Most often, it is crushing where you must first wash the pot and pot assembly line in the morning. For Sofia Verador, who helms the dish pits at breakfast and lunch spots, Long Beach’s Alder & Sage is therapeutic.
The sink, filled with unwashed dishes, marks the beginning of her work day. That’s how she made a living for the past decade. She wouldn’t have it any other way.
Verador, 40, travels over an hour to reach his job as the Alder & Sage head dishwasher, taking three separate buses from the home she shares with Santa Ana’s mother to the Bluff Heights area in Long Beach.
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The often overlooked story of restaurant workers makes and serves our food.
Sometimes a former colleague who has moved to other restaurants tries to poach her for the new facility.
“Thank you,” she tells them. “I’m fine where I am.”
For outsiders, dishwasher work is a rung at the bottom of a restaurant, awful, difficult and ultimately undesirable job. But it is definitely the most important role in a dining facility.
Without a dishwasher, the dish pits will be stopped and the restaurant will run.
Dishwashing is often mistaken for a simple entrance job at a restaurant. But it’s a fast-paced hard work that requires you to understand all the functional parts of a restaurant, from the process to the machinery.
“No one talks about these nameless heroes,” Kansteiner says. “Dishwashers are often overlooked, but we all need to understand that they work with the front of the house and front of the house to juggle everyone on the team, from chefs to servers to guests.”
Home workers like Bellador are the foundation of the restaurant industry. However, they rarely receive the praise that is usually reserved for the chef or owner. We followed Velador on a recent Thursday when she made a shift to find what one of these invisible jobs wanted.
6:55am
Covered in black, her hair is pulled up by a dark bandanna, her lips dyed bright red with lipstick, and Verador looks like a modern Chicana version of Rosie the Rebator. The wired earphones above her neck bounce off as she actively walks and catches the first bus of the day at the corner of Euclidean Street and West Caterra Avenue in Anaheim.
Sofia Bellador is the first of three buses that work to work as a dishwasher in Long Beach. She records the time after about an hour and a half.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
The stop is a few blocks away from his father’s home with Parkinson’s disease. She spends two nights a week to take care of him. She sorts out his place and spends time with him.
Verador’s shift starts at 9am and wants to leave plenty of time for work. On the bus, she stays mostly herself and listens to the music. Others do the same. A man falls asleep. Another listens to a loud show without earphones. The bus passes through strip malls, apartment buildings and walled apartment complexes.
Until she gets on the second bus, she chats with a woman she calls “bus friend” Zhanette Kazanzeva. Kazanjeva often walks to the third bus in the morning with Bellador.
On the second foot of the bus commute to Long Beach, she works as Sofia Verador, a dishwasher. To board the next bus, Bellador walks left, along with Kazangeva, through the connection stop. (Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Sometimes Verador hopes she has a car and doesn’t have to compete with work or getting back on the bus.
But then she thinks about it better. She previously had a car, but it always seemed to be broken. The parking lot in Long Beach is rough and cargo tickets are stacked.
She is grateful that her boss, Kansteiner, works mainly on bus schedules. Verador could potentially land work near the home and save a long commute. However, she remains loyal to Kansteiner.
Velador, one of Alder & Sage’s four dishwashers, began working with Kansteiner at the Berlin Bistro 10 years ago, until the restaurant closed in 2022.
Bellador did not do well during the pandemic. Still, the Berlin crew provided her with a cut of hints.
“They didn’t have to do that,” she says. “I say a lot of that.”
7:58am
Verador steps into the thick mist from the bus.
A 7-minute walk to the restaurant will take you to the fog. She steps along the retro line corridors of Long Beach into Alder & Sage, a well-ventilated, bright neighbourhood restaurant on Cherry Avenue and Fourth Avenue. The restaurant serves locally roasted coffee and small producer wines for breakfast, lunch and brunch from farm to fork.
After taking three buses from Anaheim to Long Beach, Sofia Verador arrives for a shift as an Alder & Sage dishwasher.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Verador hangs her bag, removes her jacket and ties her to a black rubber apron. She removes the trash and then checks the liquid in the commercial dishwasher with a test strip to make sure there is enough disinfectant.
“We’re fine,” she tells herself.
The Verador is turned on by hanging a portable speaker. Hall & Oats’ “You Make My Dreams” explodes into the dish pit.
She heads towards the preparation line, grabs a handful of dirty tools and washes them off before setting them inside the industrial dishwasher.
A few seconds later, she turned on the faucet in the water hole and hosed it from the pot that looked like a third of the size. The water splashes over her and some of the floor.
The chef gives him a bowl of hello and hands Velador lined up the remaining potato crusts.
“Thank you!” he cried.
Verador spends most of the day in front of the dish pit, heading towards the corner of the restaurant.
She scrubs all kinds of kitchenware: trays, frying pans, cooking sheets, plates, frying pans. She carefully places it all in a plastic wooden box. Sometimes it’s like a Tetris game fits in as many dishwashers as possible. Verador closes the latch and runs the dishwasher.
She mops water from the floor.
8:48am
Verador overlooks the plate assembly line. Stainless steel mixing bowls, blender pitchers, whisks, cooking, frying pans, etc.
During a typical shift, she says she washes at least 500 dishes.
Most will get bored of work. “For me, it feels like a cure,” she says. “I’m very satisfied.”
Sophia Bellador in the dish pits at Alder & Sage in Long Beach. She often has to lift a heavy rack of dirty glasses. One of her jobs is to make sure the liquid levels are correct in the dishwasher. (Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Verador does not wear gloves. She doesn’t mind them as she makes it difficult to handle the dishes and can accidentally drop the dishes. She wears gloves only when using degreaser. This is corrosive, but is especially necessary to really clean dirty pots and pans.
Once the dishwasher is finished, the frying pans, plates, glasses and dishes get particularly hot.
Some dishwashers report having experienced pain in their hands and even arthritis for a long time at work. That’s not the case with Verador.
A while ago, her legs began to get hurt. The pain eased after she began wearing orthopedic insoles. Now she wears three insoles. She makes her shoes one size larger and fit them all.
10:25am
Verador has front row seats for food waste.
Some plates are cleaned up by the time they reach her. But sometimes, when the restaurant is particularly busy, she looks at the plate with lots of leftover food. Half-edible quiche. Hamburger sliver. Salad lettuce barely touched.
“Sad,” she says. “I’m watching it more than I want.”
Verador grew up in a working class family. She graduated from high school, but had no desire to pursue college. She didn’t see the point of paying so much to sit in the classroom and learn. After graduating from high school, her first job was at the Spirit Halloween store. Since then, she has worked in clothing stores, warehouses and call centres. She says she felt like a “maintainer” in all of these jobs except for what she has now.
At first, she says that washing dishes was difficult, but she got used to it.
“That was the first job I had where I didn’t feel it was hard, hard work or pressure,” she says. “And more, my colleagues are amazing people.”
She started at the Berlin Bistro in the summer of 2015 and just stayed there. Velador earns a portion of the server tips, in addition to $17.50 per hour. This is about $50 every few weeks.
It is typical for a dishwasher to see his position in Jobs as a position as a basser, a prep cook, or a line cook.
Kansteiner tried to provide all of these jobs. Verador turned them down.
Kansteiner says it’s rare for someone to stay as a dishwasher for 10 years. Still, she says she has learned to respect Bellador’s decisions.
“Ten years are incredible in my eyes,” she says. “Sophia is a large part of our working family. I’ve never been in a bad mood for her. She also sets a tone for the kitchen.”
3:30pm
At the end of Bellador’s shift, she’s wet and dirty. But she says there are concrete consequences for all her works: Creekwear.
Verador puts out his clock for the day and heads out to board her bus. It takes her over an hour to get home.
Kansteiner knows the restaurant staff is overwhelmed, so she says she finds Verador to help Verador at the dining room bath table.
Kansteiner says. Verador just does that.
Verador says he will be happy to wash his dishes for the next 10 years. She doesn’t want to do more.
Verador says she believes that society might think “not showing much” to her life because she doesn’t have a car, does not own a house, or does not have the desire to marry and have children.
She sees it differently.
“I’m happy,” she says. “My family and friends who love me and support me make me happy. I am blessed. When I wake up, I am happy even on my bad days.”
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