Kitchen Lokis
Working in the kitchen for a number of years taught me a lot of things, including how to cook a good meal with on-hand ingredients. It also taught me organizational skills I would end up using in my businesses, and helped me understand how to manage people.
It also taught me how to craft some truly gross pranks.
Commercial kitchens are generally places where a lot of pranks happen. There’s just too much creative energy and hormonal activity in one spot not to have some shenanigans, and the bonds you form due to the shared trauma of battling the weeds are very real.
To help me tell a more complete tale by sharing a couple of his own stories, I’ve brought in my favorite chef from another mother,
, who writes here on Substack. Brian and I have worked together a few times now here on Substack, and I’ll share a couple of those pieces at the end here today.Brian starts us off:
I can remember when I was much younger, of course, I was restocking fries on the line. When I was putting bags of fries into the freezer I touched the back of the fry cook’s arm by accident with a bag of frozen fries.
He jumped back as he thought I had touched him with something blazing hot and didn’t say so when behind him. Not saying “hot” when carrying something that is, is a cardinal sin in the kitchen.
He was relieved that I had not burned him when he found out it was cold instead of hot, but this gave us an idea.
I thought of putting a saute pan in the freezer until it was ice cold and waiting until we were slammed for dinner, then yelling hot right behind someone and touching them on the back of the arm with the pan.
We tried the prank that night, it worked beautifully, and everyone fell for it multiple times that night.
This prank works off the sensation of when you touch something scorching, that for a split second can feel cold before it burns the crap out of you, but in this case, it’s frozen.
I can almost feel the bag of fries on my arm, and I’m not sure if someone did this to me, but I can certainly remember another fry oil-related prank.
This prank was as sinister as it was simple: we would sometimes sneak by a deep fryer and drop an ice cube in there.
Now, anyone who has ever spilled a tiny amount of water into a frying pan knows that the oil will spit the water out violently as it heats it up rapidly. When you do this with an ice cube, there’s a delay of maybe 15 or 20 seconds, so you can safely get away while the chaos erupts.
You can get safely away, but the poor mid-fry cook is going to hear a thunderous cacophony and quite possibly catch a few of those little oil-spits.
I cannot stress this enough: don’t try this prank at home (or at work!).
Back over to Brian:
The next prank goes like this - It’s the FNG'S first day and he’s young, idealistic, and eager to please.
He hangs on your every word even when you talk about complete nonsense and then ask him if he’s taking notes or if he’s written that down.
As the day goes on you come up with completely asinine tasks for this person to do, and if he questions it, you look him straight in the eye and say yeah, that's how we do it here.
The victim of this prank is sent to find things like the right-handed tongs, or the left-handed bacon stretcher, neither one of those things exists and they will never find them, but they keep trying.
This prank only stops when the victim has an awakening of sorts and calls you out, or another person clues them in on the joke, although everyone in the kitchen and sometimes front of house can be in on this prank.
This one is more like low-grade hazing than an actual prank but it’s just as funny if not funnier.
Oh yes, we certainly messed with newbies, and I remember being messed with for my first few days, too. In a commercial kitchen, there’s a certain amount of gatekeeping that needs to happen, or else it doesn’t seem like such a special club. You see this sort of thing in the military a lot, too.
What really comes to my mind, though, is when people would leave the kitchen. When people would put in their notice, we’d wait until the last few minutes of their last shift, and then we’d dump the unholiest concoction we could conjure up on top of their head.
We would always use actual food ingredients, and of course the ingredients couldn’t be too expensive—there was food cost to consider, and we weren’t barbarians—but they could sure be nasty.
Butter-flavored oil, like the stuff you might use to butter hamburger buns, was sticky and seemed to stay on your skin for days. Liquid smoke had a scent that wouldn’t wash away, and stuff like anchovy paste, eggs, and mayonnaise weren’t uncommon.
I think that, at the end of the day, we wanted to signify that working in that kitchen had meant something to the people there. There was dignity in what we did, although we had a funny way of showing it!
Here’s something Brian and I worked on, where we talked about our various injuries in the kitchen:
Here’s something Brian and I worked on about the future of commercial cooking:
From Line Cooks to Robots
For an important 15 years of my life, I worked in kitchens. First and foremost, I learned to cook, and I took it seriously: I wanted to understand different cooking techniques, and I even considered making a career of it. Meanwhile, AI is revolutionizing every industry, and the restaurant industry is no exception. Naturally, this is a very curious juncture for me, but I haven’t cooked in a commercial kitchen in nearly 20 years, so I wanted to pick an expert’s brain for the “boots on the ground” observations you’ve come to expect from me.
We’ve worked on a few other things together, too, including Sci-Fridays, where we both geek out about science fiction with a bunch of other writers. Follow Brian to see his regular contributions, and subscribe to his page to see his culinary musings!
Now it’s your turn. I know you might not have worked in a kitchen, but I know for sure you’ve done pranks. What are some of the most creative ones you’ve seen? What sorts of pranks did you engage in, and what pranks were done to you?
The similar pranks we played in the Army from finding a box of grid squares to collecting exhaust samples, to tapping to find soft spots in the armor on a tank.... it goes on and on and on. Oh, and yes, the pranks in the Resturaunts are legion too.
Once, I worked in an open-concept cubical world we were on a kick for while where we’d plant fake spiders or rodents (think cat toys) around someone’s work area. Like under the handset of their phone, in a crowded junk drawer, in a plant, etc, Thanks to the open concept design, and depending on the persons jitteriness, it was usually pretty obvious throughout the area when it was discovered. The stoic victims, who made not a peep, were the stealthiest in their paybacks. Ah, cheap laughs!