Hiram Jiminez ordered a sizzling fajita skillet at Applebee’s; first mistake. Second mistake: praying over his food.
Jiminez said he heard a loud sizzling noise as his face was bowed just inches from the freshly cooked meal and then was burned by grease popping in his eye and face.
The diner said he panicked and knocked the piping-hot steak fajita onto his lap, which caused more burns.
Jiminez did not suffer any scarring from his burns, but he sued the restaurant for damages, claiming the eatery negligently served him hot food.
I’m sure it was terrible for him, and that he was actually injured by his decision to stick his face in the platter, but it sounded like something from the Three Stooges. I might have snickered mean-spiritedly a bit at the story, and then felt a bit of remorse, but that was wiped away by the absurdity of suing a restaurant for serving hot food.
The restaurant was doing what it was supposed to do, it was his god who screwed up. Or maybe not; maybe Jesus was sending him a message by trying to fry his lap.
Apparently, ol’ Hiram neglected to notice the steaming, sizzling food in the skillet. He’d be worth keeping an eye on, because I don’t doubt that he’ll soon be ‘winning’ a Darwin Award in a particularly spectacular fashion.
Does he like his fajitas on the rocks instead?
At least the case was tossed. But I wonder how soon we’re going to hear cries of “christian discrimination/persecution” over this. Clearly his right to pray takes priority over common sense. /s
In related (old) news…
Aw, c’mon. Getting burned by hot food is no joke. Have you no enthalpy?
I have a serious problem with this article.
Red flags all around! “Freshly cooked”, you say (not you PZ, the RawStory)? Applebees? Freshly Cooked? Applebees?
Nope, that’s why he sued. *Ba-Dum-Tish*
1. I’m sorry he was hurt
2. I’m not going to say “silly idiot”. Would you all snicker like that if the exact same thing had happened to him while he tried to smell the food?
3. I’m not going to say “goodness, what do these Americans sue over silly things”? I used to laugh about the infamous McD coffee, until I read up on it and actually meassured the temperature of a freshly made cup of coffee.
He was saved from worse injury only by the grace…
seconding Giliell’s 1 & 2.
I’m not sure about the third poin. On one hand if you order something that is supposed to get to you hot then you can’t complain when it gets to you hot. On the other… they must have served him really quickly for the fat to still pop. They could have given it half a minute without having the meal cool too much.
Beatrice @ #10
Please read up on the case. I am going by memory here, but…
1) The coffee was 180 degrees F.
2) McD purposely kept their coffee too hot to drink when they served it, so they would not get many request for free refills.
3) 180 degrees means 3rd degree burns in 3 seconds.
4) The woman was in the drive through lane. She fumbled for money, or was putting change away, and dropped the cup in her lap. She could not get out of the car or out of her clothes in the 3 seconds before she got 3rd degree burns over her private parts.
5) She asked the court ONLY for reimbursement for her medical bills. She did not ask for damages for mental anguish or anything else.
Also, IIRC, McD had been asked before to lower the temp of their coffee, and they had refused. After the Plaintiff won her case, McD lowered their coffee temp to about 160 degrees, where — again, IIRC — it takes about 30 seconds for 3rd degree burns.
It was a legitimate case.
Um, I was talking about this case.
I’m sorry I wasn’t clear. I was thinking about how Giliell’s comparison relates to this case.
Ah. No prob. Sorry for the mis-directed data dump.
Giliell, 8
Probably a little, as he wasn’t seriously hurt. I’m not a huge proponent of so-called common sense (as it’s often wrong), but I should think that it’s accepted that one should not put their face a few inches away from sizzling food unless one is prepared to get a little burnt. Plus, ostentatiously bowing your whole body over your plate smacks of seeking attention for your display. I don’t know of any religious practice that requires one to put their face in their food before they eat (not saying there isn’t one, mind, I’ve just never heard of it).
I’ve never been to Applebees, but I’ve been to some similar places (Pickle Barrel, Kelsey’s…) and fajitas are generally served with the meat, onions, and bell peppers on a small cast iron pan sitting in a wooden tray, with the fat sizzling loudly enough that it can be heard three tables away, and an explicit warning from the server not to touch the pan because it’s still hot. The tortilla shells and the rest of the fillings come separately, and you then assemble your own.
So, quite honestly, ‘the fat still popping’ sounds like every time I’ve ever been served fajitas in a family style restaurant. It’s part of the presentation.
@8 Giliell
Actually, yes….if you don’t know to keep your fucking face away from a sizzling plate, you kinda have it coming…
Spouse and I often used to order fajitas for two, and yes the sizzling skillet *is* part of the presentation. But back when I was still the grace-saying kind, I never thought you needed to be “inches” from the food, sizzling or otherwise. Christians nowadays seem so much holier than I ever aspired to be….
This is typical at several places that serve “skillet” entrees. The skillet is in a wooden insulator for the wait staff to serve safely, and hearing the snap and fizzle is part of the ambience.
Thanks Giliell – I’m also not getting much Schadenfreude out of this. From the religious angle, this is not funny to me the same way “collapsed church kills congregants” is not funny and “serial killer murdered in prison” is not funny. Schadenfreude is what I call my un-empathetic reaction to people being harmed during an act harmful to others. Un-empathetic reactions to other forms of human suffering I attribute to socialized douche-iness that I should really work to resolve.
In terms of negligence, I can only say
1) I’ve been served a lot of skillet meals, and though I’m always conscientious to avoid touching the plate, I’ve never found myself wary of hot grease flying off the dish.
2) I suspect (though it’d be up to the plaintiff to show this) that the restaurant in question had failed to take reasonable measures to deliver the food in a “safe to consume” manner. It’s one thing to serve a dish on a hot plate (and even here, IMO, it’s courteous to point out to consumers who may not be paying close attention, “Hey, hot plate here”), and quite another to serve a dish on a plate that spattering hot grease everywhere.
This might come down to expert testimony, but it really bothers me that a judge would throw a case out without allowing the case to be vetted to a jury.
This man is an idiot, I’m glad he got thrown out of court, and it’s nothing similar to the McD case. That said:
Skillet serving is also idiotic, and I wish I could go back and fire whoever invented it before they did. Nobody eats directly out of the pan you cook something in. You go to a restaurant so you can be served food nicely, not “we just took it off the burner and straight to your table still cooking”. And then you have to put it together. Self-assembly of food is only cute when you have a toddler (or picky gradeschooler) and they get to put their little pizza together themselves before it gets cooked to keep them busy while you’re waiting for the rest of the food to get there. If I want to put the fajita together myself, I’ll make it in my own damned kitchen.
I have a friend who’ took his daughters 13 yo and 2 yo to a Tex Mex restaurant. The skillet of fajitas was placed in front of the 2 yo by the waiter, even though friend had cleared a spot in front of his place and made a “wall” of condiments in front of the 2 yo.
The 2yo grabbed at the skillet before friend or his teenaged daughter could react. The 2yo ended up with a small 2nd degree burn. The staff and patrons including a doctor gave her first aid.
It never cross friend’s mind to sue. I believe the restaurant offered to pay medical expenses. They also changed the procedure. They now bring out a small rack that holds the skillet first and patrons can put it where they want the fajita skillet placed.
I’ve recently taken up the hobby of glassblowing. It’s re-defined my definition of “hot.” Now, when a server warns me to be careful because the plate is “hot”, I just giggle.
Also, Saad won the thread with enthalpy.
Restaurants serve skillet type foods sizzling as part of the entertainment/ambiance. It is meant to tantalize all the other patrons of the restaurant as they walk through the crowd with the plate of food still sizzling. Indeed, they even show it sometimes in their TV ads. This is part of what people are paying for when they order such dishes. The notion that to bring food to the table with too much of a sizzle and thus there was not proper diligence totally misses the whole idea of this ritual of the sizzling plate.
And this is fundamentally different from the McDonalds case. From what I’d read the restaurant did not serve it this hot to prevent refills, they served it this hot so patrons would order 4 or 5 coffees to bring back to the workplace and all those coffees would still be hot upon arrival. So it was a conscious decision on the part of McDonalds to serve the coffee way too hot in order to sell more bulk coffee. (And with the idea that if you buy coffee in bulk on a regular basis maybe you’ll start buying a bunch of sandwiches in bulk too. Brilliant marketing if you think about it. But dangerous too if you think about it. McDonalds thought about it and put marketing over safety.) And the local town council had warned this McDonalds to stop this practice way before this incident happened.
FWIW, at Chili’s, the sizzle is artificial. There’s a bottle containing some unknown substance (water, maybe?) that the servers sprinkle over the iron skillet when they pick up the order. This may actually be of some help since, at least in my case, I’m disinclined to negligently grab at something that pops, sizzles, and steams.
I used to work in a restaurant much like Applebees. That is part of the presentation of fajitas that’s expected. In fact, it’s all presentation. The fajitas are not cooked on the skillet. The skillets are kept hot and pulled out of the oven at the last minute to put the food on, then a bit of water is added to make it sizzle. It may help the food stay a little warmer a little longer, but mostly it’s theatre, but it’s expected theatre so…
I currently work in a Mexican restaurant, and we serve fajitas. The food is fully cooked before being placed on the skillet (which is also heated up) at which point water is squirted on top to give it the sizzling look, which as others have pointed out is part of the ambiance. While I’m with you carlie (in that I don’t want to assemble my food when I go out), there are many people who like the experience.
I think the judge did the proper thing. Fajitas aren’t just another skillet meal, they are supposed to be served exactly the way this was: dangerously, sizzlingly hot. You generally have to wait a few minutes before it’s even cool enough to start assembling the meat into the tortilla. Smoke is rising from the food as it continues charring on the skillet, which is what the judge referred to in calling the danger “self evident”. The diner could tell the skillet was hot without requiring a server’s warning, and the server is not at fault for bringing an order to someone who is not paying attention to their own safety.
Another Christian ignoring Matt 6:5-6.
Didn’t some English folks do their Grace at the end of the meal?
I could not find fajitas on the online Applebee’s menu, but there are two items with “Sizzling” as the first word in the name. I recall the TV adverts for the fajitas as “Sizzling Fajitas Platter”. (I am certainly not going there to check. Oog.)
It was just the talking snake hissing a warning at him to stay away from the apple, bee, but typically the xian wasn’t listening to his own god’s words.
Public Service Announcement:
Don’t cook bacon while naked.
Al Dente @6: “Another Christian ignoring Matt 6:5-6.”
Exactly my thought. Serves the guy right for praying in public, setting himself up as closer to God and using public demonstrations of faith as a pissing match.
Isn’t TGIF a more appropriate restaurant to pray?
….or perhaps IHOP (in case you were a fundy nut looking for this place, and wandered into the pancake joint down the street by accident).
I’ve seen a few places where you’d be praying that you didn’t get food poisoning.
Some Applebees food is pre-prepared and microwaved. And by pre-prepared, I mean, it’s not fucking restaurant food.
So this could literally have been “fresh out of the microwave” food, which would help explain the popping fat.
#21, carlie
Blah blah blah I don’t like something therefore it is stupid.
She explained why she thought it was stupid, not just “I don’t like something” you disingenuous little shit.
judykomorita # 11:
Also going on memory here, as I’m too lazy to look it up, but…
As I recall, she was the passenger in the car driven by her son, who had pulled over into a parking space out of the drive-thru lane. She was holding the cup between her legs in the stationary car, adding cream and/or sugar when it sloshed. (Possibly when she removed the lid?)
I don’t remember what she asked for, but if I recall correctly, she didn’t even get enough to fully cover medical. (I believe she was found partially at fault.)
This is the fuzziest part of my recollection, so take it with a big ol’ grain of salt, but my understanding is that when asked by the court why their coffee was so hot, MickeyD’s council said the legalese equivalent of “We’re McDonald’s, we don’t answer to anyone.” That last bit may well be an urban legend.
. . .
The Applebees bit sounds like a case of religious ritual impacting painfully with real life, and the person performing the ritual blaming real life rather than religion.
Or, to put it another way: God won’t protect your face from hot things, even while you’re furiously dry-humping his leg.
I’ve never eaten fajitas, but have had various Chinese ‘sizzling platters’. They typically continue cooking by the heat of an iron skillet and they spit for several minutes. It would take a particular type of stupidity to put your face directly over one, and a particular kind of arrogance (or cupidity) to blame someone else for the consequences.
btw, I was once burned by a goop of volcanic mud near Rotorua, just after I came out as an atheist. It doesn’t pay to diss that Vulcan dude.
I’d laugh at myself if I did something so silly. And yeah, I HAVE done things that silly before.
I get the impulse to extend the benefit of the doubt, especially in light of how badly misperceived the McDonald’s coffee case has become. However, I think it’s misplaced. It is so self-evident that a sizzling cast iron pan is sizzling (fat and water plus heat makes sizzle, as anyone who has ever even seen a piece of food in a frying pan, even if only on TV, knows full well) there is no working around it. There’s no baroque explanation of what the restaurant “should have done” to “alert” customers of this phenomenon.
This guy made a bone-headed mistake that caused him pain and embarrassment. That second part is crucial: Embarrassment is driving him to place the blame anywhere but on himself. It’s that simple. It’s not that commenters are cruel, or lack empathy. And Applebee’s is not the bad guy, or remiss, no matter how richly chains and corporations deserve the contempt they earn for their business behavior.
Sticking your flag on a hill for this guy is misguided, and frankly, silly.
I’m not laughing. I’m facepalming. Praying literally over food?
We don’t get much fajita-type food here in the UK, but a lot of curry houses will serve curry in a little metal bowl, which is often very hot, so you can spoon it onto a place as needed. Useful for swapsies with other diners. The metal bowls are perched in an indentation in a little wooden board, and you’ll often get a warning that it’s really hot. The sizzling ghee and aroma is all part of the experience.
Just to pick a side because why the hell not, fajitas are awesome and doubly awesome when served hot and sizzling. I have had lukewarm fajitas brought to my table and that is not on.
They are also quite often the only food I can eat in a Mexican restaurant, because 95% of the ingredients used in common USified Mexican restaurants are inedible to me. (Any trace of hot pepper, beans in any form, and avocados.) At least with assemble-it-yourself fajitas, I can avoid all the things I don’t eat and don’t have to drive the server crazy with special requests.
(As you can imagine, I go to a Tex-Mex restaurant approximately never. Authentic Mexican is better for me, because they do in fact have non-bean-based dishes and don’t automatically put hot peppers in everything.)
Back when the McDonald’s coffee case happened, cup holders in cars weren’t as much of a thing – therefore the car mugs with a broad non-slip base and a narrow top. The woman who was burned was older, and I’ve noticed since getting into perimenopause that my skin is much more prone to burning more severely from the sort of thing that used to be more of an annoyance – second degree from spilling tea on my abdomen, or bumping the oven rack. And drivethrough lanes, at least around here, always seem to be bumpier than needful. That poor woman got a lot of ridicule for her perfectly reasonable complaint.
markmckee@25:
I have to agree with this. Also, if I didn’t want the whole sizzling platter of fajitas/plate of fixin’s/filled tortilla warmer thing, I’d just order the soft tacos*. IOW, I want to put them together my own way, that’s part of the appeal for me.
*I am basing all of this off of the Chili’s menu, since this is where my 87 year old father likes to go. A lot**.
**Don’t get me wrong; I don’t dislike Chili’s at all and I love being able to humor my dad.
I’d hate to think what might happen to this guy at a Teppanyaki place (I’ve been to some where you cook your own on a small burner in the table).
I’d say religion’s got nothing to do with this one. It’s someone who burned themselves on a very hot meal.
These sorts of things happen all the time. Everyone’s made a quick or thoughtless movement before, and sometimes those result in injuries, so give the guy a break, unless you’re saying the next time you fall in public, we all get to point and laugh.
All that said, it’s an unfortunate accident, but not one I’d say the restaurant is responsible for. Even if you could argue the sizzle and splatter could have been avoided with a warning, there’s no way they could predict someone’s panicked reaction dumping it in their own laps. That’s just… a thing that happened basically.
When it comes right down to it, the whole notion of actually accomplishing goals you set out to do is… kinda ridiculous isn’t it? I mean, we accomplish things sometimes, but really the uncaring universe has no obligation to actually LET us accomplish things, and it’s a bit of a joke that we ever actually DO get things right to begin with, so when accidents happen, why laugh?
Details on the McDonalds’ case. It’s worth noting that the burns Hiram got from his fajita were nowhere CLOSE to the kind of severity Liebeck got.
“Liebeck placed the cup between her knees and attempted to remove the plastic lid from the cup. As she removed the lid, the entire contents of the cup spilled into her lap.
The sweatpants Liebeck was wearing absorbed the coffee and held it next to her skin. A vascular surgeon determined that Liebeck suffered full thickness burns (or third-degree burns) over 6 percent of her body, including her inner thighs, perineum, buttocks, and genital and groin areas. She was hospitalized for eight days, during which time she underwent skin grafting. Liebeck, who also underwent debridement treatments, sought to settle her claim for $20,000, but McDonalds refused.”
“McDonalds also said during discovery that, based on a consultants advice, it held its coffee at between 180 and 190 degrees fahrenheit to maintain optimum taste. He admitted that he had not evaluated the safety ramifications at this temperature. Other establishments sell coffee at substantially lower temperatures, and coffee served at home is generally 135 to 140 degrees.”
“…liquids, at 180 degrees, will cause a full thickness burn to human skin in two to seven seconds. Other testimony showed that as the temperature decreases toward 155 degrees, the extent of the burn relative to that temperature decreases exponentially. Thus, if Liebeck’s spill had involved coffee at 155 degrees, the liquid would have cooled and given her time to avoid a serious burn.”
“The company admitted its customers were unaware that they could suffer thirddegree burns from the coffee and that a statement on the side of the cup was not a “warning” but a “reminder” since the location of the writing would not warn customers of the hazard.”
http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur78.htm
Since Carlie at #21 thinks skillet serving is “idiotic”, I’m wondering what people here think about other types of eating food. For instance, expensive, gourmet food. I personally dislike it very much, but that’s just for me. I think it can be argued that it’s irresponsible, but then for instance, I don’t see why it couldn’t be treated as art more than food.
The responses of people here who claim that it wasn’t Hiram’s fault that he put his face next to a sizzler platter is hysterical. It reminds of the people on Kitchnette that insist bad restaurant customers are never to blame. I’m just surprised that no one suggested it was Hiram’s socio-economic class that caused him to stick his face next to a pan sizzling with fat and burn himself, thereby making all who laugh at him elitist snobs.
Applebee’s is my grandmother-in-law’s favourite restaurant and she likes going there with the family. Mr. Barge has had the sizzler. Like the name implies, it sizzles (and smokes) all the way to the table. The wait staff use oven mitts to bring it to you. They warn you that the pan is very hot (although, admittedly, there is no safety demonstration or signed waiver). They leave an oven mitt for your use. Also, unless you are blind, deaf and have no sense of smell, there are a lot of sensory indications that this thing in front of you (normally off to the side, since people tend to keep a plate in front of them and not the pan) is not something you should stick your face into – even if you’re bowing your head inches from your plate to pray, for some goddamn reason.
I mean. You all know about not frying bacon naked, right?