Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares Nightmare kitchens - Shocking restaurant confessions

Date Published:

28/11/2007

Behind the scenes in the restaurant. What the customer doesn't see (and wouldn't want to). By Charlie Cottrell

Chefs confess

From the story of the pus-filled chicken burger to rumours of disgruntled burger-joint staff making unhygienic additions to the milkshake mixture, urban myths about food are common and usually disgusting.

But while you can write some of these horror stories off as exaggeration, the truth is not always stranger than fiction. We've rounded up confessions from chefs that show that life behind the kitchen doors is not always a pretty sight. Brace yourself.

Burnt ends

A restaurant kitchen is like a battlefield; it's busy, sweaty and noisy, tensions run high and the language is foul enough to make a sailor blush. The resulting atmosphere is not a place for fussing. One chef we spoke to got straight to the point. "I'm not going to pretend that I stand there and think 'Oh my God! There's a bruise on that peach! The horror!' If there are fifty peaches to cut and prepare, the bruise gets cut off and it goes in with the rest of them. If something comes out a bit burnt, the black gets scraped off it and I'll send it out. I'm not going to bin something that's perfectly edible. Sorry."

And even if something is binned, that doesn't necessarily mean the end of its restaurant life. "I've not done this myself", one chef carefully comments, "but I know someone who works at a place where they will take a cut of meat that someone's sent back out of the bin, slap on a bit of garnish and serve it to another customer."