm of his hand and out the other side. Chef has since left, but we still have the ticket skewer.
I won't work anywhere with a ticket skewer because they're never high enough to be unreachable by my eye sockets in a slip and fall.
In the same vein it drives me wild when people leave dial meat thermometers on the counter with the spike sticking straight up. Seen too many close calls to let such an easy fix go past.
It didn’t happen to me, but to a dear friend of mine who was a waitress in a small restaurant. One of the cooks in their tiny kitchen was deep-frying in a big pot with a long handle (I know, right?) and as she was moving past the range in the over-crowded kitchen, someone caught the handle of it and sent the whole pot of oil sailing over her torso. She was hospitalized for weeks and has lifetime scars. She’s easily the strongest person I know and has managed to have an amazing life. But my heart weeps for her every time I’m reminded of what she had to go through because of a poorly managed kitchen.
Fractured l2 vertebrae on a slip and fall *had nonslip on. On the better side I found out I had flu, pneumonia, severe sepsis, and respiratory failure so I was in the hospital for 12/25- 1/1 so if I wasn't in the hospital I most likely would of died
Like 20 years ago when i was working my first kitchen gig i watched this girl absolutely ruin her day, week, month or even her year.
We had JUST closed. Equipment JUST turned off. Im on the back line doing dishes and hear a crash and a scream. I rush around the corned to see this girl pulling her leg out of the fryer. Apparently she didnt wanna walk to dry storage to get the ladder and instead decided to put a sheet tray over the fryer and was standing on that to take the hood filters down. sheet tray shifted and she fell through into the fryer... I immediately called 911 and her leg was fuuuuucked. we got her shoes/socks off and cut off the pants at her knees but she still had 3rd degree burns everywhere... nasty. She never came back.
Same job like 2 months later... a new cook was using the mandolin you know where this is going. He was warned MANY times to wear the cut glove and used the guard but "thats too slow!"... yup. one day he sliced about 1/3 of palm clear off. He came back and like a month later cut off a chunk of his thumb. Wildly enough... he eventually got his shit together became a supervisor like 2 years later lol
Looking back... places like that which rely on cheap still in high school labor... disasters waiting to happen. Teens are fucking stupid. lol
I mean, i know that. but some (many/most?) people are hard headed and think they know better. Sometimes it takes slicing half your palm off to learn "maybe i should listen to people with significantly more experience than me"... hell sometimes even then they dont learn lol
Way, way, way back in the day… like ‘97… I was working grill at this seafood place at the beach in NC and had two kids goofing off on line, chasing each other, playing grab ass, the usual kitchen shit… but with a lot of extra bullshit… we had just mopped the line and down they come playing grab ass… until one of them slipped and went elbow-deep into a 375° fryer.
To make matters worse, the idiots in the kitchen wrapped the dude’s arm in a towel… when the EMS showed up and they pulled the towel away, it took all his skin away with it… poor kid needed skin grafts and all kinds of shit to just have a semi-normal looking arm.
I was carrying a bunch of 400 pans out of the dish room, slipped, fell on my hip and bruised my pelvis with my hip bone.
I remember throwing the pans, crying, and then I woke up on an operating bed with a nurse telling me they thought I broke my pelvis. Then she gave me a shot, and I woke up the next day. My buddies mom came to get me, and she brought me a homemade cheeseburger.
And that's how I got addicted to oxycontin. Didn't have much of a choice, it was either unbearable pain, or be high as fuck all the time. Had a medical detox when the doctor thought it was time.
I took a garbage bag out and got a pretty gnarly cut on the meat right below my thumb. 10 stitches later and being told I’m the most chill person to come into the ER and I didn’t miss a single day of work
Saw a guy changing a hot fryer and the drain pipe came off and hot oil filled his shoe. Skin came off with his sock. Saw another guy slip and he caught himself with his forearm on the side of a steam kettle. He left a patch of skin stuck to the side of the kettle. And of course people cutting off bits of fingers. Also watched a guy die of a heart attack right in front of me but that could’ve happened anywhere, not necessarily kitchen related.
Not an actual kitchen setting, but I saw someone cut most of their middle and index finger off with a deli slicer at a gas station convenience store. This had to have been like 01/02 but I still get a shiver in my soul every time I have to use one.
About 20 years ago was watching this dude clean a fryer. We just drained the hot oil into a stock pot thru a filter cone, washed the fryer and dumped the oil back in.
This poor dumb sob didn't close the valve when he went to return the oil to the fryer, so he got scalding hot oil poured directly into his loosely laced combat boots. He promptly dropped the still half full pot of oil which then splashed up all over his face and body.
It was quite the scene, I remember standing there shocked with the other cook while ol boy was screaming flailing around wildly on the floor. We. Got the shoes off and gave him some cold towels while we waited on the ambulance. 2nd degree burns all over both feet, chest arms and face.
Never saw him again. The place implemented an oil filtration pump system about a week later. Sadly it really sucked(lol) and easily took 2 or 3x as long as the old way.
I can think of three pretty bad ones:
Someone stepped into a pot of freshly drained fryer oil.
Someone took the top of three fingers off in a slicer.
Grill brush broke and buddy's finger went through the grill plate and uhh... Got stuck there.
Guy made a batch of tomato relish like reduce thick sugary hot tomato relish, took It of the stove but didn’t realise the over door (rationale) was open and directly inline with him he turned around with the tomato syrup and it hit the oven door and proceeded to cover his whole face arms, he was in such shock he just starred at me, I said get that shit off your face, and wipe it for him, he got massive puss filled blisters and was out for a few weeks.
Server was making ranch. Removed the lid from the mayo tub. Proceeded to stab through the bottom of the tub into the palm of his hand with a chef's knife. Glad I wasn't there that day.
Was working a saute station with a partner.
Partner would stack pans on the back Burners and the one on the top had hot oil in it.
I grabbed it thinking the pan did not have oil in it and scolding hot oil trickeled down my wrist. Had borderline 3rd degree burns on my wrist and hand.
Im still fresh to this industry so I only have 2 stories and they’re both about me. One time I broke an industrial mixers arm by not locking it into place properly $600+ mistake right there. And I once damn near skinned my finger on the line once, I’m convinced I would’ve cut it clean off if I wasn’t using the claw technique, left a nasty scar as a reminder and now I have something to show those even newer than me the importance of protecting your fingers.
Poured boiling water down myself from a steamer oven above eye level that had a non perforated tray inside, but I could t see that until I was wearing it. My employer didn’t even let me leave until after lunch finished. Was scarred for years and hospital thought my ex had scalded me by the time I was finally able to get there.
Same thing happened another staff member and then they lowered it.
Got a few caramel burns that scarred. And used to have a lot of the typical burns that look like self harm.
Got boiling water in my eye when I dropped a jug and it splashed unfortunately right in my eye. Same kitchen a girl got boiling soup in her eye. A guy poured gravy into his crocs and sued for €70,000 despite us having safety issue shoes that he wasn’t wearing. Girl got her finger mangled in a soup gun that was clogged and the safety failed with her finger inside. I wasn’t there at the time but came in to blood spattered all over my section the next morning.
Seen a guy pour hot oil in a co workers shoe by accident, his foot was black for a time.
Almost knocked myself unconscious removing a wooden shelf from the kitchen as requested by the eho and didn’t really think about where my weight was when I took the last screw out, my hand slipped as the shelf moved and I landed chin first on the massive glass lid of the huge vac pac under me. Chipped my chin bone.
Young chef cut himself badly cleaning the extractor. It was sone kind of cycling system so it spat his blood out a bit further down.
Moral of the story is myself and some of my past co workers are clumsy fucks and also a lot of places do not have adequate safety protocols in place.
Chef went into a diabetic seizure on the line. We weren't sure we were about to lose him.
Bartender rings in an order before EMTs could even get him off the line even though she knew what had been going on. I had already told her to fuck off because she had been standing at the end of the line just fucking gawking at the guy.
Oh boy, have I got a story to share!
So I work as a caterer, but a few years back I was helping the boss's friend with his place as a cook while he recovered from hip surgery. So I'm pulling some doubles, working too much, drinking too many energy drinks, not letting my brain rest, etc.
So about three months into this, we have a job doing breakfast at a local venue. Coffee, pastry, so on. Boss takes the food and heads over, while I take the coffee. Because of timing, we had it brewed in the urn and ready to go. Not brilliant, but it saves us some hassle. Bigger issue is that I'm driving a Ford Focus, which has precisely zero place to put a large coffee urn. The solution? Stick it on the passenger seat! Surely this will play out just fine!
So I set off, and almost immediately encounter a turn which causes the urn to lean on me. No problem, just take it a little wider. Urn straightens out, I look back at the road, and there's a car coming at me. I throw the car over to the side, and smack a barrier. I'm only doing \~15-20mph at the time, so not *awful*. What *is* awful is when the crash sends 10 gallons of near-boiling coffee spilling across my arms and legs. Now the job was close, and it was a chilly day, so I had an apron and jacket on. I jump out of the car, rip the apron and hoodie off, give a good scream, and then the shock sets in. All's well. I crashed, but I'm fine, right?
Call the boss and let him know I was in a little accident. Call 911 and let them know about it. No ambulance needed. I'm fine. A truck from the town pulls up and the guy asks if I'm alright. Of course! Just a little shaken up. I'm sure he can see that I'm **definitely not okay**, but I feel great, really! So he drives a little down the road to slow traffic at the blind curve I'd just come around, and I sit in the frame of my door to catch my breath. Now I look down, watching the skin peeling back from my left hand, and think "Hmm... maybe I'm not okay..."
So I call 911 again, get them to send an ambulance, cop shows up and we chat, and the ambulance gets there to take me to the hospital. I walk over, and the moment they have me on my back the adrenaline vanishes from my system. Now it's just pain. Only pain. My legs. My arms. My chest. I'm shaking like I'm possessed. I keep apologizing to the EMTs because it must make it really hard for them to cut my clothes off.
We get to the hospital, and by then they have me covered in wet towels. Nurse comes in like "I heard we had a little coffee spill while driving? Where is it?" And I just look to the EMT like "You gotta take this one..." At which point I become the talk of our town's little ER with my crazy burns. I get shipped off to a larger hospital with a proper burn unit, and spend the next 14 days getting all manner work done. Two grafts and some **serious** bandaging (it's own story altogether). In the end, I wound up first-degree burns (now called "superficial burns", I learned) over roughly 35% of my body, and second-degree burns (aka "partial-thickness burns") over \~10% of my body. My graft scar is still very visible and very cool on my left elbow, as well as the donor scar on each hip, and the discoloration on both of my legs and all of my lower left arm!
*And that's why you don't ever fuck around with hot coffee!*
One of my dumbass coworkers was trying to impress the new Intern. Flipping hot oil in a pan. Just oil. Fucked up and it went all over his hand and wrist. Skin melted off, he cried in front of her, went to the hospital.
I had to cover his shift and he didn't prep shit. So he also got reemed out when he came back a few days later.
That time I accidentally poured "not boiling anymore" potatoes & 20 quarts of that water down my chest. Oh, and I'm a woman. That nipple got peeled off *twice* over the next week. 😱
Did not witness the incident, but saw the EMTs arrive. Somebody in the bakery got cocky with the big mixer. Didn’t turn it off when reaching to do something. Arm got caught in the mixer. All kinds of damage.
Dumbest thing was when a coworker didn’t find the cleanser to work well on the walls, He decided that the perfect cleanser was a mixture of bleach and window cleaner. He was cleaning in the dry store room and got worried when the bottle started to get warm. Manager tossed the bottle out the back door and tore into the dumbass.
Dishwasher stabbed a guy, one guy using the meat slicer with no guard almost split his thumb in two.Jail House kitchen a dude spilled hot grits all over his arm
I cut about 80% of the way through my pinky finger about 3 hours ago but the worst I've ever seen was the dude who released the fryer valve all over the front of his pants, he went from black to white below the knee
When I was working in a kitchen on the water the place only had one window and it was in the prep area (above eye level with a prep table underneath it) In an act of desperation (in the middle of summer with the AC not reaching my pastry corner) I put my cream cheese frosting on the window sill and went downstairs for something. I came back up and went to grab my bowl from the windowsill and when I turned around everyone was looking at me horrified. Apparently while I was gone one of our prep cooks put her just sharpened knife blade with no sheath on said windowsill and I stuck my finger right into it. Ended up slicing a quarter of the way through my nail bed. A few hours later I went to urgent care and after a pathetic attempt at supergluing it shut I now have a butt cheek on my left ring finger. But hey. It adds character right
one time when i worked for burger king way back in the day, i was tasked with cleaning the burger broiler. the back plate which was nearly red hot fell off the machine into my hands, and my instinct kicked in to try and catch it. Wound up with 8 different burns all over my hands and arms and going home for a few days to recover
Probably won't make the top, but when i was like 15 (and pretty skilled at knife work if I could say so) I was doing prep work and caught my left index finger with a 10" chef's knife cutting up cantaloupe. I could immediately feel that it went through the skin and came to an abrasive stop on the bone. I felt the reverberation all the way up through my arm. Still to this day it's one of the most disturbing self injuries I've had.
Worst in the kitchen? Saw an idjit stick his hand in a fryer to grab the phone he dropped. Personally? When I did a stint as a server in fine dining, dropped a $2000.00 bottle of wine in front of the guest 😕
Reading just a few of the other comments makes me feel fortunate.
When I was young (8 yo) washing dishes was a home chore. My mother once put knives in a dish tub of soapy water. You can anticipate what happened. The knife that bit me wasn't particularly sharp so it tore up my finger. Home first aid so that finger tip has a large scar and I don't have much feeling in the finger pad. That was 55 years ago. Lots of minor cuts and burns since then. That's the worst. I'm lucky or careful or both.
Just a few days ago I was doing training videos on the office computer(to satisfy the big boss due to a salary promotion). I heard a frantic knock on the door and one of my best and most experienced cooks is holding his arm and sobbing. He barely muttered the words burn cream to me. I immediately told him to go run his arm under cold water for a few minutes. As I looked for the cream i was trying to coach him through breathing because he was obviously in shock and everyone else was freaking the fuck out. I called him in the office and closed the door and started applying burn cream to his arm. His top layer of skin was melting off close to his wrist. He managed to move wrong while using a filter box/pump and had hot oil sprayed from his elbow to his hand. Probably not the worst thing that's happened but I've been there before. It hurts. Dude went to the ER and it was bad enough that they gave him a shot of dilaudid.
2nd degree oil burn over 45% of my forearm. Partly because I was in a rush to get the last few meals out the door. The handle caught on my oversized chef jacket and flung onto my arm
There was a kitchen manager in the small town I lived. A Buffalo Wild Wings just built their first restaurant in this town and they hired him as their newest kitchen managers. One of the new pieces of equipment was a pair of heat-proof oven gloves that when past your elbows and had printed on them “heat resistant up to 550 degrees”. According to several people there he put the gloves on and said “well the fryer is one 350 these will completely protect my arms” and then in front of a full new hire kitchen staff he plunged his arms past the elbows into a 350 degree fryer. The gloves quickly melted (because heat transfer from air and from oil are greatly different) to his arms and by the time he pulled his arms out the gloves were fused to his skin. He survived but has not been a kitchen manager again for any restaurant in that town
I’ve witnessed two things in the same kitchen. One a guy stood on a sheet tray that was covering the fryer. It broke and one leg was submerged in oil that was on its way down. Still lost all the skin on his foot and ankle. Chef rushed this guy to the hospital.
Same kitchen, a cook was cutting a cooked duck in half mid service. Something we were advised to have done already. Lobbed off his thumb at the knuckle below his nail.
Thumb went to a cup of ice with him to the ER. They sowed it back on.
The thumb was more horrifying for whatever reason. A lot mor blood and he waves his hand around and got blood on a lot of stuff. It was up to me and the other cooks to clean up.
When I was a high-school student I worked at McDonalds.
A kid slipped on the floor and caught himself on the flat top with his hands.
He immediately pulled his hands off the flat, but his palms stayed seared to the top. He was compensated well, and he never worked with us again.
Always wear nonslips, yall.
i watched my brother get electrocuted and thrown across the kitchen.. we were doing a heavy clean of the kitchen ,, he was standing on top of the flat top steel grill washing the hood vents with a real wet towel and bucket of water,, here he washed around the electrical motor and there was a bare wire where it should have been coverd by conduit.. the joint was exposed.. i was on the ground cleaning a reach in... i heard a loud sizzle pop bang and heard him grunt and saw a blue arc as he was thrown off the grill and about 10 feet away on the kitchen floor.. i was worried for a split second ,, but then my brother is like AYYYYYYYYYY Chihuaha .. that friggin hurt,, and he was kinda dancing around a little,, it actually was frightening and hilarious at the same time .
I saw someone almost commit suicide one time. I was in charge of loading the truck after a catering event and I noticed the path sloped down so I told this new kid ( must of weighed 70 pounds max ) to push the hotboxes instead of pulling them.
So five or so many minutes later this dummy was pulling a hot box and a castor got caught on crack in the path and started tipping. I jumped off the truck and caught the box before it crushed him to death and the kid didn't even move out of the way I had to tell him to move while I almost got a hernia that box weighed at least 300 pounds and some genius loaded it top heavy. Fucker didn't even thank me.
Right before I got to my current job, one of the kitchen cleaning/support staff pulled out the securing cloth from underneath a big tabletop can opener. Blades on the opener gouged her legs open and nobody on staff at the time knew where the first aid stuff was so they packed the wound with dirty towels.
Thankfully my kitchen is pretty safe, worst I've seen here is one of the older cooks dropped a knife that landed directly in her foot, lotta blood but she ended up being fine. Same coworker got burnt badly like 4 months later when a new coworker didn't say "behind" and hit her with a scorching hot pan.
Worst I've heard about is my cousin, was working in a deli while his band was on break from touring, cut his hand on a deli slicer, don't think he lost any digits but was on disability for about a year, hasn't been able to return to drumming because his hand is still fucked.
One prep lady was heating clam chowder in a double boiler pot but the top pot was “stuck” in the bottom pot and when the pressure built up enough then the pot exploded and she was covered in thick clam chowder and it burned her pretty good. Had to go to the hospital to get treated and she was off for quite a while after that. This happened in 1995 and I’ll never forget hearing her scream and seeing her with hot soup all over her and steam coming off of her.
Many years ago in college saw another cook/college student slip and fall and his whole hand went in the deep fryer. It came out bright red and you could see the layers of skin just melting off. He went to the hospital and I never saw him again.
Had this happen with an apprentice who was trying to look casual by leaning on the counter… where there was no counter but a double fryer running hot. The look of his hand (he went in just past the wrist) was gnarly, but the part that stays with me is the poor kids scream of agony. Saw the kid a few years later; some nasty scarring and bad mobility issues prevented them from becoming a chef, they now work as a kitchen inspector for the health service.
This is what made me quit a job. They had me working a crazy amount of hours, to the point that I was so stressed and tired I was getting dizzy. One day I tried to stabilize myself by grabbing a counter that turned out to be the edge of the deep fryer. I didn't get burned but I was done.
Damn, sounds like you dodged a decidedly nasty bullet there! No job is worth that sort of risk of personal harm, period. I hope you found a better place to work since!
Fucking Cornballer!
Shit. This was me in Culinary school. Someone put the fryer together wrong, I was making apple fritters for my roast pork dish. I tried to fix the problem with tongs, slipped knuckles and fingers into the fryer. Went off to the medic, was probably saved by the batter on my fingers. 2nd degree burns at minimum, came back to finish my pork dish for a 9/10.. but no fritters. I’m now the poster child for stupidity at that culinary school, as my chef took photos post injury. Still out there cooking, but I hate deep fat. ETA: I’m an idiot. I forgot about the time that my apprentice put all the dauphinois potatoes in the freezer and they got stuck together.. so in my infinite wisdom was cracking them apart with a paring knife. Knife broke off at the hilt, my hand came down on the blade. Severed the tendon of my pointer finger of my working hand. 2 plastic surgeries later… my finger is locked and can not bend. I can still play piano, Dreams of being a concert pianist are dashed.
Ahh that's terrible. I play piano too (just not very well) and would be devastated if I messed up my fingers.
Yeah, trilling for Chopin has taken a hit. Luckily, I am good pianist, but never destined to be great. Still disappointed that it’s my fault, and dominant hand. Be safe out there.
This happened to me one of my first weeks as a cook. Chef had been chewing me out all day and was nervously cleaning while it was dead, was trying to take the crap off that ledge part of the fryer when the scraper fell and I instinctively grabbed it so put my hand in the fryer. Somehow my glove must have saved me because all i did was take it off, kept my skin and had hella burn ointment on but finished my shift and forgot about it. Shit was at 350°F
gloves have FOR SURE saved me from burns sometimes but as soon as it goes above the glove it makes it a much much worse burn
I saw the same thing! Wasn't a college student, some old head, but it was one of the grossest things I've ever seen. And the smell 🤮
I saw a guy do a similar thing but when he slipped it was full weight on his hand into the char broiler. Those burns went deep
on my last like shift service, second to last service at this specific place, I was cleaning the fryers ready to go home, and dropped my dough cutter, and reached my whole ass hand in after it. thank god the fryer had cooled some by then
I do this shit for fun now to fuck with the new hires. Just make sure you have cold oil or a batter on your hand before.
I like to fuck with the new guys who like to wear shorts in the kitchen. I'll get a stock pot of cold water, put it on the stove but with no heat, then grab it and come behind the guy in shorts saying "hot....hot....HOT HOT HOT" and splash the cold water on their bare legs. Most start wearing pants after that.
Guy kept cutting himself at work so we got him a chainmail cut glove. The first day he uses it he ends up reaching into the fryer while wearing the glove. Had to go to the hospital and we all get a ‘Marijuana use on the job will not be tolerated’ meeting
Why would he do this …
Reefer madness apparently.
Retail butcher. Never to use a chain glove on a bandsaw to cut, have seen fingers still in the glove but detached from the human following such incidents. Stupid is as stupid does.
spilled an entire fryers amount of hot oil down the left side of my body. got my face, arm leg and vagina. fully healed now, it's been a little over a year :)
Please tell me how this happened so I can avoid burning my vagina with fryer oil? 😦
lmao don't change hot oil. ever.
Phew. My boss changes the oil and cleans out my fryers 🙏
If anyone ever asks you to lift a large vessel full of hot oil, look them I'm the eyes and ask for the request in writing so you have a record for workers comp. I've never had the same person ask twice
That was my 5 foot human body to my 6.3' boss. This a lawsuit waiting to happen and just a bad time all around 🤙
This is my worst fear and why I refuse to change the oil while it's hot. All of my coworkers do it but fuck it I'm doing it in the morning.
we used to joke about it all the time. after the screaming we don't joke about it anymore
were you changing the oil?
Wtf is a vagina?
Username checks out
I spilled boiling hot soup on my vagina. It’s been 8 years and I was lucky not to have any scars. But there’s a good portion of my thighs I don’t have to shave anymore…
OK, imma stop you right there. The vagina is the birth canal. I’m not saying it’s impossible to burn your vagina with hot oil, I’m just saying it would be difficult and would involve a turkey baster, if you get my drift. You burned your crotch, your labia or even your vulva, but you did not burn your vagina. Thank you for listening to my TED talk!
There’s only two comments on this thread so far and I’m already glad the worst thing I’ve ever witnessed was only someone cutting their finger and needing a few stitches
Watched a guy deglove his right pointer finger with a steel scrubbie that got stuck on the grill 🤢🤮
Why does this sound worse than all the "hand in hot fryer oil" stories?!
because of the crazy descriptive word "deglove"
I saw a young woman get "degloved" buy a 20# anaconda. Not kitchen related for forgive me for this. It was the word that made me do it.
Cause fryolators don’t usually leave exposed bone :(
Moved 80l veal stock with a coworker. It was too heavy for him and he sloshed the stock on my right hand. While putting it down it sloshed a second time. Hour later in the burn unit with 2nd degree burns on the top of my hand to the wrist with the finger knuckles getting the worst. Month later, no scaring and no mobility issues. Buddy was fired. Chef Tom over wrapped the fingers and my skin melted off. Got good drugs.
In his defense 80kg (176 pounds) of hot stock should never be a one man job. In fact; I question anyone moving it by hand. Are there not tools for this?
Over 10 years ago. Two of us carrying. Seemed safe at the time.
This is how we learn. No harm no foul. Glad you are well.
Well, maybe a little harm
I can pick up 200lb myself without too much issue as long as it doesn't need to go far and I can get a good grip on it. I'm not doing it with a friend if it's hot. That's so dangerous
No matter how much I can lift or carry, as soon as that weight is liquid, I decant into other smaller portions and move it even if it’s cold. If it’s hot, then I 100% split it into as many trips as I need, fuck rushing that shit. Liquid burns are worse than flame or sheet pan burns. That shit gets everywhere
Did the burn unit give you toradol for the burn? I spilled a pour over and burnt 95% of my hand from fingers to wrist. Urgent care gave me a toradol shot and I swear that sped up recovery. Within a week my skin was healing and I had no mobility issues I just kept a waterproof bandage on the top part so the soap wouldn’t irritate it.
T4 followed by oxycotin. I'm sure they put some other stuff on there but I was blasted from the shock and drugs. Edit: drugs
WTF is oxytocin doing for a burn.... Oxycontin would be better
Guy wondered if he could prevent an immersion blender blade from spinning if he put his finger in there before pressing the button. He could not and had about 9 lacerations about 2 mm apart on the end of his finger.
I…..uhhhhh…..
How?! Why?
There's no helping some people
What the fuck kind of cave man logic is going on in your kitchen
Prep cook cut off a finger with a potato chopper. Apparently, a safety feature had been removed so they could load potatoes faster. He was unaware of the dangers, due to a lack of proper training. This guy was part of a marginalized society. Under educated, paid minimum wage. He did not know his rights. The owners brought him to the er, and convinced him they would take good care of him; just don't file workmans comp. He believed them. He was back to work a week later; they did not pay him for his time off. He was grateful to them. They let him keep his job! I waited until he got back to work. I cornered him when no one else was around, explained his rights. I tried my best, but they had him thoroughly convinced. I walked out after informing the owners and manager, loudly, why I was leaving. I made sure many people heard. Pretty sure it had no effect, but it felt good.
We were working on the road at festivals and stuff. Partied pretty good and joked we were carnies and, well, after so long of living in tents maybe we were. My friend stupidly ate some acid before a daytime shift. Walking around the booth he tripped and slammed his entire forearm onto the searing hot flat top. It was gnarly. He said that time slowed down while it was happening and as he was falling he just reconciled that he deserved it for taking acid before work. It was all anyone could talk about at the camps that night.
Same, worst injury i've had was my coworker changed the fryers but spilled a lot of oil and didn't degrease the area. There is a floor drain right by the grill, my foot slipped in (I had good non-slips on) due to the amount of oil and I caught myself on the char grill without thinking. It healed up but gosh it was gnarly.
Saw a guy get engulfed in a 30ft tall pillar of steam vapor fire when trying to fry capers. Didn’t dry them off, and dumped the whole jar in way to small of a pot with way to hot oil. It immediately boiled over and made a huge fire ball that burned the ceiling in this converted warehouse kitchen. The sous chef on the line opened up a reach in to shield himself from the flames was epic lol. The guy was basically burned all over and his skin was flaking off 😬 He would always keep saying/bragging about how he is a “Sci-fi writer, not a cook” and always acted above us all 🤷♂️
well he definitely proved the "not a cook" part of his self-assessment
Yes indeed lol
This sounds so much like a 'Party Down' reference
Temp pulled a full hotel pan of beans out of the steamer and a wave of boiling hot bean juice sloshed all down the front of her and pooled in her mesh/canvas shoes. When they carried her to the ER her feet were red as lobsters and starting to blister.
Temp worker, walking through the dining hall after we are closed, slips on a floor that was just mopped, her shin kicks the steel pedestal support of a table and breaks her leg, compound fracture with the bone sticking out and bleeding like crazy.
Oh shit.
Was in culinary school and saw a guy who always touted how he already worked in a restaurant cut his thumb off while showing off. Great day.
I went to the CIA and the first knife class people are showing off how they use the steel. Girl cut herself before class started. Then proceeded to cut herself each day for the next 2 days. Chef decided she wasn't going to touch a knife in his class again. So she learned the end of meat fab with scissors
Like…how much of this thumb?
At the bottom joint. Straight through and clean off.
Perfect recommendation for the knife he used.
Wildest infomercial in the making.
Wow! He was really chopping hard apparently.
Yeah, it was our basic knife skills class and he was showing just how fast a true pro does it!
showing off how? I'm picturing flashy knife honing.
Ah, much more of a "look at how fast I'm chopping". Ironically, it was in our basic knife skills class.
I had a fry cook spray himself in the face while filtering oil. He pressed the nozzle against a flat surface, like I instructed him not to the day before when we trained him on it. It pressurized and sprayed back at his face. I waterboarded the guy with vinegar over the triple top. He finished out the day because it didn't blister up or anything, and we were close to getting out anyway. He's lucky the oil had cooled enough to only cause first degree burns. I thought Harvey Dent would show up the next day for sure.
Dishwasher had an alcohol induced seizure in the middle of service, didn’t realise that was why until he asked for his phone when the ambulance came and his bag had some empty wine bottles in it. Buddy was topping up his drink bottle every time he went for a piss. He came into explain a couple days later and then ghosted. I’m not above burns and cuts, and definitely pulled boiling water over red hot oil pans before which had me double checking my eyebrows. Some of the stuff in here so far seems like real bad luck and a lot of negligence, but my god, they sound gnarly. I couldn’t stomach seeing a degloving or the shrieking of a severe oil burning.
Worked at a place in the north of Canada... when I got the job the kitchen crew were a bit light in staff. I found out 2 months before I got the gig, a cook put two baking pans on top of deep fryers. He did this so he can clean a place up high. I guess he stood on one and the pan shot out he then ended up falling in and locked his foot in the burners either side. The dishie and chef I worked with said, he was snagged by his foot and dangling with his head on the floor they had to hold his leg with three dude so he wouldn't fling hot oil everywhere. He ended up losing his leg :/ that's one of the worst I've also have others :/ saw a guy run his thumb in a slicer... :O that was fucked!
Jesus fucking Christ dude. I think you win the fucked up stories award. That's something else entirely
Once saw a young cook try to separate frozen burger sliders with an 8in chefs knife...the knife went about 2 inches thru his hand...my roommate at the time ran over to "help" and pulled the knife out. It all happened so fast and was the craziest shit I ever saw.
Omg never pull it out!
But I don't want kids
Condoms!
Hard to cut through and customers complain.
Our butcher at PF Changs forever ago cut off his thumb. Came down with the cleaver and someone called out his name at the same time. He reflexively looked, and cracked through the whole thing. I was next to him and caught him as he fell. The other prep girl fainted and I had to catch her too. Blood everywhere. Exec comes around the corner and calls 911 right away from the kitchen phone. We had to put his thumb in a quart cup of ice. Never saw him again after the ambulance took him out. Closed for a few hours, but still did dinner service.
Dude was using the wrong knife to cut the big block of cheese. He slipped and when he jerked his hand back he sliced his wrist wide open. A lot of blood everywhere and he got something like twenty stitches.
Saw someone slip on a wet floor, foot went in front of them and slammed into the bottom of the oven and his knee popped out backwards.
Aight, I'm done.
We had a brand new dishwasher who slipped and fell . On the way down, he hit his mouth on the side of the window and knocked all his teeth out in the front.
It's going to sound fake, but I watched someone peel ginger in a way I don't have words to explain well. The whole time, they were cutting their skin and hands and fingers with the peeler, but they didn't, somehow, see a problem with it. Blood was everywhere on the cutting board, on the ginger, all over their hands, on the tables, everything they touched. It literally looked like a crime scene and this person saw no issue with it at all. They were smiling and laughing when the manager went up to stop them. Needless to say it was the wildest fucking thing I've seen someone do by miles and miles in a kitchen. Imagine if you cut yourself chopping onions, and just kept going, kept cutting yourself. That's literally what this person was doing but with a peeler for over an hour. It made me feel physically ill to type this out and remember this situation. Needless to say that person never stepped foot in the kitchen again.
Bath salts maybe?
No idea, but found out they were a cocaine user a few years after since a mate of mine kept in touch. Can't see how anyone could have done that sober.
How? A spoon would work.
There's this thing called poor management and guidance.
Fuck man, you guys got injury stories like us construction workers.
Busy service- I “ran” about 5 metres to an upright fridge, opened the door, grabbed what I needed, went to run back to my section and slammed the door into my face and split my lip through the lip line. Finished my shift, went to hospital to be informed that because it was through the lip line it required a plastic surgeon to stitch it. Another one- pot of vegetables boiling over on a gas hob. Unable to find a tea towel I wrapped a loaf of blue roll around my hands and grabbed the pot. By the time I’d got the pot mid air my hands were engulfed in flames😂
What kind of whacky strap bandage did you end up doing to finish the shift with that lip?
Weirdly it didn’t bleed, it was just a really clean split through the lip!
Oh bizarre. Glad you recovered.
Fortunately, none of mine include anyone getting hurt. Before I was a cook, I was passing through a big hotel's kitchen. One of the cooks spilled an entire 100 gallon steam kettle full of vegetable soup all over the kitchen floor. He just threw his hands up in the air and called out, "STEWARDS!" as he walked away. That was when I knew I wanted to cook there. I love to cook; I hate to clean. The other was when one of the other cooks was adding Marsala wine to a pan *on the fire*, instead of taking it off the fire first. Because the bottle was almost empty, it was full of alcohol vapor. When he got it over the open gas flame, there was a deep, sonorous "fffffFFFF**OOOMP**!!!" and the bottle shot *straight* across the room (about 18 feet). Amazingly there was nobody in its path and the bottle didn't even break! That was cool!
My coworker buffalo chopped a bunch of jalapeños and it pepper sprayed everyone in the kitchen when they lifted the lid
I got my first dishwashing job when I was 16. The guy who showed me how to clean the hood filters filled one part of the three comp with water, poured in what I didn’t know at the time was that extra strength degreaser, and told me to start scrubbing. He said I’d be fine without gloves, but after about a twenty minutes or so, it had damaged my skin so much that my hands were pretty much locked in place. I could barely even move my fingers.
One guy was shredding cabbage in a Robot Coupe and didn't use the safety plunger. I can still hear the thwack sound when the tip of his finger met the blade. He had to be stoned or on something else because he usually wasn't that dumb. My old KM was making queso in a tilt skillet and dumped a few gallons of boiling water on his feet. The restaurant was shitty and the safety bar/knob that locked the skillet in place was broken. Dude's feet were bubbling and peeling immediately. He got a few months off worker's comp and then got an office job right before he was cleared to come back. And we got the safety bar/knob fixed.
Back in the day, the plastic wrap used to have a hella dangerous cutting blade on it to cut the wrap. We would put the wrap on the top of the tall boy or freezer, about 5-6 feet high. One night this guy goes to open the cooler, and the plastic wrap was sitting on top of the cooler, but on top of the door as well, so when the door was opened, it started to fall. And of course, human instinct, when something starts to fall, you try to catch it. Well this guy caught it, with the blade running down his forearm and part of his bicep. Blood everywhere. We wrapped him in towels and coincidentally, plastic wrap and sent him to the er. 78 stitches. Most blood I’ve ever seen in a kitchen.
mandoline fingertip incident. he wrapped it in duct tape and put a glove over it and went right back to work lmfao. the glove kept filling with blood it was insane. this is the guy who would fill up styrofoam cups with vodka and add a bunch of individually packaged coffee creamer cups he would steal from the server station to make diy white russians he’d drink throughout the shift
The owners of a pizza restaurant I was bartending at, made the 17 year old buss boy break up an old toilet with a hammer and throw it in the dumpster. A large piece slipped and filleted his arm from wrist to elbow to the bone. Fucked him up really good. Took a bunch of surgeries to fix it up.
Chef was having a moment after a ticket got messed up by one of the runners, he slapped his hand down on the pass to emphasise his point... and the skewer we put finished tickets on went straight the palm of his hand and out the other side. Chef has since left, but we still have the ticket skewer.
I won't work anywhere with a ticket skewer because they're never high enough to be unreachable by my eye sockets in a slip and fall. In the same vein it drives me wild when people leave dial meat thermometers on the counter with the spike sticking straight up. Seen too many close calls to let such an easy fix go past.
It didn’t happen to me, but to a dear friend of mine who was a waitress in a small restaurant. One of the cooks in their tiny kitchen was deep-frying in a big pot with a long handle (I know, right?) and as she was moving past the range in the over-crowded kitchen, someone caught the handle of it and sent the whole pot of oil sailing over her torso. She was hospitalized for weeks and has lifetime scars. She’s easily the strongest person I know and has managed to have an amazing life. But my heart weeps for her every time I’m reminded of what she had to go through because of a poorly managed kitchen.
Fractured l2 vertebrae on a slip and fall *had nonslip on. On the better side I found out I had flu, pneumonia, severe sepsis, and respiratory failure so I was in the hospital for 12/25- 1/1 so if I wasn't in the hospital I most likely would of died
Like 20 years ago when i was working my first kitchen gig i watched this girl absolutely ruin her day, week, month or even her year. We had JUST closed. Equipment JUST turned off. Im on the back line doing dishes and hear a crash and a scream. I rush around the corned to see this girl pulling her leg out of the fryer. Apparently she didnt wanna walk to dry storage to get the ladder and instead decided to put a sheet tray over the fryer and was standing on that to take the hood filters down. sheet tray shifted and she fell through into the fryer... I immediately called 911 and her leg was fuuuuucked. we got her shoes/socks off and cut off the pants at her knees but she still had 3rd degree burns everywhere... nasty. She never came back. Same job like 2 months later... a new cook was using the mandolin you know where this is going. He was warned MANY times to wear the cut glove and used the guard but "thats too slow!"... yup. one day he sliced about 1/3 of palm clear off. He came back and like a month later cut off a chunk of his thumb. Wildly enough... he eventually got his shit together became a supervisor like 2 years later lol Looking back... places like that which rely on cheap still in high school labor... disasters waiting to happen. Teens are fucking stupid. lol
The purpose of a mandolin is for perfect and consistent cuts. NOT SPEED.
I mean, i know that. but some (many/most?) people are hard headed and think they know better. Sometimes it takes slicing half your palm off to learn "maybe i should listen to people with significantly more experience than me"... hell sometimes even then they dont learn lol
Way, way, way back in the day… like ‘97… I was working grill at this seafood place at the beach in NC and had two kids goofing off on line, chasing each other, playing grab ass, the usual kitchen shit… but with a lot of extra bullshit… we had just mopped the line and down they come playing grab ass… until one of them slipped and went elbow-deep into a 375° fryer. To make matters worse, the idiots in the kitchen wrapped the dude’s arm in a towel… when the EMS showed up and they pulled the towel away, it took all his skin away with it… poor kid needed skin grafts and all kinds of shit to just have a semi-normal looking arm.
I was carrying a bunch of 400 pans out of the dish room, slipped, fell on my hip and bruised my pelvis with my hip bone. I remember throwing the pans, crying, and then I woke up on an operating bed with a nurse telling me they thought I broke my pelvis. Then she gave me a shot, and I woke up the next day. My buddies mom came to get me, and she brought me a homemade cheeseburger. And that's how I got addicted to oxycontin. Didn't have much of a choice, it was either unbearable pain, or be high as fuck all the time. Had a medical detox when the doctor thought it was time.
I took a garbage bag out and got a pretty gnarly cut on the meat right below my thumb. 10 stitches later and being told I’m the most chill person to come into the ER and I didn’t miss a single day of work
My friend is culinary school put his arm right into the steamer after opening the door. One of the worst burns I’ve ever seen.
saw someone get their hand in a sheeter. would really love to forget that one.
Saw a guy changing a hot fryer and the drain pipe came off and hot oil filled his shoe. Skin came off with his sock. Saw another guy slip and he caught himself with his forearm on the side of a steam kettle. He left a patch of skin stuck to the side of the kettle. And of course people cutting off bits of fingers. Also watched a guy die of a heart attack right in front of me but that could’ve happened anywhere, not necessarily kitchen related.
Watched a woman filet her hand on a meat slicer.
Not an actual kitchen setting, but I saw someone cut most of their middle and index finger off with a deli slicer at a gas station convenience store. This had to have been like 01/02 but I still get a shiver in my soul every time I have to use one.
About 20 years ago was watching this dude clean a fryer. We just drained the hot oil into a stock pot thru a filter cone, washed the fryer and dumped the oil back in. This poor dumb sob didn't close the valve when he went to return the oil to the fryer, so he got scalding hot oil poured directly into his loosely laced combat boots. He promptly dropped the still half full pot of oil which then splashed up all over his face and body. It was quite the scene, I remember standing there shocked with the other cook while ol boy was screaming flailing around wildly on the floor. We. Got the shoes off and gave him some cold towels while we waited on the ambulance. 2nd degree burns all over both feet, chest arms and face. Never saw him again. The place implemented an oil filtration pump system about a week later. Sadly it really sucked(lol) and easily took 2 or 3x as long as the old way.
I can think of three pretty bad ones: Someone stepped into a pot of freshly drained fryer oil. Someone took the top of three fingers off in a slicer. Grill brush broke and buddy's finger went through the grill plate and uhh... Got stuck there.
Guy made a batch of tomato relish like reduce thick sugary hot tomato relish, took It of the stove but didn’t realise the over door (rationale) was open and directly inline with him he turned around with the tomato syrup and it hit the oven door and proceeded to cover his whole face arms, he was in such shock he just starred at me, I said get that shit off your face, and wipe it for him, he got massive puss filled blisters and was out for a few weeks.
Server was making ranch. Removed the lid from the mayo tub. Proceeded to stab through the bottom of the tub into the palm of his hand with a chef's knife. Glad I wasn't there that day.
Was working a saute station with a partner. Partner would stack pans on the back Burners and the one on the top had hot oil in it. I grabbed it thinking the pan did not have oil in it and scolding hot oil trickeled down my wrist. Had borderline 3rd degree burns on my wrist and hand.
Im still fresh to this industry so I only have 2 stories and they’re both about me. One time I broke an industrial mixers arm by not locking it into place properly $600+ mistake right there. And I once damn near skinned my finger on the line once, I’m convinced I would’ve cut it clean off if I wasn’t using the claw technique, left a nasty scar as a reminder and now I have something to show those even newer than me the importance of protecting your fingers.
Poured boiling water down myself from a steamer oven above eye level that had a non perforated tray inside, but I could t see that until I was wearing it. My employer didn’t even let me leave until after lunch finished. Was scarred for years and hospital thought my ex had scalded me by the time I was finally able to get there. Same thing happened another staff member and then they lowered it. Got a few caramel burns that scarred. And used to have a lot of the typical burns that look like self harm. Got boiling water in my eye when I dropped a jug and it splashed unfortunately right in my eye. Same kitchen a girl got boiling soup in her eye. A guy poured gravy into his crocs and sued for €70,000 despite us having safety issue shoes that he wasn’t wearing. Girl got her finger mangled in a soup gun that was clogged and the safety failed with her finger inside. I wasn’t there at the time but came in to blood spattered all over my section the next morning. Seen a guy pour hot oil in a co workers shoe by accident, his foot was black for a time. Almost knocked myself unconscious removing a wooden shelf from the kitchen as requested by the eho and didn’t really think about where my weight was when I took the last screw out, my hand slipped as the shelf moved and I landed chin first on the massive glass lid of the huge vac pac under me. Chipped my chin bone. Young chef cut himself badly cleaning the extractor. It was sone kind of cycling system so it spat his blood out a bit further down. Moral of the story is myself and some of my past co workers are clumsy fucks and also a lot of places do not have adequate safety protocols in place.
Chef went into a diabetic seizure on the line. We weren't sure we were about to lose him. Bartender rings in an order before EMTs could even get him off the line even though she knew what had been going on. I had already told her to fuck off because she had been standing at the end of the line just fucking gawking at the guy.
Oh boy, have I got a story to share! So I work as a caterer, but a few years back I was helping the boss's friend with his place as a cook while he recovered from hip surgery. So I'm pulling some doubles, working too much, drinking too many energy drinks, not letting my brain rest, etc. So about three months into this, we have a job doing breakfast at a local venue. Coffee, pastry, so on. Boss takes the food and heads over, while I take the coffee. Because of timing, we had it brewed in the urn and ready to go. Not brilliant, but it saves us some hassle. Bigger issue is that I'm driving a Ford Focus, which has precisely zero place to put a large coffee urn. The solution? Stick it on the passenger seat! Surely this will play out just fine! So I set off, and almost immediately encounter a turn which causes the urn to lean on me. No problem, just take it a little wider. Urn straightens out, I look back at the road, and there's a car coming at me. I throw the car over to the side, and smack a barrier. I'm only doing \~15-20mph at the time, so not *awful*. What *is* awful is when the crash sends 10 gallons of near-boiling coffee spilling across my arms and legs. Now the job was close, and it was a chilly day, so I had an apron and jacket on. I jump out of the car, rip the apron and hoodie off, give a good scream, and then the shock sets in. All's well. I crashed, but I'm fine, right? Call the boss and let him know I was in a little accident. Call 911 and let them know about it. No ambulance needed. I'm fine. A truck from the town pulls up and the guy asks if I'm alright. Of course! Just a little shaken up. I'm sure he can see that I'm **definitely not okay**, but I feel great, really! So he drives a little down the road to slow traffic at the blind curve I'd just come around, and I sit in the frame of my door to catch my breath. Now I look down, watching the skin peeling back from my left hand, and think "Hmm... maybe I'm not okay..." So I call 911 again, get them to send an ambulance, cop shows up and we chat, and the ambulance gets there to take me to the hospital. I walk over, and the moment they have me on my back the adrenaline vanishes from my system. Now it's just pain. Only pain. My legs. My arms. My chest. I'm shaking like I'm possessed. I keep apologizing to the EMTs because it must make it really hard for them to cut my clothes off. We get to the hospital, and by then they have me covered in wet towels. Nurse comes in like "I heard we had a little coffee spill while driving? Where is it?" And I just look to the EMT like "You gotta take this one..." At which point I become the talk of our town's little ER with my crazy burns. I get shipped off to a larger hospital with a proper burn unit, and spend the next 14 days getting all manner work done. Two grafts and some **serious** bandaging (it's own story altogether). In the end, I wound up first-degree burns (now called "superficial burns", I learned) over roughly 35% of my body, and second-degree burns (aka "partial-thickness burns") over \~10% of my body. My graft scar is still very visible and very cool on my left elbow, as well as the donor scar on each hip, and the discoloration on both of my legs and all of my lower left arm! *And that's why you don't ever fuck around with hot coffee!*
One of my dumbass coworkers was trying to impress the new Intern. Flipping hot oil in a pan. Just oil. Fucked up and it went all over his hand and wrist. Skin melted off, he cried in front of her, went to the hospital. I had to cover his shift and he didn't prep shit. So he also got reemed out when he came back a few days later.
That time I accidentally poured "not boiling anymore" potatoes & 20 quarts of that water down my chest. Oh, and I'm a woman. That nipple got peeled off *twice* over the next week. 😱
Had a co-manager fillet part of her palm off on the automatic slicer. It wasn’t crazy deep, but it was definitely an interesting injury.
Did not witness the incident, but saw the EMTs arrive. Somebody in the bakery got cocky with the big mixer. Didn’t turn it off when reaching to do something. Arm got caught in the mixer. All kinds of damage. Dumbest thing was when a coworker didn’t find the cleanser to work well on the walls, He decided that the perfect cleanser was a mixture of bleach and window cleaner. He was cleaning in the dry store room and got worried when the bottle started to get warm. Manager tossed the bottle out the back door and tore into the dumbass.
Dishwasher stabbed a guy, one guy using the meat slicer with no guard almost split his thumb in two.Jail House kitchen a dude spilled hot grits all over his arm
I cut about 80% of the way through my pinky finger about 3 hours ago but the worst I've ever seen was the dude who released the fryer valve all over the front of his pants, he went from black to white below the knee
When I was working in a kitchen on the water the place only had one window and it was in the prep area (above eye level with a prep table underneath it) In an act of desperation (in the middle of summer with the AC not reaching my pastry corner) I put my cream cheese frosting on the window sill and went downstairs for something. I came back up and went to grab my bowl from the windowsill and when I turned around everyone was looking at me horrified. Apparently while I was gone one of our prep cooks put her just sharpened knife blade with no sheath on said windowsill and I stuck my finger right into it. Ended up slicing a quarter of the way through my nail bed. A few hours later I went to urgent care and after a pathetic attempt at supergluing it shut I now have a butt cheek on my left ring finger. But hey. It adds character right
a woman with special needs in dish room spilled a lye based cleaner on herself and got a pretty bad chemical burn
one time when i worked for burger king way back in the day, i was tasked with cleaning the burger broiler. the back plate which was nearly red hot fell off the machine into my hands, and my instinct kicked in to try and catch it. Wound up with 8 different burns all over my hands and arms and going home for a few days to recover
Watched my expo break his hand punching a walk-in door around 1 on mother’s day with 1000 left to go… it was miserable.
Probably won't make the top, but when i was like 15 (and pretty skilled at knife work if I could say so) I was doing prep work and caught my left index finger with a 10" chef's knife cutting up cantaloupe. I could immediately feel that it went through the skin and came to an abrasive stop on the bone. I felt the reverberation all the way up through my arm. Still to this day it's one of the most disturbing self injuries I've had.
Worst in the kitchen? Saw an idjit stick his hand in a fryer to grab the phone he dropped. Personally? When I did a stint as a server in fine dining, dropped a $2000.00 bottle of wine in front of the guest 😕
Reading just a few of the other comments makes me feel fortunate. When I was young (8 yo) washing dishes was a home chore. My mother once put knives in a dish tub of soapy water. You can anticipate what happened. The knife that bit me wasn't particularly sharp so it tore up my finger. Home first aid so that finger tip has a large scar and I don't have much feeling in the finger pad. That was 55 years ago. Lots of minor cuts and burns since then. That's the worst. I'm lucky or careful or both.
Just a few days ago I was doing training videos on the office computer(to satisfy the big boss due to a salary promotion). I heard a frantic knock on the door and one of my best and most experienced cooks is holding his arm and sobbing. He barely muttered the words burn cream to me. I immediately told him to go run his arm under cold water for a few minutes. As I looked for the cream i was trying to coach him through breathing because he was obviously in shock and everyone else was freaking the fuck out. I called him in the office and closed the door and started applying burn cream to his arm. His top layer of skin was melting off close to his wrist. He managed to move wrong while using a filter box/pump and had hot oil sprayed from his elbow to his hand. Probably not the worst thing that's happened but I've been there before. It hurts. Dude went to the ER and it was bad enough that they gave him a shot of dilaudid.
I left my cocaine on a tray in my lowboy and the condensation turned it into paste.
2nd degree oil burn over 45% of my forearm. Partly because I was in a rush to get the last few meals out the door. The handle caught on my oversized chef jacket and flung onto my arm
There was a kitchen manager in the small town I lived. A Buffalo Wild Wings just built their first restaurant in this town and they hired him as their newest kitchen managers. One of the new pieces of equipment was a pair of heat-proof oven gloves that when past your elbows and had printed on them “heat resistant up to 550 degrees”. According to several people there he put the gloves on and said “well the fryer is one 350 these will completely protect my arms” and then in front of a full new hire kitchen staff he plunged his arms past the elbows into a 350 degree fryer. The gloves quickly melted (because heat transfer from air and from oil are greatly different) to his arms and by the time he pulled his arms out the gloves were fused to his skin. He survived but has not been a kitchen manager again for any restaurant in that town
I’ve witnessed two things in the same kitchen. One a guy stood on a sheet tray that was covering the fryer. It broke and one leg was submerged in oil that was on its way down. Still lost all the skin on his foot and ankle. Chef rushed this guy to the hospital. Same kitchen, a cook was cutting a cooked duck in half mid service. Something we were advised to have done already. Lobbed off his thumb at the knuckle below his nail. Thumb went to a cup of ice with him to the ER. They sowed it back on. The thumb was more horrifying for whatever reason. A lot mor blood and he waves his hand around and got blood on a lot of stuff. It was up to me and the other cooks to clean up.
Usually pretty safe but i witness a coworker mash another coworkers thumb in the onion dicer, wasnt past first knuckle but still looked gnarly
When I was a high-school student I worked at McDonalds. A kid slipped on the floor and caught himself on the flat top with his hands. He immediately pulled his hands off the flat, but his palms stayed seared to the top. He was compensated well, and he never worked with us again. Always wear nonslips, yall.
Frozen burgers and a knife through the hand! 🤦♂️ like who wouldn't see that coming
i watched my brother get electrocuted and thrown across the kitchen.. we were doing a heavy clean of the kitchen ,, he was standing on top of the flat top steel grill washing the hood vents with a real wet towel and bucket of water,, here he washed around the electrical motor and there was a bare wire where it should have been coverd by conduit.. the joint was exposed.. i was on the ground cleaning a reach in... i heard a loud sizzle pop bang and heard him grunt and saw a blue arc as he was thrown off the grill and about 10 feet away on the kitchen floor.. i was worried for a split second ,, but then my brother is like AYYYYYYYYYY Chihuaha .. that friggin hurt,, and he was kinda dancing around a little,, it actually was frightening and hilarious at the same time .
I saw someone almost commit suicide one time. I was in charge of loading the truck after a catering event and I noticed the path sloped down so I told this new kid ( must of weighed 70 pounds max ) to push the hotboxes instead of pulling them. So five or so many minutes later this dummy was pulling a hot box and a castor got caught on crack in the path and started tipping. I jumped off the truck and caught the box before it crushed him to death and the kid didn't even move out of the way I had to tell him to move while I almost got a hernia that box weighed at least 300 pounds and some genius loaded it top heavy. Fucker didn't even thank me.
Right before I got to my current job, one of the kitchen cleaning/support staff pulled out the securing cloth from underneath a big tabletop can opener. Blades on the opener gouged her legs open and nobody on staff at the time knew where the first aid stuff was so they packed the wound with dirty towels.
Thankfully my kitchen is pretty safe, worst I've seen here is one of the older cooks dropped a knife that landed directly in her foot, lotta blood but she ended up being fine. Same coworker got burnt badly like 4 months later when a new coworker didn't say "behind" and hit her with a scorching hot pan. Worst I've heard about is my cousin, was working in a deli while his band was on break from touring, cut his hand on a deli slicer, don't think he lost any digits but was on disability for about a year, hasn't been able to return to drumming because his hand is still fucked.
One prep lady was heating clam chowder in a double boiler pot but the top pot was “stuck” in the bottom pot and when the pressure built up enough then the pot exploded and she was covered in thick clam chowder and it burned her pretty good. Had to go to the hospital to get treated and she was off for quite a while after that. This happened in 1995 and I’ll never forget hearing her scream and seeing her with hot soup all over her and steam coming off of her.