We Want Your Kitchen Nightmare Stories
If you want a job in America today, you'll probably end up working in a restaurant. (Yay!) One in ten Americans already work in restaurants or bars, and the WSJ says that since the recession hit, restaurant jobs have increased at more than twice the rate of other jobs.
That means that unless you're some sort of rich freak, you either work or have worked at a restaurant. And that means that you've probably experienced the joys of life in a professional kitchen. Joys like those enumerated in the latest lawsuit against a famous NYC restaurant:
"[Chef Eric Hara would] pour food on my hair almost every day — heavy cream, chocolate sauce, honey," [former Oak Room pastry chef Melissa Rodriguez] told The Post. "He'd make me carry eggs in my shirt, and if I did something he didn't like, I would have to break them and rub it into my chest."
Hara nicknamed her "Whore," and would boast that "all he had to do was get one drink in me and I would go to bed with him," Rodriguez said, reiterating just a few of the allegations in her lawsuit.
Notwithstanding the veracity or lack thereof in this particular lawsuit, the experiences described should sound familiar to most restaurant veterans. So—in honor of the fact that we're now a nation of stressed and financially desperate restaurant workers—we're asking for your best stories of restaurant employment hell. Psycho bosses? Psycho coworkers? Psycho customers? Or just anything involving the gross misuse of knives, fire, and/ or walk-in freezers? Email it to me! Or leave it in the comments, if you're an exhibitionist. We'll feature the best ones in a future post. This will make us all forget about our collective predicament, momentarily.
[Photo: Shutterstock]