Barron Watford of Hammerstone’s in Soulard
As a restaurant cook, there are few things more dreadful than hearing “we have no dishwasher tonight.” Not having a dishwasher doesn't simply mean that one member of the kitchen staff is missing—it means that the entire restaurant is now operating in complete anarchy.
In the kitchen, all the dishes from daytime prep are sitting in a huge pile in the dish pit. The dishes and glassware from lunch service are stacked waiting to be run through the machine. Flatware isn’t clean yet, which means the servers can’t polish it yet. Same with glassware. It means that all the pans needed for service on the line are caked with food and sauces. It means everyone in the kitchen has started complaining and stomping around with a bit of a salty attitude. It means that when you go to the sink to wash your raw, chicken-juiced hands, there may not be any soap in the dispenser. It means trash bins are overflowing with food prep. It means trying to not only catch up on what dishes need to be done but keeping up, somehow, with the dishes that will accumulate throughout the evening. And it means staying until the very latest hours, cleaning every last Cambro container and hotel pan, before scrubbing the kitchen down (including the floors).
It means misery.
Chefs are praised for their exceptional food, and we scrupulously critique a restaurant’s service, however no one cares much about one of the most essential and important behind-the-scenes positions. Many of the chefs we currently heap praise upon today began as dishwashers and worked their way through the ranks. “Dishwashers are the key component to a restaurant's success,” says Jessie Gilroy, chef-owner of Pangea in New Town at St. Charles. “They are often overlooked and certainly underappreciated.”
Barron Watford of Hammerstone’s in Soulard is most certainly a key to their success. “I started working here at Hammerstone’s when I was 17. I’m 38 now.” Just listening to Barron’s daily list of responsibilities is exhausting. “When I come in here at 5:30 in the morning, I wash and mop all the floors, clean the mirrors, chandeliers, the patio, and the bathrooms. Once I’m done with all that, I can get to my deliveries. I have deliveries three days a week. That’s before I get to any dishes. I get ice and run beer. I’m a barback, too. They keep me busy.” Watford has a philosophy about the importance of his position. “Everything here is the trickle-down effect. If something is going wrong in the back, it’s going to make its way out here to the front.”
Ask a handful of chefs how they started in the restaurant industry, and a number of them will tell you they began by washing dishes. Restaurants are truly a “work your way up” enterprise, and a dishwasher who shows initiative and interest in moving up doesn't have to wait long before a line cook leaves for another restaurant or someone fails to show up for his or her shift. Suddenly the dishwasher is chopping garlic, prepping herbs, straining stocks.
That’s how Pangea’s chef-owner Gilroy began her journey from dishwasher to chef. “When I was a teenager, I started washing dishes at a pizza joint in Eureka.” Dishwashing led to running food and soon after that prepping in the kitchen. “When you wash dishes, you see everything that goes on in the kitchen, not just what’s going on at your station,” notes Gilroy. Asked if she thinks culinary school or working your way up from washing dishes produces the better cook, she responded: “I went to culinary school, and you get as much out of school as you put into school. But when you have on-the-job experience and training, you have to perform 100 percent right away. You have no choice.”
Although it’s been many years since Gilroy washed her first dish at that pizza place, she coincidentally has found herself in the dish pit once again. At Pangea, she is not only the chef and owner but also the dishwasher. “It’s just me back here, so at the end of the night I’ll bust out all the dishes. I actually like it—I find it relaxing. It gives me time to decompress.”
Dishwasher Eddie Pearson of Grace Meat + Three notes that “I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’ve noticed people don’t think much of dishwashers. But they have one of the most important jobs in a kitchen."
“Back in the day, the dishwasher was looked at as an entry-level position, but it’s one of the hardest jobs in the kitchen,” explains Rick Lewis, chef-owner of Grace. Lewis adds that “Eddie is kind of the utility dude around here.” Pearson explains that the dishwasher should be able to step in wherever needed.
“Even though you’re a dishwasher, you’re ultimately thinking about the customers. If you don’t have something cleaned and ready to go that the cooks need to prepare and serve the food, then they get slowed down, and it goes on down the line until it affects the customer’s experience.”
Eddie’s larger-than-life personality is key to the positive vibes at Grace. Says Lewis, “Eddie comes in with a great mood, as opposed to having a miserable dishwasher who is throwing shit around and not keeping up with what needs to be done. That pisses off the cooks, and they piss off the front-of-house staff, and everyone is pissy, and that translates to the entire customer experience. It’s a 's--- rolls downhill' effect. He really does set the positive tone in the kitchen.”
Pearson adds a personal sentiment: “If you’re a dishwasher, take some pride in what you do and have some finesse about it.” He smiles and says: “I like to do this. I’m good at this.”
