Kitchen characters

Working in the kitchen, you meet a whole different type of profile than at the UN, but somehow, people’s stories and lives are just as interesting. As previously mentioned, the average age encoutnered is roughly twenty years old, without counting the chef of course (thank god they are older than me, at least so far). As such, I have met two very interesting eighteen year olds, whose stories, for their young age, really captivated me. First was this little kid in the garde-manger, and when I mean little, he is shorter than me and they actually nickname him “petit” Jean (not his real name). I met him while I was still working in the pastry station, which is adjacent to his station. He flattered me by saying that he was convinced I was his age (yeah right), and then made me wonder about his life when he said he spent Christmas with his cat eating McDonald’s take-out. I thought it that was strange, for a kid his age, from here, to be spending the holidays like that. I got to know him a bit more during my second week which we shared at the same station. When he came in late last Monday the chef de partie (boss of the garde-manger) was worried because he was not picking up his cell phone. Later that day he showed up with bandages and scratches on his face; he was in a car accident, his friend was driving him home when a car collided with them head on; the driver was drunk and was driving in the wrong lane without his headlights; Jean’s friend did not survive the crash. Jean told me it was the fourteenth person he had lost over a period of two years. I could not imagine how at eighteen years old you could lose so many people, except of course in a war or disaster situation. I wanted to know more but of course left him alone.
It turned out that Petit Jean was my neighbor. He lived alone with his cat in an apartment close to the hotel where he had been working for over a year as an apprentice. When he first started he was working the hot line, the meat station to be more precise. One day he was cooking next to the sous-chef and there was a huge vat of hot oil on the stove for potatoes. As the kitchen got busier, the oil started to smoke, and so petit Jean picked it up to carry it away somewhere out of danger. As he was going through a doorway and shouted “chaud devant” which is what you do to warn someone to get out of your way in the kitchen, another cook didn’t hear and showed up in front of him. Petit Jean froze, and the burning oil made one slow wave which covered the pot’s handles and his hands which were holding them. As he let go of the pot in shock, the skin from his hands stuck onto the handles. He had to be treated for four months for burns at the hospital, and cannot tolerate being near heat anymore…