Threw a whole tray of hotel pans into the dishwasher and learned a loud lesson

Had a new kid on the line last Saturday night. We're in the weeds, tickets are piling up, and he grabs a stack of those metal hotel pans from the prep station. Instead of scraping them first he just tosses the whole pile into the commercial dishwasher. You know the sound when a bunch of wet metal crashes around? Sounded like someone dropped a bag of hammers off a roof. Machine stopped mid-cycle and I had to pull 5 pans out from behind the heating element. Took us 20 minutes to get it running again. Anyone else got a dishwasher horror story from a busy shift?

2 comments

2 Comments

nelson.nancy8d ago

I started having the new guys scrape pans into the trash first after that exact thing happened to me.

zarab247d ago

I read about a restaurant that had a dishwasher drop a hotel pan full of baked-on cheese right into the sink. The whole drain line clogged with scalding grease and bits of parsley. They ended up having to call a plumber to snake the main line, which cost them like 400 bucks. So now they have a rule that all pans have to sit in hot soapy water for at least ten minutes before anyone touches them.