The dishwasher is an important piece of equipment for a restaurant. It’s not just a matter of clean dishes. It’s more than that. A dirty dishwasher means a dirty kitchen, and if you don’t clean your kitchen, you don’t have a restaurant.
In the early days at Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles, I learned to use the dishwasher by hand. I would fill the machine with soap, turn it on, and let it run while I did something else. After a while I got tired of doing that, so I would leave the door open but still move it around every once in a while to make sure everything was getting cleaned. Sometimes I would go out to the front counter and stand there and listen as the dishes went through their cycle so I could get an idea of how much noise they were making.
Nowadays we have automatic dishwashers, which make life easier for owners and employees alike. We can set them to run every day at certain times and usually don’t need to be there to watch them run or think about them very much. But in spite of all this convenience, we still need to know how to properly handle a dishwasher in your restaurant business: how to keep it clean for when guests come in
This is not a review of a dishwasher, or of the way I’ve been handling it. It’s about how you should handle dishwashers in your restaurant business: how to know when to use one and how to find the right one.
In most restaurants, dishwashers are an afterthought. They’re there so that a dishwasher can be installed in the kitchen and then either turned on and off by the cook or left on all the time so that no one has to wash dishes, which they don’t like doing anyway. This is like installing frigid air conditioning in your car in order to have it cool down all summer. And if you have hot water instead of cold, you can always use the water with cold food still in it to save energy by reheating it with hot tap water afterward.
In any case, they’re usually inefficient because they use up more water than they save and usually leak a lot. The hot water often has trouble getting through the pipes because they’re old and corroded, or because there isn’t enough water pressure to get it through. Or maybe there is too much pressure, which stops up the drain. The pipes are old even before that happens; maybe they were installed at some point when no one thought about
The dishwasher is not a machine that you operate with your hands. It’s a machine that washes dishes. Running a dishwasher should be like running any other machine in your restaurant business, which means it should be done by someone who knows how to run that kind of machine, and if you don’t have someone who knows how to run it, then you shouldn’t run it.
Many people think that the biggest danger from a dishwasher is from spills. But that’s not it at all. The real danger comes from having too much water in your cabinets, which can cause a lot of damage.
The worst thing you can do is to overload the thing. If you have too many dishes, or too many glasses or plates stacked up on the racks, or a couple dozen dirty plates piled up in the sink, the machine will be overloaded, and the water pressure will go down.
It may take two or three cycles to clean up the mess. And maybe not even then. It depends on how dirty your dishes are and how much water they need to get clean. If there is too much water in your cabinets and it takes two or three cycles to get them clean, whatever was left behind on those first cycles will still be there on the last cycle.
You don’t have to make sure everything gets clean every time through; if one cycle doesn’t completely clean everything, no harm done. But if the dishes aren’t cleaned thoroughly enough for your standards–if there’s still food stuck to them–you’ll have to do another cycle before you can put anything else in your dishwasher.
Most restaurants handle this by putting dirty dishes back
Dishwashers are one of those things that you could get away with using in a low-end restaurant, but they really don’t belong there. The best dishwasher I ever saw was at a high end place: a 24″ dishwasher that came with its own built-in magnetic drain guard and stainless steel interior racks. It cost around $2,000.
There are a lot of reasons to have this kind of dishwasher. A good dishwasher doesn’t need to be expensive; it just needs to work well, and work well for as long as it is needed. An economy dishwasher is just going to wear out too quickly, over and over again. The biggest problem with washing dishes by hand is the soap scum on the plates and glasses that makes you spend all day washing dishes in the sink. A good dishwasher will take care of this for you.
A good dishwasher takes up much less space than a traditional electric dishwasher. It’s about the same size as a large refrigerator or small freezer, which means that you can put it right next to your open kitchen, without blocking anything except maybe the door to the walk-in cooler behind it.
A good dishwasher uses water (not electricity) so there’s no concern
Dishwashing is important, but it’s not a big deal. I’m too busy to do it.
Every now and then someone will email me, “I saw you had an article about dishwashers, but that article only mentioned the little models you can get at Home Depot. Where are the ones my restaurant needs?”
This is a serious question. A restaurant dishwasher has to be able to wash dishes at a very high rate of speed in a very small space; it’s not something you can just buy off the shelf at Wal-Mart. And if the dishwasher isn’t fast enough, or doesn’t fit on your countertop, or isn’t powerful enough to clean your dishes properly, then you’ll have food leftover in your dishwasher that can’t be found anywhere else.
We’ve already looked at the problems with buying from Home Depot. That leaves us with two choices: make a dishwasher ourselves or find someone who makes them for restaurants.
If you want to make money in restaurant cooking, it will help to understand what is involved. Making money in restaurant cooking means making more money than you spend. This is very hard. It means making up for labor, which takes time and effort that you have to supply. It means getting good customers, who are not only willing to pay a lot of money, but also have a strong inclination to be nice and to know what they are doing.
Most restaurant cooks’ main problem is not having enough customers. If you can do something that will increase the number of your customers by ten times, it will be easy to make it up for all the extra work that increased labor will cost you.