Washing dishes in a small Italian restaurant in Sydney's Artarmon nearly turned chef Richard Purdue off the industry for life.
"My first job in the industry was as a kitchen hand. I was a student and worked there for about a year. While it gave me a taste of the industry, it made me think I didn't want to work in a kitchen," says Purdue, now head chef at Rockpool Dining Group's Rosetta Ristorante in Sydney, which opens next week.
"If you do that," says Purdue, "you understand the pressure of the kitchen and understand the urgency. As a kitchen hand you're expected to do a million things in not enough time and you need to be doing 10 things at once. Waiters want glasses and chefs want pans, so there is a lot of pressure," he says, adding Rosetta has three kitchen hands on during each service.
"If you can survive as kitchen hand, you can survive as a chef."
Igni's head chef Aaron Turner has also done his time washing dishes, and says, despite his restaurant being ranked 12th at The Australian Financial Review's top 100 Restaurants, he still takes his turn at the sink.
"Running a small business you have to do everything," he says. "It's quite therapeutic, really."
Turner, who employs nine people including one full-time kitchen hand at his Geelong restaurant, describes dishwashers as the "backbone" of any restaurant.
"It all starts there, if we don't have clean plates, knives, forks or equipment, we as chefs or floor staff can't do what we do at the level we expect," he says, noting that he likes to hire full-time staff members as dishwashers, and include them in all staff briefings so they don't stay stuck in the kitchen.
And is there any secret way to get dishes super-sparkly?
"Getting things super clean is just process, first hand washed – then run through the dishwasher twice, polished dry and then polished again pre-service," says Turner.
"There's a product in the industry that's known as 'the pink powder' and it works miracles! Good old elbow grease doesn't go amiss, either," says Purdue.