Impactful can come from all sorts of places, even the dish area.

Today, I wanna share something I learned from this guy named Brian.

He was an awesome team mate, and the only dishwasher at Grace in Chicago when I worked there.

A Bit About Bryan

He was, tatted, soft-spoken and big into skating culture. Stood side-by-side with some of the other chef-de-parties, he actually looked like one of them, and he treated the dish area like a station he was responsible for running.

See, at Grace, it wasn’t egg-caked pans and cheesy sheet trays that Brian was cleaning. His main tasks really fell into 2 camps:

• Delicate speed

• Persistent polishing

I’ll quickly provide context on the first but the lesson here is found in the latter…

Delicate Speed

At Grace, the Tasting Menu had between 10-12 dishes on it. Add in 6-8 more from the Vegetable Menu and it was closer to 18-20 total courses we’d serve.

At 50+ guests/night, that was over 1,000 plates that Brian had to run through the machine.

It doesn’t seem that hard until you factor in that certain hand-made plates we used would shatter if you whispered at them from the wrong angle.

We would even layer thin sheets of plastic foam between certain pieces after they were washed before bringing them back into the kitchen to decrease the chance for breakage.

Add in hand-blown, thin-stemmed pieces from the beverage team and this was no ordinary dishwashing job. If he broke 1x $25 piece per day, he could be costing the restaurant over $6,250 a year.

Brian’s station was tiny. It was a little, tucked-behind-the-kitchen, narrow dish area, and he didn’t have a ton of room to store things. This meant he would run half-full dishwasher trays just so that he would be able to free up real estate and not fall behind.

Right after the last seating would arrive, the chef-de-parties would start to breakdown their stations. This meant trays, pots, deli’s, and hotel pans getting added to the mix of highly breakable service ware.

During that hectic time of the night, Brian taught me how he would approach the second bucket of tasks, that persistent polishing.

Persistent Polishing

The leadership at Grace cared a lot about aesthetics. The idea was that every single pot was flawlessly silver, and no black spots or caked on grease would be present on anything that we cooked with.

However, we still did projects that had those messy side effects: roasting, sautéing, and blow-torched prep tasks. This meant all of that responsibility for cleanliness was on Brian to manage.

One day, when we were a bit slow (~30 guests), I had gotten my station fully broken down AND helped Brian get all of the service ware put away. I wandered back into the dish area and asked Brian if he needed help with anything.

He was standing there, quietly, next to a stack of pots, and he handed me the tiniest green scrubby I’ve ever seen. See, he would take the large industrial scrubbies and cut them into credit-card-sized pieces, and he shared with me, “yeah, if you wanna jump in, just work it until it comes away, you don’t have to go too hard, I’ve got some Barkeeper’s Friend here if you need it”.

This blew my mind. I was used to the exhaustive, loud, visibly stressed way of cleaning things where you put your whole body into the process. Brian was standing there, rubbing stainless steel like you clean a phone screen and it was just dissolving away, in the same amount of time.

Some lessons from that moment:

• Hard work doesn’t always look “hard” - If I told you to do anything “as hard as you could”, by definition, you probably wouldn’t last that long. This might look like feverishly moving through a task, where you look like you’re crushing it for 3 minutes, but then the other 57 minutes of the hour are just spent below baseline, recovering from that sprint. Brian figured it out. If you find something you can stick with, you can both stay in the game longer and have the results that speak for themselves.

• Efficiency vs Effectiveness - I grew up really valuing “hard work” (mostly via pressure from my parents). I like the “efficiency” lens of evaluating work because it helps me avoid unnecessary strain and reminds me to seek the path of least resistance. There’s even an Encyclopedia entry for this difference that reads: “Effective means “producing a result that is wanted. Efficient means “capable of producing desired results without wasting materials, time, or energy”. Said another way, he knew that if he continued to scrub, it would be unreasonable to expect that the pot wouldn’t get clean after a certain amount of passes. Instead of optimizing for pressure, he found that combining just the right amount of firmness with continued passes meant he would get the result without needing a break after 3 pots. Question to ask yourself this week: where are you being effective without being efficient?

• Optimal Setup -Unlock this for yourself in optimizing how you work. Trim the fat, cut the fluff, find the opportunities. Brian knew that the surface under his index and middle finger was the only contact point that mattered with his scrubbies, so he cut them down to size accordingly. This made sure he could use one through it’s useful life, and once the abrasive qualities were exhausted, he could swap out for a new one, vs having one giant scrubby that was questionable which part still “worked”. He used the tools that were at his disposal (like the Barkeeper’s Friend) instead of operating under an “I’ll do everything myself” or “I don’t need any help” mindset.

In Summary

Learning from a dishwasher named Brian at Grace in Chicago, I discovered the power of delicate speed and persistent polishing in a high-stakes environment.

His approach to handling fragile dishware and maintaining spotless cookware with minimal effort taught me valuable lessons: hard work doesn't have to look hard, the importance of being efficient as well as effective, and the benefits of an optimal setup.

These principles, applied with the same finesse and attention to detail Brian showed, can enhance productivity and quality in any task.

If you want to learn more professional skills about how to prepare, perform and problem-solve in restaurant kitchens (as an alternative to culinary school), check out Total Station Domination!