The Most Horrific Restaurant Kitchen Accidents Made Me Lose My Lunch

Welcome back to Restaurant Confessionals, where we talk to the unheard voices of the restaurant industry from both the front-of-house (FOH) and back-of-house (BOH) about what really goes on behind the scenes at your favorite establishments. In the latest installment, we hear from chefs who’ve witnessed some seriously gnarly kitchen accidents.

Everyone has heard those stories about people who’ve lost a few slivers of skin to a cheese grater or chopped off a piece of their thumb while slicing bread. And though accidents are bound to happen in home kitchens, more horrific things go wrong in restaurants.

I worked in a kitchen for a while and saw plenty of bloody and messy accidents take place, but it all started back in culinary school. Things started to go wrong during our very first class when a girl claimed that she knew how to operate the cutting machine. She told our classmate that she wasn’t going to use the safety measures because they were annoying. Two minutes later, her fingers were bleeding and she was screaming for help. The teacher stood frozen in the middle of the room and stared at the tips of her fingers, which were now attached to the blade of the machine instead of her hand.

I was curious to hear other about people’s horrific kitchen stories, so I asked four seasoned restaurant experts to tell me about their most clumsy and terrifying accidents and the aftermath of those incidents.

Sander Lenselink has worked as a chef in the Netherlands for years. He sustained first-degree burns on his face from a busy day of service. “It was a busy Friday afternoon and we had about 80 guests in the restaurant. I made gnocchi and had prepared a huge pot of water and oil to cook them in, but when I went to pour the water out, the pot slipped out of my hands and into the sink. All of that boiling water shot up straight into my face. I remember watching it all unfold as if in slow motion.” Because it was so busy, Sander didn’t take a break and continued to work until a colleague pulled him aside. “Apparently, I had blisters all over my face. We cleaned the wounds and I went to the emergency room, where I found out I had first- and second-degree burns. I came out of there covered in bandages like the English Patient. I couldn’t work for a week and a half, but I luckily don’t have any scars to show for it.”

Joost Brouwer worked in a kitchen for years before he started his own catering company. The days that he remembers the most are the ones when something went very wrong. “At one of the restaurants I worked in, we cooked fast and improvised a lot—the same as in every kitchen—and something would occasionally drop and end up on the floor. One night, I was sweeping the kitchen with a broom and slipped on a mussel. My leg shot forward and my knee bumped into a small workstation. I ended up with something called “jumper’s knee,” an inflammation where the kneecap meets the shinbone. It’s very unpleasant if your job is to stand on your feet all day.”

Burns and slips are definitely high on the list of common kitchen accidents, but the winner has to be disappearing fingertips. I’d be surprised to find a cook who has never cut themself. Joost Brouwer has a painful stabbing memory of his own: “I had this bad habit when I was cutting something to wipe my knife on my apron in between rounds. One day, I forgot to put on my apron and the knife went straight through the fabric of my pants and into my leg. I changed my knife-cleaning habits that same day.”

Jordy Pottgens is a restaurant manager who experienced something quite gruesome when he was throwing out glass. “We had a new machine that breaks up big pieces of glass like beer bottles into smaller pieces. It’s operated by hand and features a handle and a lid that keep the glass container closed so it doesn’t end up all over the place. To crush the glass, I held onto the handle and pushed it down to break the glass, but something went wrong and the lid popped open again. My hand got stuck between the lid and the handle, which amputated the tip of my ring finger and part of my middle finger. Luckily, we were the first ones to use the machine so we got rid of it immediately. Several investigations are underway by the insurance company, the occupational health and safety company, and so on. But none of those things will bring my fingertip back, of course.”

Samuel Levie is a personal chef who now runs a food PR company. During his years in the kitchen, he witnessed several reckless chefs pull stunts that didn’t end well. “When I was about 18 years old, there was a chef in our kitchen who really loved to drink. One night, while he was making caramel and I was busy with prep work, I was handed a spoonful of caramel. In the kitchen, they always say that nothing is more important than tasting. So I tasted it, but it was incredibly hot—actually scorching—and caramel is also very sticky. My skin was scalded from my gums to my nose. I walked around with burns for three weeks in addition to an upper lip full of pus that tasted like caramel.”

He later moved on to work in a restaurant with a chef who felt like he needed to prove himself, an added risk factor when working in a kitchen. “One of the chefs always said that he could take croquettes out of the fryer with his bare hands. On his last night in that kitchen, he wanted to show us that he could, so he put his hands in it. I don’t think there are many people who can truly stick their hands in hot oil without suffering some damage. It didn’t look so good and this guy had to go straight home. He didn’t stay for a drink after the shift.”

Chef Peter Ian recently had a cook working for him who chopped a centimeter (almost 0.4 inches) off his finger. “The kid came up to me with only half his finger and said that he needed to see the doctor because he had used the cutting machine. And yes, we found a beautiful, bloody fingertip in there. After that, I had to show up for work seven days in a row because someone had to do those hours. After a week, the boy was back with a square thumb.” There are also plenty of people who take their fingertip(s) to the hospital in a Tupperware container filled with ice in hopes that doctors can somehow reattach it.

I’ll end this cautionary tale with a cliché: Take good care of yourself and remember that playing with hot oil, sharp knives, and cutting machines never ends well.

This story was originally published in January 2016.