Blood and Guts

Traci Des Jardins Shares a Final Bloody Tale

And to set you off on your Halloween weekends, we thought we’d give you one of the San Francisco outtakes from today’s Kitchen Horror Stories post (for which SF chefs’ stories weren’t quite gory enough to make the final cut). Jardinière executive chef Traci Des Jardins shared a special little story with us that was probably the bloodiest of the lot we collected. Take it away Traci…

“Back when I was at Rubicon I had a prep cook whose job it was to cut up these huge wheels of parmesan that we’d get in about every week or so. We’d get these 30-pound wheels, and we’d cut it in quarters and wrap it up, you know, in small segments. When you’re cutting a thirty-pound wheel of cheese you have to use a double-handed knife and you really have to put all your body weight into it – it’s one of the most physically difficult things a person has to do in the kitchen. Like, I couldn’t even do it. I’d watch him because he was always trying to cut the cheese with it up on the round, rolling side. I told him, you can’t do it that way. You are going to hurt yourself. And lo and behold, because he wouldn’t listen, he goes to cut the cheese one morning, and his arm rolls under the knife and he cut his forearm straight through to the bone. He cut down to an artery and it started to squirt across the room. There was blood everywhere. It’s the first time I’ve ever had to call 911 in a kitchen.”

Traci Des Jardins Shares a Final Bloody Tale