A restaurant kitchen is a dangerous milieu. There's fire, wet floors, boiling oil, razor sharp knives and ovens that are always on. Everything is exaggerated, compared to the usual home kitchen -- huge, weighty pots, shanks with 20-inch blades, tongs as long as your leg and skillets 2 1/2-feet in diameter. Add exhaustion, hurry, tension and bad luck and you've either smacked, burned, dropped or cut something that's gonna hurt.
Yesterday, Guiseppe had a big red mark on top of his hand. A cut? No, a burn from the forno, oven. We started swapping kitchen war stories and I suddenly thought of the movie "Jaws."
There's a scene in Jaws when the main characters, Hopper, Quint and Brody are in the belly of Quint's boat. They're eating, drinking and gabbing. They begin to talk about their scars. Each recount becomes progressive more gruesome as each thinks the wounds before were nothing. Finally Quint tells the story or all stories.
Quint: ... Mako. Fell out of the tail rope and onto the deck. You don't get bitten by one of those bastards but twice -- your first and your last."
I burned my right index finger caramelizing sugar in my freshman dorm room making Brazilian Flan. Guiseppe almost lost part of a finger in a slicer. I nearly cut off the tip of my finger just last month slicing my favorite, yet extremely dense Zingerman's dried fruit and nut bread.
Tomek, the youthful dishwasher, just then let fall a huge sauce pot. It fell right in the middle of his shin. The knot on his leg was the size of a tangerine.
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