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Comment by dataviz1000 | Hacker News Reader

My first career was a chef. When I asked a friend of the family who owned a restaurant when I was teenager what steps I should take to become a chef, the advice he gave was "Get a job as a dishwasher in a restaurant because the most important thing you need to know is to respect your dishwasher because anytime everything goes wrong and you are in a jam, it is your dishwasher who will save you." Unknown to me the restaurant that hired me when I was 17 as a dishwasher was also one of the most prestigious restaurants in California in the early 90s which lead to years cooking in Michelin Star restaurants. Good advice.

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Reminds me of something that my father told me: "Always be nice to nurses and janitors. Nurses run hospitals. Janitors run buildings. Secretaries run offices."

It is basically the bottom half of the triangle that runs everything, anything else are mostly management.

Right.

In the case of offices, the receptionist is the most important and powerful person there. They are the ones who have the ear of everybody else, have control of access to everyone else, know how things really work (as opposed to how everyone says they work), etc.

A good or bad word from the receptionist can literally make or break business deals.

Can you elaborate a bit on how the dishwasher role gets the restaurant out of jams?

Can’t cook if your tools aren’t clean?

I'm not certain I'd pay the bill for an expensive meal were it served on grubby crockery.

If it's anything like the small, dinky restaurant i washed plates for, the reality is that the restaurant doesn't have enough plates and pans to satisfy every order on a busy night without washing something. Pans in particular are reused multiple times during a shift, and they better be well-scrubbed, because you don't want your fancy ingredients tasting of something else.

A line cook can't stop what they are doing for even 5 minutes during a 4 hour period of time. There might be a lull for 15 minutes between seatings to run to the bathroom, but sometimes not. It is brutal work. Because of the thin margins in restaurants, they tend to be under staffed. When something needs to be fixed during service, maybe a plumbing problem, the ice machine broke, or a purveyor didn't deliver the correct items so someone needs to run to the supermarket, it is usually the dishwasher who fixes the problem. The pay is awful for a dishwasher. Likely, especially in California, the dishwasher in the restaurant you are eating at isn't legally allowed to be in the United States. Other times, the dishwasher will have a criminal record and can't find other work. Another dishwasher in Portland had his entire face tattooed with body modifications. They are in that position for a reason. The point is paying the dishwasher in respect if not higher wages is important to the survival of a restaurant. A chef depends on this person who is in the lowest social position to have his or her back.

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