Vent: watched a new hire grab a screaming hot saute pan handle barehanded at our spot in Boise

Sandra Bennett · 2026-10-08T18:40:04.075302+00:00

So this went down at the restaurant I work at in Boise, on a Friday night about two weeks back, right in the middle of a 90 cover rush. We hire a lot of kids with zero line time since nobody around here can find good help, and this guy had maybe three shifts under his belt. I'm on the grill, he's on saute, and I hear him yell and turn around and he's got the handle of a pan that just came out of a 500 degree oven in his bare hand. No towel on the handle, no warning from whoever left it there, nothing. He dropped the pan, ducked out, and I had to finish his station for the rest of the night with a burned hand of my own from grabbing the same pan two minutes later. Turns out our guy on pantry set it down there and walked off without saying a word to anybody. Nobody got seriously hurt but it scared the hell out of everyone on the line and we spent the rest of service yelling at each other about pan handles. How do you all handle this at your spots, do you have a hard rule about announcing hot handles or marking them somehow, because towel on the handle clearly isn't cutting it when the rush hits?

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Vent: watched a new hire grab a screaming hot saute pan handle barehanded at our spot in Boise | Chefs - Thought Shares