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Chefs and cooks will always be able to remember their war wounds. It’s a game that is played with much the same tone as the conversations that take place in your 20s around the drugs and other things you have played with, or the conversations in your 30s around the legitimacy of your own personal enlightenment and spiritual journey (read: the cults you’ve joined/narrowly avoided).
It is common ground in kitchens to compare stories, to relive the trauma of impossible services and unforgivable fuck ups. Sitting around at the end of the day or the week bonding over the extent to which each one of the staff have suffered beyond their station, worked beyond their means, stretched outside their bodies to honour the ‘craft’ or the ‘mate’ or the unreasonable, erratic but creatively ‘brilliant chef’. Wherever it may begin the conversation always ends on the topic of war wounds. You buy entry into the club with scars, burns, blisters and breaks.
I’m a chef, that means I get injured in my workplace. It also means I am trained to keep working, regardless of the injury. The only thing that could potentially justify exiting the kitchen would be death, or the loss of my right hand. Two weeks ago in Sydney, both of those things almost came to pass.
I learned to bake at the same time I learned to cook. Long hours but in reverse. Start at 3pm finish at 1am ready for deliveries come 3am. There would be days when I would finish work in the kitchen at 2pm, drive straight to the bakery and work through until 1am. Go home, wake up, arrive at the kitchen with the bread still warm from the bake a few hours prior. It was a romantic thought that I could keep that up. I did for a while. A long year. The possibility for injury in the bakery was limitless1. Each night ended with holes burnt through my shirts, blisters on my hands and black grit under the skin of my fingers. Not everyone was so lucky: one of the bakers, adjusting a mistake I made on the top shelf of a four shelf oven, caught his elbow on the bottom stone - these ovens sat at around 300° plus steam heat. They are 40-50cm in height, just small enough to feel entirely uncomfortable with your arm in it - as his elbow nicked the stone his arm jerked up, away from the burn. His right bicep was split open by the stone on the top of the oven. It was as if his arm had just burst open. No blood at that stage, just bare bright, raw flesh. He grabbed some cold dough from the fridge and wrapped it over the wound, he was ok. He didn’t miss a minute of work. It was Easter 2010; Brisbane was cowboy country; the bread was good. The hot cross bun recipe would have been worth it.
The kitchen porter at Dandy was an Ecuadorian body builder. A beast of a man standing at only 5’6, muscles bursting through clothes. He was putting a knife away in the draws and he slipped, the edge of the knife cut through his jeans and split his thigh open like a balloon. A clean, deep wound that not only left his leg bursting out of his black jeans but his flesh open, like he was not made of muscle and tissue but instead his muscles shaped with marzipan and his skin wrapped in balloon plastic. Hard and tight but incredibly fragile. Two days off of work because he couldn’t stand, and 3 months of no legs at the gym. His arms wouldn’t fit in the bread ovens these days.
Cuts and burns are unavoidable, you walk through any BOH operation and the cooks wear them with pride and a deepset satisfaction, like pictures of the smiling wounded in war trenches.. Up until two weeks ago, these were my top three worst kitchen injuries:
2011 - March - Cooking, Cup Speciality Coffee, West End. Slicing stale bread with a chefs knife, the blade slipped off the dough and went through my thumb, caught only but he strength of the middle of the nail. I dropped the knife, jumped 360° and squeezed that thumb tight. Disinfected, wrapped hard and tight and butterfly clipped. I stopped working for the 4 minutes it took to disinfect, clean, strap and wrap. If I press down on the tip of my thumb where the blade went in there is no sensation, a dull painful ache instead.
2013 - September - Cooking, at home, slicing beef for a ragu. I had just returned home from the gym.. I had a bottle of Barbera from Nadia Verrua, a label designed by Gianluca Cannizzo (my poster sucks2). It was raining. It was going to be a good night. My finger slipped off the handle of the knife and went rogue and 1/3 of my left hand pointer was gone. I dropped the knife, jumped and span 360° and held my finger. Andy told me to stop being so dramatic and walked me over the sink. He ran the water as I looked away. All I remember is hearing his garbled voice as he turned and ran to the couch, making his way into some kind of child pose foetal position ‘oh, fuck. It’s bad. I gotta… ohh shit… I gotta go. It’s bad Danny.’
After a few minutes of heavy breathing3 it was wrapped tight, dinner was served and wine was drunk. I went to the hospital the next day to make sure it was clean and hunky dory and you know, get some stitches and stuff. When I went in to have it examined the doctor came by and asked me where the rest of my finger was. I told him I put it in the bin with the rest of the sinew from the beef and he very kindly let me know that next time I should go straight to the hospital so that I can have it sewn back on. He asked my profession, I told him ‘chef,’ he rolled his eyes and walked away4. I went back to work the next day and wore a glove for 2 weeks.
2019 - November - Cooking, Dandy 3.0, Bermondsey. Opening night. I pulled some chicken out of the fryer to temperature probe it and the oil from the batter ran down the tongs and all over my right hand, pouring down each finger and cascading over my palm onto my wrist. I dropped the tongs in the oil. I stopped. I whispered ‘fuck’ to myself, looked at the docket rail and realised with a great sense of clarity that I could leave. I could walk out right then. There would be consequences but I did not need to do it to myself. Birdman, in his first service ever, snapped me out of my funk, ran me some lukewarm water and took over the pass. He wrapped my hand tight and we finished service. My hand ballooned like the Michelin man and blisters wrapped themselves around each finger from top to bottom and across my palm as one big blister hot air balloon. When it popped it and weeped five days later it was underwhelming to say the least5. I kept working for fifteen days straight after this injury.
I’m a chef, that means I get injured in my workplace. It also means I am trained to keep working, regardless of the injury. The only thing that could potentially justify exiting the kitchen would be death, or the loss of my right hand. Two weeks ago in Sydney, both of those things almost came to pass.
I was in Sydney to help open a new brewery on the Northern Beaches. I had helped design the hospitality concept and developed all the recipes and the next phase was to help with the opening. The goal was to arrive in Sydney, oversee the opening for the first six weeks, train the staff and build a back end operation that could be handed to any member of staff if help was needed in the kitchen. Recipes, guidelines, costings, checklists, service strategies - that was the job. Make sure that everything was in place to hand over to anyone - chef, cook, bartender - who could then comfortably run service. In theory a brilliant job that not only pulled on the administration experience I have academically and practically, but also creatively, building a system that can be taught and passed on. A system that maintains quality, consistently and with ease.
The problem when Australia shut the borders a couple of years ago they also shut out - or kicked out, or forced out - a huge portion of the kitchen staff. The hospitality industry is held up by international visitors, travellers, students and migrants. Finding staff in Sydney is nearly impossible. Top kitchens are restricting hours and pulling back menu development to accomodate the fact that there just are not enough people to do the work.
So instead of training, I cooked. I took on the kitchen in a venue with a capacity of 120. To do that much work with that little help takes up almost every hour of every day. The normalisation of 80 hour weeks made this process almost comforting. I understand what it takes to do that work. I thrive on that kind of focus. Because of this I forget what it sounds like when my body and brain ask me to stop. There is never enough time to get everything done in an understaffed kitchen, in a kitchen staffed by only one the cliche of Sisyphus rings true.
Yet the show must go on. One of the beautiful things about cooking is that the work must get done otherwise you don’t get to enjoy the brilliance of feeding people. The insane thing about cooking is that it becomes part of your gumption, your integrity, your credibility, to embody this philosophy that the work must get done - if not me, who? Out of defiance chefs are trained to fuck the system and rise beyond any reasonable expectation of physical labour and mental exhaustion. Sleep is seen as weakness, to be unprepared is unacceptable. The greatest sin.
It was a slip of the pairing knife caught a moment too late - just nipping the bottom of my pinky where it joined the palm. I thought for second I had gotten away with it, maybe just a little nick, nothing to worry about. After all, the heavy duty gloves I was wearing may have taken the brunt of the accident. I wasn’t so lucky, but it was a clean, shallow cut with a sharp knife - one of the benefits of new kitchens and new openings, the knives work - they cut. It bled, but it wasn’t big and it didn’t hurt.
I cleaned it and wrapped it and gloved up and got on with the day. It was a long day. A long day at the end of a long week, a long day at the end of a longer than anticipated month. Ignore the injury, and get on with the job.
When I took the bandage off a few hours later, I felt what I could only describe as electricity running down my finger. A buzzing, like the cleansing of energy after a Reiki session6 - almost pleasurable but also confusing. Tiny cuts don’t feel that way. This tiny cut be crazy.
The small wound had healed the next day, and the day was just like any other. Long hours in the kitchen, no pain, no problem.
Thirty-six hours later, I woke up at 3am in agony - a pain so present and stark that I realised for the first time what it means to actually, really, terrifyingly have something wrong. My finger was swollen, I could not move it, I could not bend it, I could not move my arm. I googled the little finger. The tendon that gives you tennis elbow runs through the little finger. I decided that I had given it a little trim, maybe the cut was deeper than I suspected - a couple of painkillers and a heavy nip of whiskey and I caught some more rest, but when I woke, the pain was worse. I was at the doctor by 7am.
When things hurt, in my experience at least, drugs can solve it. Physical pain? Drugs. Emotional pain? Drugs. Psychological pain? Drugs. Sharp pain? Drugs. Dull pain? Drugs.
With this pain, it wasn’t quite that simple. A trip to the doctor very quickly turned into a trip to the emergency. Emergency turned into being admitted, and the full array of X-rays, scans, blood tests and urgent meetings with the hand surgeon at the Royal North Shore. My hand was deeply, horrifically infected, the tendon was infected. My arm was at risk and without ceremony the surgeon made clear if I left the hospital my life was at risk. Four hours after leaving my house to potentially get some antibiotics I got some - through a cannula that stayed in my hand for five days. I was pumped full of bag after bag of intravenous antibiotics which the infection did not quickly respond to, and was then scheduled for surgery. I was not allowed to move my arm, eat or leave the hospital.
The pain intensified and from the hospital bed I organised a colleague to fly down from Brisbane to run the kitchen, initially just for the day until I got out of hospital on the Thursday. I entered hospital on Tuesday, on the Thursday they kept me awake as they sliced open my hand and washed out my finger from inside the palm. A man in the bed next to me had severed his thumb when he fell through a roof, and almost took it right off. He was in hospital for no more than 36 hours, in and out - but they didn’t let me leave. You see, one thing I didn’t know was that if an infection, like the one I had, makes its way into the tendon and runs amok down the arm towards your elbow that is really really, really not good. That is ‘chop off your finger before that happens’ not good. That is ‘the loss of the use of the your right hand because it dies’ not good. It is, as the surgeon made very clear ‘you leave the hospital you might day’ not good. Very quickly it can become a question of not whether or not they cut things off but how much they have to cut off to save your hand, your arm or even your life.
Over 5 days I had more than 20 intravenous bags of antibiotics. I wasn’t allowed to leave. Every hour my heart rate and blood pressure checked, every night at midnight another bag, every morning at 6am another bag, every afternoon, every evening every night, every morning on repeat.
The shock of the cut and the surgery or even the infection wasn’t what confused me. It was the stillness. The silence, the quiet. I was for the first time in my life entirely helpless. I was sick and I was so lucky that I went to hospital. I slept. I slept a lot. For most of the time I was in a lot of pain. I am used to pain so when pain sits on a 6/10 I can ignore it. I sleep, I wake, I sleep. When the nurses could convince me to take some pain medication I would sleep even more. I felt like my body could finally stop. Yet a conscious guilt seeped through every thought - I should be working. I deserve to be tired, I need to keep going, to not stop. Only after the surgery when the surgeons explained just how serious my injury could have been did I finally just rest. The permission was granted, and for the first time not even I could accuse myself of being lazy, useless, or pathetic.
I think it was prawn that must of gotten in there, prawn or dirty fish oil or some kind of floor sludge. I still scrubbed the floors that night before I went to hospital. I still cleaned the fryers and cleaned the walls and the extraction and disinfected the dishwasher and took out the trash and wiped out the bins drove home and drank too much wine. The cut didn’t change anything, until it changed everything.
After five days in hospital the surgeons were finally convinced the operation was a success and the infection was gone. That was really only the beginning though. It was then a week in a cast, with strict instructions to not use my hand. Now, according to the hand specialist, I am going through at least a few months of rehab. I can almost close my hand into a fist again. There is pain but the finger almost wants to go. I can straighten it and bend it and stretch it, but I can’t open a door with my right hand. I can’t butter bread. I can’t hold a knife.
I am writing this using dictation. Luckily I have an editor, someone kind enough to help it make sense without common grammar.
My body has been angry. Angry and tired and I realise now fed up for so many reasons. At last, even though entirely unexpected and entirely without precedent - it can rest. I can rest.
I like to think that sometimes, just sometimes you get what you deserve.
The official line was that if a health inspector arrived, the cage to protect your arm from being torn off by the mixer was ‘faulty’ but had only been stuck for 1 day. The truth was the practice of the person mixing was to follow the dough all the way to the hook and pull it back away from the hook, acting as a second arm to increase the development in the bowl. If you are wondering what I am talking about have a look at this video and imagine how it would feel if your arm got caught by that spiral… That never happened though, at least not while I was there.
Gianluca’s images have framed the natural wine movement from its beginnings. His images are now all so familiar and playful. Find them here
I feel as though I have dramatised this version of events from my side. I was very brave you see. I had just chopped off a good chunk of my finger yet was still able to see the bright side. It would be great for nose picking and that first post dinner cigarette would taste super sweet if I lost enough blood to be light headed. I did. It was. I am pretty sure but absolutely not certain that there was some breathing into a bad to stop some vomit by Andy. In fact, do not quote me on that. Please. Actually, more than anything don’t tell him I’ve written this. He knows I am full of exaggeration. In fact, from this moment on let us refer to Andy as Sam. Sam doesn’t like blood. Sam would make a great doctor. Sam is a very good friend. I am lucky to know Sam. Sam is very patient. Sam is very handsome. Sam somewhat saved my finger.
For all those worried and wondering about the status of said finger - it’s fine. It grew back. I clearly have the constitution of an ox. Clearly. In fact if this piece shows anything clearly it is that I am very very strong…
I had just opened a restaurant and I couldn’t use my right hand for the first four days. It was absolutely fucked.
You cleanse energy through the finger tips, the toes and the top of the head. If energy is stored in the body and unable to release it causes a deep muscle tension and can weaken the extremities. When you clear someones fingers or toes they feel as if shoot starts are running out of their finger and toes. Electricity, energy, bloody flow. I went through a big hippie phase when I was younger and trained in Reiki and Zen Thai Shiatsu massage. I am no longer a practicing hippie.
Words by Daniel Wilson
Daniel has a Masters in Food Culture from The University of Gastronomic Science in Pollenzo, Italy. He is a writer, a chef, and a recovering restaurateur.