08/03/2026
How We Do Things: The Unsung Heroes – Our Dishwashing Team
Every restaurant has a group of people you rarely see, but without them, nothing else could happen.
Enter our dishwashing team.
For many of our staff, the dish pit is their very first job. Most are between 13 and 15 years old, and if you can survive working in the dish pit on a busy summer night, you can survive just about anything!
Depending on how busy we are, it takes 3 to 8 people to keep the dishes flowing.
The process starts in the dining room. Before dishes even reach the dish pit, our servers and table cleaners remove cutlery into soaking buckets, plastic bibs and butter cups into the garbage, and napkins and paper products into the compost. By the time the dishes reach our dishwashing crew, only food scraps and dishes should remain.
One of the biggest ways everyone can help is by making sure only food scraps go into the shell bucket. Plastic butter cups, bibs, wrappers, cutlery, napkins, wet wipes, and other garbage don't belong there. Since our food scraps and shells are composted and used on local farmers' fields, keeping those buckets free of garbage is important. It protects our composting process, makes sorting safer for our staff, and helps us reduce waste.
From there, the real work begins.
Food scraps and lobster, mussel shells are scraped into chutes that lead to collection barrels. Those scraps don't go to waste—they're composted and later used on local farmers' fields.
Two team members scrape dishes while others load racks and feed them through our commercial dishwasher. On the clean side, another crew inspects every plate, bowl, glass, and utensil before sorting and returning them throughout our kitchen—a space nearly as large as our main dining room. Anything that isn't perfectly clean is soaked, scrubbed, and washed again.
Then there's the cutlery.
After soaking, every fork, knife, spoon, and lobster pick is washed, sorted by hand, and run through the dishwasher a second time before being put away.
And that's just the guest dishes.
Our dish team also washes countless pots, pans, mixing bowls, cutting boards, baking trays, utensils, and kitchen equipment used throughout the day.
Now imagine this...
The average guest may use:
• 2 forks
• 1 knife
• 2 spoons
• A lobster pick
• A water glass
• Another beverage glass
• A coffee cup and saucer
• A creamer
• A chowder bowl and saucer
• A salad plate
• An entrée plate
• 2 mussel buckets
• 2 lobster shell buckets
• A dessert dish or 2 ;)
Multiply that by 600–700 guests on a busy night, and it's easy to see why our dishwashers never slow down.
Our dishwashing crew is almost always the last team to finish each evening. Long after the dining room has emptied, they're still cleaning, sorting, and putting everything away so we're ready to do it all again tomorrow.
Their reward at the end of the night? Usually a well-earned bowl of ice cream or a slice of dessert before heading home.
It may be an entry-level job, but it's one of the hardest jobs in the building. We're incredibly proud of these young team members and grateful for the work they do every single day.
Because without clean dishes... there would be no supper.
🦞
