In this edition of Cooking With Conrad Gallagher, we learn why Conrad claims the dish washer, or kitchen porter, as unsung heroes of the kitchen.

Washing dishes and hauling kitchen trash might seem like the lowliest of kitchen jobs, with zero glamour or celebrity potential. Still, no restaurant can function without people doing these jobs.
No clean pots to cook in? No clean plates to serve food on? The restaurant is at a standstill.
Many of the greatest chefs started out as kitchen porters or dishwashers. Taking out the garbage, cleaning up everyone else’s mess, offloading deliveries, chopping up sides of meat and prepping mountains of vegetables, basically all the jobs no one else wants to do.

And if you think chefs work long hours – these guys get in before everybody else, and they’re the last to leave after taking out the trash and sanitising the kitchen for the next round tomorrow.
This is probably why any chef worth his salt recognises that the porter is an essential part of the team to keep the flow of the kitchen going. So much so that there’s an award for KP of the Year in the UK. You’ll find that these top “kitchen ninjas” have been with the same restaurant for a decade or more and are considered worth their weight in gold.

It’s also a profession that attracts some great characters. Porters are often credited with keeping spirits up in mad rushes, on slow days or when the chef loses his rag and some of society’s misfits.
I’ll never forget my first kitchen job as a 15-year-old, a holiday and weekend job in the kitchen of the local hotel in the small town where I grew up in Donegal. As I walked into the kitchen, the first person I witnessed was a guy in a crash helmet weaving through the chefs in their big hats.
I assumed he’d just arrived for work on a bike. However, an hour into my first task of peeling a bucketful of potatoes, he came again – still wearing the crash helmet. He was bashing his head against the wall as he walked along with an armful of dirty dishes.

No one else paid any attention, so I carried on with my potatoes. I spotted the guy later, crash helmet still in place, banging his head, singing and talking to himself while washing a sink full of dirty pots.
Later, he came over and introduced himself, offered to take me under his wing, show me around, and asked if I’d like “a cuppa tea and a little sandwich”.

Of course, I said I’d love that, and next thing I was tucking into Joey’s “little” sandwich – a hefty chunk of bread slathered in butter that he’d rolled up in his hands around a sausage.
From then on, tea breaks and lunch breaks, I hung out with Joey, who was on day release from the local mental hospital, and we became best of pals.

It was prevalent in those days for the shitty jobs to be done by mentally ill patients on the day of release. In fact, the next dishwasher that became my firm friend while learning the ropes of the kitchen was Eugene. He was also on day release from a local sanitarium. He was the dishwasher at the hotel in Connemara, where I went on work placement three years later, after finishing up at cooking college.

I understood from Joey and Eugene that the dishwasher guy does more than wash dishes. He’s the glue of the kitchen in a way – and I learned my lifelong respect for the people who do the job.
Much later, when I opened my first incarnation of Peacock Alley in Dublin, I hired my Uncle Eamonn as the chief dishwasher. He was the backbone of that kitchen for a decade or so.

Uncle Eamonn was something of the black sheep of the family. We loved him dearly, but he was always the guy that broke into song at a funeral. You couldn’t get him off the stage at a wedding, always the guy that would have more than one too many. His nickname was The Jackhammer because he was a wee, tough guy.
He became the famous kitchen porter of Peacock Alley. Every young chef who went through my kitchen could tell you about nights after service drinking beer with Uncle Eamonn.

The point is, I hired the wee tough guy because I knew how important the job was to the success of the restaurant.
It has become more of a profession now. The dishwasher title has been upgraded to kitchen porter. Physical fitness, the ability to deploy elbow grease and stand on your feet for long hours used to be the only requirements, but job ads now will talk about being a team player, organisational skills, calm disposition under pressure, ability to follow instructions, and knowledge of food hygiene, health and safety.

But the fact remains – a restaurant kitchen can’t operate without a constant supply of clean dishes, and that’s why these guys are our heroes.