Dishwashers hold the kitchen together.
Every restaurant owner and chef knows you can lose a line cook for a shift and still survive. Stressed, scrambling, but alive. Lose a dishwasher? Throw in the towel and call it a day.
Anthony Bourdain said it best: "Everything important I ever learned, I learned as a dishwasher and as a cook. You show up on time, you stay organized, you clean up after yourself, you think about the people you work with, you respect the people you work with, and you do the best you can."
Before I'd find my footing with the other cooks in professional kitchens, it was always the dishwasher who took me in. They'd show me where everything lived without judgment, how the 600 pans shared a rack with the 200s and 400s, stacked in a specific order based on who grabs what, and when. Or where the secret box with just spare lids to the small squeeze bottles is hidden. Just “please don’t tell the rest of the crew.”
Chefs like to believe they run the kitchen. But when their very specific tweezers—the tiny ones they tucked into the 16-quart Cambro full of sanitizer with the rest of the end-of-service silverware—suddenly go missing, there's only one person who knows exactly where they are. And they've probably already set them aside.