Fire In The Hole and Big Chucky N...

So the other day I was in the In Room Dining kitchen testing some recipes and a couple of funny things happened. First, I had been cooking for a few hours and needed to leave for about 45 minutes for a meeting. I was going to come back after the meeting so I took all the things off the heat, but I left things set up in the kitchen. I informed a couple of the stewards that I would be back and then I left.

Before my meeting I saw one of the sous chefs in one of the other chef's offices talking about some of the local breakfast foods that we would be ordering for the employee dining room. Fuul (beans), local breads and tameya which is falafel. He was going to leave to go fry some of the falafel, to test it out. So he left to do that and I went and had my meeting. Afterward, the fried tameya was on a plate in the chef's office so I tasted it and then went to the office that I share with my sous and the other chef de cuisine, a Vietnamese woman named Mai Phuong. She stood up and looked at me with wide eyes and started laughing.

"Very big fiyah! Yo kitchen! Black!"

"What?" I replied.

"A lot smoke! Very big! Eveewhere!"

Again from me, "What?"

Beeg fiyah! He make!" And she pointed at the sous.

He looked sheepishly up from his desk and said, "Eet was esmall...notah that beeg."

At this point I was beginning to understand...and I took off at a fast walk to the kitchen where I had been working and sure enough, there was a huge burn pattern up the entire wall!! Up into the hood vents, completely engulfing the pot shelf above the burners. Whoa. There were also signs that someone had tried to clean it up. The sous. Poor bastard. Moments later there was a team of six stewards in there to clean it up and they were laughing at him the whole time.

The sous is a local and this was a bad thing for him because he lost face in front of the other Egyptians. It will probably take him a while to live it down. He had left the fire on high beneath the pot of corn oil he had used to fry the tameya and it had hit the smoke point and ignited. Doh!


The next funny story occured while those same stewards were cleaning up the mess. They were joking and laughing and behaving as all young kitchen dudes do. I was on a table prepping as far away from the mess as I could be. They are really friendly people and kept looking over and smiling. Finally a guy with decent english skills walked over and asked, "Hey chef, you used to make da movies?"

Again my answer, "What?"

"Before you do this, you do the movie?"

"What?"

"I think I see you in the movies..."

I laughed. "Ok, what one?"

He smiled big and hit me with one I have never been hit with before. "Walker: Texas Ranger! You Chuck Norris right?"

Oh man it was all I could do to not double over on that one. Yeah, ya had to be there, but do I really look like Chuck Norris? If I do I would like to think I can at least act better than him. Ha ha.