Laurent Basset/Bravo
Marcos Spaziani, a chef and restaurateur, has worked in kitchens for decades, but this season of Bravo's "Below Deck Sailing Yacht" was his first time cooking on a sailboat.
This season of the pre-taped show, which airs every Monday at 8 p.m. ET and follows a crew of yachting staff through their charter season, is set off the coast of Menorca, Spain.
In an interview with Insider, Spaziani said one challenge his new workplace has presented is cooking in a more narrow galley kitchen — which becomes a near-completely tilted space when the boat picks up wind.
In episode four, "Oopsie Daisy," of the reality show's current season, viewers saw the chef try to reach into the fridge to prep dinner while the yacht was moving, but in doing so he hit his head and started bleeding. Spaziani said he had lost a piece of his scalp along with a chunk of hair after colliding with the edge of the stainless-steel refrigerator.
The chef said he bumps into things a lot while working as he's a self-proclaimed big guy, but he's never gotten hurt like this before.
"I hear the sound and I see the chunk of my skin in the refrigerator and realize, 'Oh my gosh this is mine,'" Spaziani said. "It was my fault."
On March 18, after the episode aired, Spaziani shared a photo of his head bleeding after the incident on Instagram. In the caption of his post, he wrote that his hair has since grown back and that in future he'll be "way more careful" in the kitchen.
"Below Deck Sailing Yacht"/Bravo
Determined to please his charter guests, Spaziani had his crewmates wrap his head with gauze and kept cooking while he waited for a doctor to arrive via another boat. Viewers watched the doctor clear Spaziani for serious injuries and bandage him up (he didn't require stitches).
While he told Insider the incident was "one of the most painful things I've ever experienced," Spaziani said it's not the only time he has sustained an injury in the kitchen.
The chef told Insider about an injury he said occurred while chopping vegetables in a restaurant kitchen as a young cook. He was around 17 or 18 years old, he said, adding that he got a little too confident with his chopping skills when his finger got in the way.
"I took my whole nail with the knife," Spaziani said. "It was disgusting."
Spaziani said that instead of going to the hospital and getting stitches, he wrapped up the injury and kept cooking. The nail eventually grew back, he said.
Also early on in his career, he said, an arm burn took him out of kitchens for a year. Spaziani said he sustained first, second, and third-degree burns after taking a sheet pan out of an oven while working in a restaurant.
Before the incident occured, he said he was cooking a large fish, and in trying to find a safe surface to put the pan down he chose to rest it on top of a Salamander broiler. As he transferred the pan, he said, the cooked fish slid on the surface.
"The fish moved and the oil kind of made a big wave and went straight onto my arm," Spaziani said.
He described his arm as "completely melted" and "bleeding everywhere." The pain was so bad that Spaziani said he passed out when staff scrubbed everything off in the hospital. His arm took around two months to recover from the burns, according to Spaziani, who said he took a year off from cooking after that as he didn't want to work in or around a kitchen.
