Defined By Dishes
Thoughts Of A Professional Dish Washer
The dish pit at the restaurant I work at is pretty basic: three basins, a spray hose, two drying racks. The left basin is filled with boiling hot soap water. The middle basin is empty, meant for spraying. It’s constantly getting filled with food fragments, and you have to use your fingers to get the water to drain out. The right basin is filled with cold sanitizer. Spray in the middle, dunk in the left, spray again, dunk to the right, put it on the rack to the right of the sink. Middle left middle right right.
The whole pit is made of sheet metal; it’s basically a huge desk with thin, belly-high, razor-sharp dividers. We serve food on a line a la Chipotle, but like a super bougie version. This means 75% of the dishes are third and sixth pans, 10% are the ceramic bowls we serve the food in, and the other 15% consist of various cambros, spatulas, mixing bowls, utensils, the blender (we only have one but it’s constantly in use), cups, and pots.
The dish pit is in the very back of the restaurant, away from the people, away from the grill. Despite this, you have to be tuned into the rhythm of the whole place. During the lunch rush, when dishes are piled head-high, you have to smell when forks are running low. You have to hear when sixth pan lids are about to run out. You have to know that all the four quart cambros are in use, so you better have all the two quarts ready. Don’t waste your time on sixth pans yet, there’s a million clean ones good to go. Doing dishes is psychic prioritization. It isn’t easy.
For some reason, dish washer is considered garbage work. You’re a cook? Sick. Server? Appreciate the hustle man, keep your head up. Bartender? I straight up think you make more money than everyone in this room.
Dish washer, on the other hand, has a tinge of shame to it. They’re sequestered in the back, out of sight from customers, a lot of times out of sight from staff. Maybe it’s the thought that they deal with actual garbage. Maybe it’s some unconscious racism. Whatever it is, it seems like a “Hiring: Dish Washer” sign makes a lot of people suck their teeth. No one wants to do it.
Somebody has to, though, and the people that are good at it are extremely particular and very intense. A thousand servers a day are yelled at for putting a fork in the wrong spot. If you open as a dish washer, you know who’s coming in after you, and you spend the last thirty minutes of your shift setting the pit up to their specific style. One of the other dish washers I work with straight up fills the sani basin with ice. It takes him twenty minutes just to get started, but no one says anything. He’s good at what he does.
And you let a good dish washer do whatever they need, because the difference between a good dish washer and an average one is the difference between a smooth day and a chaotic one. A backed up dish pit slows down every single element of a restaurant, and it can take hours to catch up from a small hiccup on a busy day.
Despite this, dish washing is a pretty thankless job, even in the kitchen. It doesn’t command a lot of respect because there’s nothing aggrandizing about a dish washer. A cook can frame themselves as an artist pretty easily. A server is a charmer (a lot of servers are performers for a reason). A bartender is a combination of the two. But there’s no framing a dish washer. Washing dishes is manual labor, pure and simple, and we don’t put a lot of value on manual labor with no bent. A house painter and a muralist do similar work, but we only admire one of them.
We don’t thank our garbage men, our landscapers, our plumbers, drive thru people, exterminators, mailmen, or movers. Their work is face-value labor, and we, as a whole, have a tendency to look down on that. Which is weird, considering how royally fucked we’d be without them.
Doing dishes is fast-paced, hot, wet, loud, and meditative. You fall into the pentameter of middle left middle right right, and your body sort of takes over. It frees your mind up to think, day-dream, or just be quiet for a while.
There’s also something really satisfying about seeing a stack of dirty dishes, and leaving with a stack of clean ones. It’s something to point at — this is what I accomplished today. With things like writing, video editing, or social media, it’s hard to point to any tangible accomplishment at the end of the day.
And it won’t last. I know it won’t. More dishes will come. My function is to make something a blank slate, and if I do my job well no one will notice. But, I cannot deny the satisfaction of a closing shift — an empty restaurant with half the lights off, music the staff actually likes playing, and an empty dish pit. Nothing to clean. Nothing to dry. I turn the spray hose on the pit itself, wash it down, and take a breath.
Look at what I did today.
Twitter: @shaunparkerish | Instagram: @shaunparkerish
If you liked this, check out another story: Framing
