Sometimes, things don't always go to plan in the kitchen. Here are some of the worst things that can happen to a chef while on shift.

Like in all walks of life, chefs just want to be able to create and do their jobs without too much hassle involved. The odd mishap is commonplace, but when things go wrong in a professional kitchen, they really go wrong.

  1.  Having a power outage

It seems strange that we have become so over dependent on electricity yet are so ill prepared for power outages. When they do occur, chaos ensues, and this sense of chaos is no greater than in the kitchen of a restaurant.

Many chefs have told stories of having to break out the butane burners and cook in the dark without proper ventilation in the middle of service, but can get worse; if you’ve embraced technology to the point of intrinsically linking everything electronic in your restaurant to Wi-Fi, including cash registers, you may find yourself unable to even do business.

  2.  Dealing with a late produce delivery

So you’ve turned up to work and are all ready to start doing prep before cooking hours. But what’s this? There’s no food to prep?

There are few things more irritating than factors outside of your control impacting upon your schedule. A late or unordered delivery is high up the list in terms of annoyance. It’s such a simple thing that should be easily fulfilled on a daily basis, yet sometimes even the most basic stuff can go wrong or be messed up by someone who just doesn’t care about your time.

  3.  Poisoning a customer

Bingo.

The worst thing that could ever happen to a chef is accidental poisoning. When it’s a simple case of over or undercooking a meal, or just not washing your hands before prep, that’s bad enough. However, when it goes full scale and is caused by factors out of your control, that’s when the real kitchen nightmares start to happen.

There has been a number of cases of wide-scale food poisoning in restaurants, but perhaps none more famous than the incident at a Chi-Chi’s restaurant in the Pittsburgh area, Pennsylvania in November 2003.

Chi-Chi’s was a highly successful Mexican restaurant chain in the USA that was hugely successful in the 90’s. Already going through an uncertain financial period having filed for bankruptcy a month prior, you would think it couldn’t get much worse for Chi-Chi’s. Well, when 660 cases of Hepatitis A and 4 deaths were traced back to their Beaver Valley Mall site, it did.

The cause? A contaminated batch of spring onions imported from Mexico. This remains the largest outbreak of Hepatitis A in American history.

Not only must this have been extremely tough on the chefs that cooked and prepared the food, everyone employed by the restaurant chain was out of work by September 2004. The only remaining relic of their existence is a Chi-Chi’s brand of salsa that’s still sold today.

 4.  Working with untrained/unprofessional staff

If you’re a seasoned pro, taking someone else under your wing can be seen as a great responsibility. However, when the person you’re trying to teach just isn’t on the same page as you, things can get hairy.

Working with untrained waiting staff can lead to poor communication and a slowing down of service, so it’s vital that staff are trained well before starting.

However, you can’t train bad habits out of people, and if someone continually turns up late, doesn’t appreciate hygiene standards and is generally a pain to work with, it can really hurt productivity and customer satisfaction.

In addition, if they don’t want to clean up their area after service is done, they’re in the wrong industry,

  5.  Experiencing a fire system failure

The advancing technology of modern day fire systems is a blessing that any kitchen can be thankful for… so long as they keep their nose out of a chef’s business.

When a fire system fails, it usually means it triggers without any sort of precursor, such as smoke or heat. As a result it can comes as quite a surprise when sprinkler systems fire unexpectedly.

Other fire systems that have been known to spontaneously activate include Ansul systems, which is a dry chemical retardant which stops fires spreading. This chef on Quora explains this story - the clean-up job was not a fun one.

  6.  Random acts of general weirdness disrupting your shift

If there’s anything a chef doesn’t want on a shift, it is unnecessary distractions when they are trying to create masterpieces. It’s therefore no surprise to find that literally anything can happen in the kitchen, be it light-hearted and humourous, or dark and contrived. This bizarre story, which comes from Reddit user DontTouchMyMise, falls somewhere in between.

You can read the full story here (contains strong language), but the gist of the story is this: one of the servers at the restaurant walked into the kitchen holding an injured crow asking for a place to keep it on behalf of the manager.

There’s so much wrong with this. The hygiene, the need to bring it in to a professional kitchen, the fact that it’s an injured crow, everything. We can appreciate the humanitarian side of wanting to keep the crow safe, but there’s a time and a place for everything, and in a restaurant kitchen during service hours just isn’t it.

Is there anything we may have missed? Let us know!