Gas explosion: ‘community is behind us’

A metal splashback on the wall was vital protection for the chef at Eat Italy in Richmond when a gas explosion blew him across the kitchen last week.

The new restaurant at Berryfields Crossing had been open not quite a week when its owner, Cherif El

Bakkali, got a phone call from his brother to say the kitchen had blown up.

“I thought it was a joke,” he says.

“But then he said it again and I felt the tone in his voice.”

Cherif had just left the restaurant on the morning of 3 May. He had just been in the kitchen with his young son, right where the explo- sion blew out the wall and sent kitchen equipment flying. The explosion was triggered after a contractor accidentally drilled a screw into an LPG pipe while putting a shelf on the wall. The pipe supplied gas to the kitchen’s cooking hobs, but the pipe’s rupture went unnoticed until the chef arrived to prepare food for the restaurant when it opened for lunch. When he flicked the switch to the gas, the resulting spark triggered the explosion immediately, blowing out the wall and throwing the chef and cookware across the kitchen.

Thrown onto his back, Cherif says the chef’s reaction was to leap up