Chef pranks in professional kitchens
When I was 16 I left the constraints of classic education to train to be a chef at a specialist school. I had an innate obsession with food which led me to be a chef in big kitchens from a young age. I’ve seen EVERYTHING under the sun happen in restaurants and hilarious (albeit horrific) stories that I can’t wait to share with you.
So, why would I want to endure this madness, you may ask? Why would a teenage girl want to spend her days in the epitome of hell, peeling onions in the basement, surrounded by an aromatic concoction of BO and spices? I ask myself that question all the time too. My youth, most of my sanity and a few fingertips will forever belong to the kitchen.
CHEF PRANKS
This week I was trying to explain to my friends the pranks that the senior chefs would play on the new young recruits (commis chefs). At the beginning I was warned by people in the industry to watch out for jokes that would be played on the naïve commis, although they wouldn’t tell me what exactly they would be. This led me to be extremely sceptical about everything that was asked of me.
I have split opinions on even divulging the secret pranks from the kitchens. Some chefs may be mad and feel that the newbies shouldn’t know what’s about to come, as it’s a ‘rite of passage’. However, I believe that although this can be fun and games, no one should feel belittled or humiliated in what is already a difficult taxing profession.
So, with that being said, let me quickly spill the secrets.
My friend used to be a commis chef in a big restaurant kitchen, she’d only been there for a month when she was asked to move 80 boxes frozen food from one side of the walk in freezer to the other because it was ‘colder on the other side’. This was a lie. And yet, she did it, because you don’t argue with a sous chef.
‘Stores’ are the area of a kitchen with every ingredient imaginable and is usually ran by a supervisor. One of the running jokes between the head chef and stores is the list of crazy ingredients you can get the gullible chefs on work experience to ask for. One day I saw a boy run downstairs to stores, look the supervisor dead in the eyes, and say “Chef Daniels needs some cyanide urgently, can you give me a kilo?”. I’ve never anyone laugh as hard as the supervisor did in that moment. I bet the boy wanted to take some cyanide right then.
These requests from the chefs extend to asking us to find certain (non-existent) items that spanned from ice warmers to parsley curlers. Each of them getting more elaborate as the day went on, a personal favourite of mine was getting asked to find the bacon stretcher and a bucket of steam.
Sometimes, in big kitchens, the chefs on work experience aren’t trusted to do anything aside from chop onions. So, the chef de partie (chef of the section) usually finds something to waste the poor work experience students time. The best story I have heard is a friend of mine that was asked to finely chop flour in order to ‘make it smaller’.
