Staff Highlight: Andrew Parker
Often the unsung heroes in the restaurant industry, dishwashers play an integral role in the flow of service and help make your experience, as a guest, the best it can be.
If a restaurant doesn’t have clean plates, they can’t serve food. If they don’t have clean pans, they can’t make food. How a dish pit operates can affect wait times and how smoothly service goes on any night. If the dish pit fails in any way, that ripples out of the kitchen.
Andrew Parker, Head Dishwasher at The Original Vinnie’s, explains the importance of the dish pit, or the “water park” as he and his coworkers affectionately call it, and how it affects a restaurant in service.
“Food is the soul of a restaurant, and the cooks are the spirit behind it. The plates are what carry all of that, they are the pumping blood source. The dish pit is the heart.”
With Parker at the helm, the dish pit symbolizes the heart on more than one front. He often comforts coworkers who come there to talk if they’re having a bad day or have had a difficult table. He can tell how a night is going by mutters and mannerisms, how servers throw their trash away, or if they look overwhelmed. As someone who has been in the service industry for many years, he’s often doling our advice or helping others change their mindset so they can have a better evening when they aren’t feeling their best.
“Everybody goes to the water park to talk. If someone is having a bad day, I’m able to catch that and let them know everything is going to be okay. I’ll ask if it’s their Friday, or remind them it’s always best to ‘kill them with kindness’ when they get a bad table. Sometimes people are just mean, but I try to help the servers not let that get to them. Sometimes you just have to embrace the suck.”
For the past 14 years, Parker has dedicated himself to hospitality. He has managed a food truck, and been a pizza thrower, sauté cook, and line cook, before leading Dish at Vinnie’s. His experience has lent him knowledge and skills that are apparent, and help our restaurant provide the standard of service we are known for.
“It’s The Greatest Show on Earth. The service industry really is; you meet every single class of person in this industry. Some days are comic days, where what could go wrong does, and some days everything goes right and hits perfectly.”
A dish pit is typically tucked away in a restaurant kitchen, and it’s not always easy to notice the impact of the work done there. Parker admits that as a sauté cook, even he didn’t see it. But when you come to understand that every role inside a restaurant is important, especially those that are more easily taken for granted, you learn to have a greater appreciation while dining out as a whole.
We hope the next time you visit you’ll take a moment to appreciate all the wonderful people behind the scenes, like Andrew Parker and the other dishwashers on our team, who help keep your glasses, plates, and silverware clean, your wait times reasonable, and your experiences great while at Vinnie’s.
