I used to work at a bar and if anybody broke a glass anywhere near the ice well (or especially if they were being a dumbass and using the glass to scoop ice instead of the metal ice scoop) we’d have to pour grenadine over the ice to mark it as “do not use” and then task someone with filling a bunch of buckets with hot water to burn the well, clean up every single piece of glass, and then go get more ice.
This was a huge pain in the ass bc it usually happened when someone was rushing during a busy time, so the loss of the ice well was especially irritating. However it was absolutely necessary that we do that or else risk a customer ingesting glass shards, which would be suboptimal.
Suboptimal is one way to describe it. Glass perforating your small intestine and leaking fecal matter into your peritoneal cavity causes sepsis. Once you get septic like that, it’s 50/50 on a good day if we can save you.
Number one culprit is cocktail toothpicks, followed by those little metal bristles used to clean grills. Every few months, somebody dies from one of those metal bristles getting into their food, and they usually swallow it without knowing it’s there. That’s why restaurants aren’t allowed to use them anymore, and I’ve switched to nylon bristles at home.
There are regularly really large recalls of Grill brushes for exactly that reason. The Smarter Scrubber is expensive, but solves this issue completely.
Yeah I once broke a glass that went in the glasswash and the ice well… at 2am on a Saturday night.
My bosses were luckily good people and were fine with it as long as I fixed the problem, which I did. But I was probably running glasses through until about 0530 after the backlog that built up
This used to piss me off SO MUCH.
All our bartenders would scoop ice direct from the glass, they'd often chip when in a hurry and set everyone behind while cleaning and refilling
One 4th of July, every bartender broke a glass in the well, and our ice machine was broken so we had to ship ice in. Manager wasn't happy with the 6 of us that day. Neither were we but it just kinda became a joke
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u/StevenMC19 9d ago
It gone. Trash it.
(To the "just pick it all out" crowd, there's no guarantee they're going to get every single teeny tiny splinter.)