17.2023 Edition

Hey Reader,

Lessons can come from all sorts of places. 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.

Lanky, tatted, soft-spoken and big into skating culture. Stood side-by-side with some of the other chef-de-parties, he actually looked like he was one of them, and he treated his work that way.

See, at Grace, it wasn’t egg-slicked pans and cheesy trays that Brian was responsible for. His main tasks really fell into 2 camps: delicate speed and persistent polishing.

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

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.

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 foam between certain pieces after they were washed before bringing them back into the kitchen so that there was less chance for breakage.

Add in hand-blown glass and 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.

Remember when I said delicate speed?

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.

Towards the end of the night was when this got hectic.

See, 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.

Before I got moved to the hot line, I was one of those first stations to breakdown at Grace.

After I got all of my prep put away, I would spend time in the dish area with him, running plates back into the kitchen to help him out (reason being, I couldn’t start scrubbing my station until the stations that flanked me were done serving).

During that time of the night, Brian taught me how he would approach the second bucket of tasks, that 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, 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 business-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:

Micro and Macro Burnout Avoidance - If I told you to do anything “as hard as you could”, by definition, you probably wouldn’t last that long. In the micro, this means 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. In the macro, this might look like working 85 hour weeks for a month or a few years, ultimately degrading your health and leading to time away from the industry. 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. So 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?
Custom Setup - The way that you can unlock this for yourself is 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 the “I’ll do everything myself, I don’t need any help” mindset.

I picked up some other insightful lessons from dishwashers in my career, but that’s another monologue 🧽 Have any fun dishwasher stories that come to mind for you? I’d love to hear them! Just respond to this email, I read every one 👀

7shifts: Team Management for Restaurants*

Are you feeling in over your head with all the parts that go into running your restaurant team?

Making schedules, tracking time off, managing shift swaps, tracking tasks, trying to keep a pulse on labor costs, onboarding - there’s a ton that goes into managing the restaurant team. Where do you even start?!

7shifts has your back.

Their team management platform is a restaurant’s secret weapon that can literally save your operations. With their tools and resources, restaurant operators and teams are creating stronger processes, better communication, and adding confidence at every level.

Say hello to a new way of working, and build your best restaurant team today. Sign up now and get your first 3 months free 👀

*Sponsored by 7shifts

Top Hits 💥

Big Dairy Is Trying to Get Gen-Z to Drink More Milk

Alarmed by dwindling sales to Gen Z, the dairy industry is going all out to get younger Americans on the milk train. The dairy industry isn’t banking on nostalgia to save the day. It has embarked on a full-frontal marketing assault intended to do what the “Got Milk?” mustaches on celebrities like Taylor Swift and Dennis Rodman did for previous generations.

“We have to reclaim milk’s mojo,” said Yin Woon Rani, the chief executive of the Milk Processor Education Program, a marketing and education arm of the dairy industry based in Washington, D.C.

All this is not to say that young people don’t eat plenty of cheese, yogurt and ice cream. “They’re not abandoning dairy,” said John Crawford, a dairy analyst for Circana. “But they certainly are walking away from traditional dairy milk.”

Our Take: I grew up in the "Got Milk" generation, and in the Midwest of the US to boot! It's fascinating to see how ingredients (especially ones that can often cause dietary restrictions in people) are marketed and managed from the C-Suite level. Some other fun examples that come to mind (if you're into this kind of stuff) is the history of coffee in Japan (and how they leveraged younger generations to get hooked on a commuter-friendly and Western-influenced beverage) and even the governmental support that Thailand pays to give rise to Thai food here in the US.

I Manage a Restaurant. Tipping Has Never Been More Volatile

“Maybe it’s because things are more expensive, everywhere. I never want to be somebody who deters people from coming out, and I don’t presume to know anyone else’s life. I’ve been in the situation where I’ve gone out to meet a friend, ordered one drink, and somehow I’ve instantly spent $20, but I’ve spent it and that’s that. If you don’t have the money to tip properly, you probably shouldn’t be going out to eat right now. I don’t want to scold anyone, but I do want people to understand the ramifications: A bad tip affects the entire service staff. The more people try to take advantage of this system, the more our employees are hurt.”

Our Take: This fits into the larger macro-economic picture around inflation and the oncoming wave of automation. However, there's no bigger way to get folks talking right now, and we don't see this ending anytime soon.

If we had a magic wand? Tipping would be a long-forgotten relic of the past, wages would be livable and profit sharing (or bonuses) would take it's place.

ICYMI 🙌

🧄 How to make Garlic Chive and Trout Skin Chips… Checkout this fun recipe that slightly went wrong in the best direction possible!

🍽️ New Episode of This Place Called (TPC) is Live!! - My Honest Thoughts on Tasting Menu at Kin in Boise.

📲 Short on time but still want to listen to the best clips of the podcast? - Checkout Repertoire’s Instagram for clips from Suzanne Vizethann’s episode where we discuss The Buttermilk Kitchen, chef’s mental health and the importance of empathy in hiring

This Week, We Learned… 🧠

Cheap Vegetarian Recipes: Tomato Pasta, Mac and Cheese, Tofu Curry and More
The Best Big Restaurant Salads in NYC
How to Make the Best Fried Eggs with Still-Runny Yolks
Michelin-starred chef shares perfect roast chicken recipe
Angry Starbucks Union Workers Rallied Outside of Corporate HQ

Comment from you folks:

What if a brand that viewed chefs as “culinary athletes” made shoes? Well, MISE did just that, with their line of footwear called The Standard. *(Click on the image to check out the video the comment is from!)*

To Peep 👀

$100 Off for Limited Time! - Cuisinart Deluxe Wood Pellet Grill & Smoker, summer is almost here and it is the perfect BBQ time!

30% off on Mandoline, until stock lasts! - Mandolines are a secret weapon for the prep team, get yourselves equipped before the discount ends!

Quote I'm Pondering 💭

"Too often we convince ourselves that massive results require massive action." - James Clear

Thanks for reading, as always,

👊Justin

Dishwasher Wisdom 🧽