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Lord Lambeth posted:Dude I was working with the other day mentioned that a guy at his last work got his arm stuck in a Hobart mixer. I don't know how, since those things are generally pretty idiot proof. The newer ones are, yeah. All the cages, lockouts, and all the other seemingly over-the-top safety precautions are there for a very, very good reason: floor mixers have huge, incredibly high-torque electric motors in them that are capable of absolutely ripping your loving arm off. Due to the sad trajectory of my foodservice career, I've worked around basically every "dangerous" appliance you could possibly imagine (save for that moulder from earlier. gently caress that), and the one that always made me feel the most ill at ease was the mid 70's Hobart D300 floor mixer we had at my last job. Sorta like this one...  (edit: I realized this picture doesn't lend much scale. this thing is maybe 4 feet tall.) This thing was a goddamn gorgeous example of why high-quality old commercial kitchen appliances rule. It was mechanically very simple so it would have been easy to fix it if it ever broke (which it never did, and I bought it from the original owner), was stupidly powerful, and was so thoroughly beat to poo poo that, in person, it looked like a background sprite in Fallout 2. I loved it. However, note how simple the controls are. A three stage toggle for speed and a (hilariously small) on/off switch. I suppose cages were a factory option at the time, but I never could find one. I had one of these running on 2 working on some dough, and, due to an absolutely ridiculous, Rube Goldberg-esq series of events, my prep guy accidentally dropped a decent shallow hotel pan into the bowl. This thing folded it up like nothing happened at all (put a bunch of hugely annoying gashes into the aluminum bowl, though, which was a bitch to try to replace). So yeah, imagine if that was your arm. Or maybe a part of your apron, or the hoodie you were wearing on a particularly cold day. Newer floor mixers are probably some order of magnitude more powerful than the one I had. Having a healthy respect/fear of the appliances you're working with is a great way to keep yourself from getting hurt. edit: I got enough stories of "KITCHEN BADAZZEZ" trying to be Bourdain and sending themselves to the hospital to fill a book. soon enough Radio Help has a new favorite as of 12:40 on Aug 22, 2015 |
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Aug 22, 2015 11:53
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 05:25 |
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I have a hard time writing in threads like these, because "crazy poo poo" happens all the time in the commercial cooking world. It's part and parcel with the whole job description. everything is hot, all the surfaces are slippery, and you have to move as fast as possible all the time. also you have a sharp-rear end knife in your hand. Honestly, every single cook who has been doing their thing for longer than three years has probably seen some Real poo poo at one point in time or another: hey wow, a guy cut his hand open and now you know what the inside of a hand looks like. homebody is a loving juggernaut tho so he slathers his cut in super glue and double gloves it with some blue 3m masking tape as a blood gasket and gets cheered on by his other hardcore-rear end coworkers and finishes his shift. drat that guy is a loving soldier. then he doesn't go to the hospital because he makes $10/hr (and that's considered fair for his station) and his poo poo never really heals right and he's still bitching about it four years later and for whatever reason still can't completely flex his pinkie finger. but at least he's not in collections for medical bills! wuh-oh, some culinary school new hire was trying really hard to prove his hustle and he tripped over the lip of the floor mat and spilled a half hotel of hot roux on veteran line cook X's whole lower left leg, putting X out of commission for a month or so due to the fact that he got For Real second degree burns because hot roux is the culinary equivalent of napalm. Now it's a few months later and veteran line cook X is drunk at the after-work bar and threatening the well-meaning new hire with a knife because his workmans comp didn't cover poo poo and he has no practical legal recourse because the owners of the brand new restaurant are just as broke as he is. also he couldn't afford a lawyer even if he wanted to. but hey! some new restaurant in the area is hella progressive and wants to be The First New Restaurant to Really Take Care of Its Employees. they do the whole payola thing to make a big deal about it on Eater or whatever the gently caress, and well-meaning social media folks love the fact that they're charging an extra i dunno 10% to all orders to help pay for the hugely-expensive-yet-still-janky group health insurance plan they offer to the full timers. the general manager gets at least five complaints a day from fiftysomethings that demand to have this surcharge removed form their tab. in motherfucking Portland. I'll be the first to admit: I'm jaded as gently caress. the real American food industry horror story isn't "wow a guy did a gross thing" or "this dude totally hurt himself check it dogg," it's the fact that whole loving system completely refuses to take care of the people that exist inside of it. a decent portion of the people making your fancy-rear end steak aren't doing it because it bankrolls their sweet cascaidan black metal band or their crushing cocaine addiction: they're doing it because they really, really want to make you dinner for a living. they like what they do, they are good at it, and all they really get in return is alcoholism and a ten year handicap on whatever they end up doing in their 30s when they finally realize that their youthful idealism got them absolutely nowhere. it isn't even inherently the fault of the business owners, either: the cultural expectation of value nowadays is absurd for the mid-range (read: largest and most potentially profitable in my area) market, and is completely out-of-sync with the reality of owning a small- to medium-sized restaurant. how can you possibly pay your employees what they're worth when a huge portion of your potential net profit is going towards appealing to motherfucking broke gourmands? Radio Help has a new favorite as of 13:59 on Aug 22, 2015 |
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Aug 22, 2015 13:30
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Novum posted:FOH manager was dating a server and the owners made him fire her the day before they fired him. Tha's frigid cold. Haha drat, that might be the most brutal thing I've read in this thread.
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Aug 25, 2015 21:17
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thiswayliesmadness posted:sanitize chicken wings. How does this work, exactly? PS: I was the km of a wing joint for 2 years.
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Aug 31, 2015 11:33
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thiswayliesmadness posted:It's pretty much how the poster above described. Soak with water and a bit of salt to leech out any blood, then rinsed till the water's pretty much clear. Sanitizing isn't the best word for it, but was how they referred to the method. Mostly keeps your fryer oil fresher for longer than anything else. Oh, ok. Pretty much all you're doing is just rinsing off the excess chicken plasma slime and whatever loose protein is chillin on the surface of the wings. Definitely keeps the wings from sticking together in the fryer, at the very least. If you had management telling the rest of your staff that "sanitized" them, they were idiots. Never never never never tell hourly employees that raw chicken is anything other than completely covered in its own poo poo (unless you slaughtered the thing yourself and did it very, very competently). Which brings me to... TOTALLY STUPID/UNTRUE THINGS AUTHORITY FIGURES HAVE TOLD ME IN MY MANY YEARS AS A GLUTTON FOR PUNISHMENT/COOK
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Sep 1, 2015 11:46
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SHUPS 4 DETH posted:5. In what world do fast food cooks get "laid off"? Non-US or something? Because this guy wouldn't last a week anywhere I've worked. I got laid off once when a quarter of the restaurant burned down due to an electrical fire, but that's just about the only situation I can think of where you'll actually get laid off in the US instead of getting straight up fired (if you're in a right-to-work state like me), or at least ghosted off the schedule. That being said, fast food places in lovely towns (or that have lovely managers) can definitely get in a place where they won't fire an obviously crap employee just because it isn't worth the effort to find a replacement. Standards are loooooooow in some places.
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Sep 15, 2015 08:45
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yo man not really trying to call you a liar or anything but this poo poo reads like some stdh.txt. but yeah Waiting is a pretty good movie
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Sep 19, 2015 12:32
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Outrail posted:Well you see if you do a food safety course then anything you do is safe, you have a certificate to prove this. Thus, the things that used to be unsafe are now safe as long as you, the one with a food safety certificate, does it. If anyone else does it it is unsafe, but still acceptable. When I was km at this one spot, I liked to give prep positions to kids from casual dining spots, cuz it's hard to get a job at a "real" restaurant when all you have on your resume is a few years at Chipotle or Five Guys or Applebee's or whatever. Most of the time it worked out fine, but one time I gave this guy a working interview who made an obnoxiously big deal out of his ServSafe certification. He was from a lovely local chain but seemed alright during his sit down interview, so when I took him to the kitchen he started going on about ServSafe again, about most small kitchens are filthy disease factories. he actually said "this place seems really clean but I bet even you mess up more than you realize." So I said "OK, so what temp are you supposed to cook chicken to?" He launches into this rant about chicken and botulism (which is like the one food borne illness that raw chicken doesn't carry), and ends it with "and that's why you always cook chicken to 150." I told him it was 165, and he flipped the gently caress out and told me I had no idea what I was talking about, and what do I even know, I'm just some scrub that wouldn't last a minute in a real kitchen always. (dunno what his idea of a "real kitchen" was, considering he was interviewing at a popular mid-level dining spot) So yeah, I didn't give him the job.
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Sep 25, 2015 04:13
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Probably the most spiteful thing I ever saw when I worked in restaurant land was somebody promise the server a $20 tip if they gave good service. And, well, they did give a $20 tip but they also covered it in syrup, flattened it on the table, then glued the paper place mat down over the $20 with more syrup. All told they ended up plastering half a bottle of cheap, sugary syrup over the bill. The table took for loving ever to get completely clean. Christ, what an rear end in a top hat.
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Oct 12, 2015 00:34
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cash crab posted:I'd see him dart out the door, and the hunt would commence to find out where he'd stashed his plate and silverware. Ugh. Drunk people do this sort of poo poo all the time. I was cleaning out a bar bathroom one night, and randomly looked up and noticed that there were three shot glasses in the ceiling boob light fixture. The place had taller than average ceilings (maybe 15 feet), the boob light was screwed down, and there was nothing in there that they could have used as a step to get up there in the first place. Never underestimate the tenacity of drunken assholes
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Oct 12, 2015 09:57
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Yeah that's where it gets problematic. People can lie their faces off about it and no business wants to be That Place that ends up plastered all over the news for being jerks and denying service animals. Even if it's blatantly obvious and well-known that the person is lying you're still at risk of some news establishment that cares more about ratings than truth (well that's all of them now, isn't it?) refusing to shut up about that place that refused a service animal. I'm not sure why, but lying about having a service dog irritates me more than practically anything else. I'm not sure if this is an Oregon-specific thing, but if you have a service dog (to the best of my knowledge they're always dogs) they are required, by law, to wear a vest noting them as such, and you have to carry an ID card that is issued by the service that accredited them as service dogs. No paperwork, dog doesn't come inside. I don't "card" every service dog that comes in, because that's stupid, but when your dog is obviously a pet and clearly hasn't gone through the super intense training that is required to get a service dog accreditation and you tell me "oh don't mind my dog getting up on someone else's table, he's a service dog wink wink" you will definitely get kicked out if your paperwork isn't in order. You're a liar on top of being a lovely pet owner, and you're making the business owner liable for whatever your lovely dog does. Radio Help has a new favorite as of 20:31 on Oct 13, 2015 |
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Oct 13, 2015 20:29
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One time a little kid bolted in front of me when I was crab-walking a 10 gallon stock pot full of very hot fryer oil to the waste oil can. Thankfully it turns out I'm spider man and somehow managed to dodge the little dude without spilling scalding hot oil everywhere, but I don't think I've ever been more immediately terrified in my life. that could have gone so bad
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Oct 26, 2015 12:07
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Xinlum posted:Why was there a little kid in the kitchen? Exactly. Portland is full of inattentive hippie parents that are totally down to let their kids wander around busy restaurants. It's loving ridiculous. Psychobabble posted:The better question is why you would be moving and discarding hot fryer oil. Uhhh... because that's the reality of working in a busy, small restaurant? Do you have any idea how long it takes for a fryer's worth of oil to cool down to a "safe to move" temperature? Hint it's a lot longer than you have time to wait.
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Oct 26, 2015 22:39
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Mister Speaker posted:That's why you empty the fryer at the absolute end of the night and leave the oil to cool in a pot overnight so the openers can dispose of it safely. If your KM is ordering you to move cooking-temperature fryer oil more than a few feet, he's an rear end in a top hat - and if you agree to it, you're stupid and you deserve to be burned. Hahaha wow you're an rear end in a top hat.
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Oct 27, 2015 03:59
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Novum posted:He's not wrong, he's just an rear end in a top hat. No, he's definitely both, on top of being a sanctimonious prick. sorry for the delayed response, telling my managers all the dangerous things in the kitchen that I now refuse to do took longer than I thought (did you know you can cut yourself with a knife???)
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Oct 27, 2015 13:48
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 05:25 |
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Mister Speaker posted:Like I said, you empty the fryer at the very end of the night and leave the oil in a pot so the morning guys can dispose of it safely. Xinlum is also right, emptying the fryer 1/2 at a time is also a much safer course of action than "crab-walking a 10-gallon pot" through a busy kitchen. This absolutely isn't some 'it's not a perfect world' bullshit, what Radio Help did was entirely avoidable (in fact, he would have saved time by not having to dump the oil) and he could have seriously injured someone other than his own dumb rear end. So what happens when you have more than one fryer? How about five? And literally no place to store five stock pots full of oil? Or five stock pots? Does that still mean I "deserve to be burned"? Thanks for looking out though bruh you surely were a resource to whoever you worked for Xinlum posted:Also you don't dump the whole fryer at once. You do to half drains to make it way easier to carry and dump. Perhaps my problem was I assumed that people knew I wasn't hauling around 40 lbs worth of hot oil. 20 lbs worth of oil is scary enough. Radio Help has a new favorite as of 22:14 on Oct 27, 2015 |
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Oct 27, 2015 22:04
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