Kitchen Battles

The heavy steel frying pan was hurtling toward me at high speed and whizzed by my head missing me by a hair, crashing into the wall. I ducked under a prep table, watching in disbelief as one of the battling women, shrieking like a banshee slammed a huge pot against her enemies head. Blood poured down her face but she didn't waiver. Handfuls of hair were flying as they ripped at each others heads; the noise was deafening as plates and pots were thrown or knocked to the floor. One of the women fell with her angry face turned toward me. She looked insane with eyes agog and a stream of curses interspersing her screams. Shock and terror seemed to freeze the few people in the kitchen. The male photographer I was working with leaped on a table and shrieked along with the women. Finally somebody called the police and the women were taken away. We were up to our ankles in food, broken glass, pots, pans and adrenalin. One of the more memorable kitchen moments in my past.

During my food career,  I spent more than my share of time in various kitchens large and small:  hotel kitchens, test kitchens, food labs, pilot plants, manufacturing kitchens. They share one very important element - high energy. Anyone who has ever worked "on the line" in a restaurant knows the drill. You stand around doing prep work and side work, a few customers drift in but then the "big busy" hits and everyone gets into their groove. It's a feeling I've always loved - the urgency, the working together as a team and then the satisfaction of making it through alive. 

Sometimes the high energy goes wrong.  The kitchen battle I got caught in took place in New Orleans. I was at a Denny's working on an operations manual for their regional kitchens. There was never a dull moment. The cook we'd been working with for weeks was stabbed to death in a poker game the night before. It turned out he was heavily involved with two of the women working in the restaurant; they discovered his murder and his two-timing on the same morning and went berserk. Our recipe that day was one part grief, two parts shock and ten parts jealousy. The finished product was a disaster.

I crawled out from under the table; the photographer retrieved his battle-torn equipment-broken lights, broken camera, pranged tripods - everything was wrecked. I left the restaurant, checked out of my hotel and fled the scene of the crime, returning reluctantly after a month or so when things had cooled off.

My kitchen experiences, while rarely battlegrounds of this magnitude, were usually steamy, chaotic, lively affairs far removed from the dispassionate, sterile Queens' kitchen at Windsor Castle (1878), pictured for Sepia Saturday this week. I'll give you this though.....the place looks safe.