Kitchen Humor

Butchers are notorious for having dark senses of humor, fish mongers seem incapable of smiling, and line cooks...are insane. Quick example?

The sous chef who’s job I just took over is accused of stealing in his last two weeks the following.

A butter wheel, an egg slicer, a patio umbrella, a meat tenderizer, and 10 pounds of kosher salt.

Who steals salt?

Cooking professionally is wildly competitive, and attracts strange characters. Mix that with an environment that is ripe with room for error and you find a plethora of bizarre situations.

Basics

My first cooking job was at the greasiest spoon you could imagine. We had a cat that slept under our dishwashing machine to catch the rats at night.

I pretended to be 15 to get the job. They put a spatula in one of my hands and a cigarette in the other, with that my training was complete.

I remember once the chef asked me to strain the chicken stock he was making. So I did...right into the sink. I then asked him “Where do you want me to put the bones?”

Realizing I had just dumped out his stock he flew into a fit of screaming rage unlike anything I had ever witnessed. I thought the veins in his temple were going to burst. He threatened to call the cops on me, which made no sense, but was terrifying.

Ordering

Fast forward a few years, I’m 19 and have been hired to open a deli in a health food cooperative grocery store. I’m trying not to think about the fact that it’s a multi-million dollar operation, because I’ve never written a menu before.

It’s the grand opening week and everything is going well. I seem to have all of my peers believing that I know what I’m doing.

Until my first shipment of produce arrives. Apparently, I accidentally ordered 100 cases of avocados instead of my intended 1.

The delivery drivers proceed to wheel in cases of avocados while I frantically check their invoice to make sure I in fact did accidentally order thousands of these alligator pears.

Half the people watching this nightmare were amazingly excited to see what I was going to do with all of them! The other half were hanging their heads.

The delivery drivers begrudgingly took them back.

Adjustment

Fast forward a few more years, I’ve seemingly made every mistake possible in a culinary setting and have somehow progressed in my career. I’m now ready to help some younger cooks through their growing pains with some harmless pranks.

“My steam kettles dry, go downstairs and get me two buckets of steam!”

“Would you mind mopping the freezer?”

“Sautée these shrimp, but god help you if they turn pink!”

“Quick, go get me the bacon stretcher! It’s next to the left handed spatulas”

Once, I had this beautiful ice sculpture of a swan I had used as a centerpiece at a wedding, afterwards I needed to dispose of it.

I asked a dishwasher to put the sculpture through his machine to “sanitize” it for a wedding the following night. The horrified look on his face when he realized the sculpture had completely melted confirmed the fact that my jokes were not that funny.

Currently

Cooking for a living requires long days in less than ideal environments. A good laugh is always appreciated, especially if your able to laugh at yourself. I don’t hassle the “green” cooks anymore, even though it was always harmless and in good fun.

Instead, I just wait for the daily unpredictable catastrophe to occur and reassure the younger cooks that everything’s fine. Given some time they will laugh about there mistakes as well.

Situational

I once worked in a Greek restaurant in a larger city. The back door to the kitchen wouldn’t lock, which meant anyone could walk right into the hotel it was attached to, or into our dry storage in our basement.

More than a few times I found sleeping bags, empty booze bottles, and makeshift campsites next to our chest freezers. It seemed homeless people were welcome to route around and have a party in our pantry, and the restaurants owner didn’t seem to find this a safety concern.

This made the simple task of going to get a bag of french fries from the dimly lit basement a heart pounding experience, you never knew what you were going to find. I would calmly go downstairs, grab what I needed, get spooked, and sprint up the stairs at full speed.

I would then have to try to look composed in front of my coworkers out of embarrassment. Which wasn’t impossible because everyone did the same thing.

This happened dozens of times a day, the sound of someone sprinting up the rickety wooden stairs fearing for their lives became increasingly humorous...until you needed something from the basement.