The stinky, sticky pig's blood wasn't what disgusted Tony Liu. Nor was being stuffed in a trash can the worst part. It was the nasty, rancid paste that formed on his head when a dusting of flour mixed with the blood that was almost more than this young chef could handle.

"It was all out of love," Liu says about his parting gift from New York's venerable restaurant, Daniel, where he worked for two years. The kitchen crew, led by three men who called themselves the Trio of Terror, had a soft spot for the young chef and wanted to give him something other than knife skills to remember.

Now as executive chef at August in New York's West Village, Liu laughingly acknowledges the incident as a rite of passage. Every chef goes through some degree of hazing, whether it's as innocent as sending the new kid out for a bucket of steam or as aggressive as slamming a chef's hands in a 500-degree oven door. More often than not, a chef who is moving on gets covered in a disgusting slurry.

"It's worse if you don't get anything," says Liu. "Then they just don't care whether you come or go."

Fraternities get fined for it; firehouses get slapped with lawsuits. But in the tightly wound restaurant world—the male-dominated mesh of regimented order, outsized egos, obsessive perfection, and strict hierarchy—chef hazing is rampant. To make sure the new guy or gal can hold his or her own, initiation is paramount.

"There's an organic process that goes back a long time," says author, chef and TV celebrity, Anthony Bourdain. "I don't think it comes from cruelty or sadism, it just comes from this pragmatic reality: This is a mentoring business."

After student cooks leave the feathered nest of high-priced culinary schools to learn their trade, they're nothing but interns, apprentices. They work long hours and get paid next to nothing. They never question authority. Lessons are no longer taught by the book; they come the hard way—generally from a fiery concoction of piss and vinegar, plus a huge helping of humiliation.

"If I call attention to something you did wrong," smirks Bourdain, "you should go home determined to do well tomorrow and not feel like a fool. But even if I horribly humiliate you, we should still be able to have a beer at the end of the night." Anything else, he says, and you've crossed the line.

"All that ball busting happens from working in an insular, cult-like society. You're lucky if you get to the ribbing and joking. The real hostility comes first."

Some people in the industry believe old-school hazing is a natural result of the Escoffier partition and apprentice system, the basis on which modern kitchens divvy up work. You often hear about the brutish mentality of early French kitchens. More recently, the antics of European chefs like Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White—whose celebrity is in part the product of their yelling, hitting, punching, fist-fighting, and pan- and knife-throwing—have become the stuff of legend.

Gavin Kaysen, the 2007 American Bocuse d'Or finalist who recently became the executive chef at New York's Café Boulud, worked as an unpaid intern at Ramsay's L'Escargot. He admits to seeing the fire-breathing, over-the-top personality we see on "Hell's Kitchen"—the one who calls people "donkey" and yells at them for dripping sweat—but acknowledges that the man's got talent.

"He demands only 100 percent perfection, and no less. Then he makes sure you know what less is," says Kaysen. On his first day in Ramsay's kitchen, Kaysen peeled shallots for 14 hours straight until someone came over to tell him he had done them all wrong and threw them away. On his second day, a fist fight broke out between the pastry chef and sous-chef.

"It was one of the most passionate kitchens I ever worked in," he admits.

When Jason Ambrose, chef and owner of Salt in Baltimore, started cooking in the late 1980s, he was the brunt of attacks in one Connecticut restaurant. "I was always in the weeds, so the older chefs would take my tongs and put them in the oven. When I got back to my cold station, I'd burn my hands."

This playful brutality, plus working for a few screamers, made Ambrose realize how not to be a boss. "There's no freedom in that kind of environment," he says. "I don't know anyone who likes working for that kind of person."

"When I trained in France, it was like boot camp," says Sang Yoon, chef and owner of Father's Office in Santa Monica, California. "It was normal for a chef to get in my face and yell at me or to see frying pans fly by inches from my head. I was told to accept it, that there were no laws to protect me."

Military analogies aren't lost on John Besh, executive chef at New Orleans's Restaurant August: He did a tour of duty in Desert Storm with the Marines. But Besh also trained in some of Europe's top kitchens. "The mind games senior chefs played made me ill every day before going to work," he says. "I knew I would just get tortured and that I'd never win."

Until he left, that is, when Besh taped raw shrimp under everyone's station. The foul smell lingered for weeks and no one could find the source. "My own reign of terror lasted a good long time."

There's somewhat of a generational divide for the different degrees of kitchen hazing. Most chefs in their 20s and early 30s have only heard stories of the rough stuff, but they've seen their share of practical jokes.

"It's more human nature than chef nature," say John Howie, chef and owner of Seastar Restaurant & Raw Bar in Seattle. "You work in such a high-paced, stressed environment that you need an outlet."

Brent Hammer, executive chef at the Platinum Hotel in Las Vegas, once made a cocky remark to a boss in Milwaukee. Ten seconds later, Hammer's pants were around his ankles. "In the middle of dinner rush, I had two scalding sauté pans in my hand and nothing but an apron on for several seconds," laughs Hammer. "I'm just glad I actually put on an apron that day. I haven't forgotten to put one on since."

In Milwaukee, where winter temperatures regularly dip to 30-below-zero, practical jokes often took an icy turn, Hammer recalls. One guy's car was encased in a sheet of ice after he and his co-workers dumped five-gallon buckets of water on it.

"In a business where turnover is severe and training is expensive, employee retention is important," says Hammer. "If you keep the mood light and keep yourself accessible, people stay a lot longer."

When Chris Frothingham, executive chef of Todd English's Fish Club in Seattle, was an eager dishwasher looking to quickly move up the line at the Timberline Lodge in Oregon, his chef sent him to find a 10-pound box of "pith powder" in the storage room. After searching for 30 minutes, the chef angrily told him it was right next to the dehydrated distilled water. "All the labels were racing through my head," says Frothingham. "I couldn't remember seeing dehydrated distilled water anywhere, but I kept looking."

That was his first lesson in product identification. And like a frat brother passing down paddle swats to a new pledge, he's pulled the same joke on his eager new dishwashers. "You see which guys are really interested and dedicated. They turn out to be your strongest people."

"You want to see what they're made of, if they can handle that pressure," says Randy Evans, executive chef of Brennan's in Houston, who's been known to send newbies on wild goose chases for phantom tools and products; just as his first chef did to him. "It creates camaraderie."

"I sent a guy out to find the bacon stretcher at a nearby restaurant," recalls Jason Ambrose. "And the next restaurant sent him to another one, and the next guy sent him to another one. An hour later, the kid comes back empty handed but the whole neighborhood was in on the joke."

Occasionally, the jokes get out of hand. Years ago, John Howie's crew at Simon's Piano Bar in Seattle kept stealing each other's clothes to put in the freezer. "My staff was more concerned with protecting themselves than cooking. That's when it had to end."

In his first restaurant job, Casey Miles, now market partner chef for Joey's in Seattle, was sent across the street for a "cup of fellatio." The other chef sent him back with a cup of vanilla cream. He was the butt of jokes for weeks.

Full-frontal sexual innuendo like that curious cup is definitely a thing of the past says Susan Feniger, co-owner of the Border Grill and Ciudad restaurants in L.A. and Las Vegas. She and her business partner Mary Sue Milliken were the only females in an all-French kitchen in the late 1970s, where they quickly learned how to be one of the guys. When they opened City Café in Los Angeles, Feniger remembers people positioning phallic still lifes with fresh horseradish and curly parsley or trying to kiss someone with a lamb's tongue in their mouth.

"You just can't cross these lines anymore because of HR issues," Feniger laments. "It's unfortunate because it changes the dynamic of the kitchen on some level. But everyone needs to be protected."

As executive chef of the soon-to-open Commerce in New York City, Harold Moore knows he's no longer in a position to pull the practical jokes. "But I might say to the new guy who just got something done to him, 'You know, if it was me…' and plant the ideas."

Tony Liu agrees. He doesn't push his staff by yelling or screaming, but he's not averse to frivolity. "I might instigate a scenario," he chuckles. "Because, really, everyone's got a little Trio of Terror in them."

Lesley Balla is a Los Angeles-based freelancer writer and editor of Eater L.A.