Wet Work: The Loneliness of a Kitchen Porter.

Before graduating to that illustrious and often imposter-syndrome-inducing title of ‘chef’, I paid my dues in the damp corners of restaurants, cafes and sports stadiums as a kitchen porter. In this strange, limboing ‘in between’, one tastes the irreplicable comradery of a professional kitchen whilst always feeling a uniqueness of experience, teetering on the edge of something more, the sink your solitude. Yes, to be a chef is to dirty your hands, but at least those hands stay dry. Whilst the chef may enter a kitchen motivated by a love of food, no one becomes a KP out of a deep-seated passion for washing dishes.

It was on days where I’d start work at 7am in one restaurant and finish at 11pm at another, or a chef on shift refused to learn my name and instead call me ‘lady’ every time he had a task for me to compliantly complete, or I’d dropped a bucket filled with the contents of the grease trap I’d just emptied onto my non-slips in mid-August; it was on days like these that I would ruminate on all of these stories and experiences, of day-ruining mishaps or of record-breakingly quick turnarounds on dirty to clean spoons, and laugh at the fact that no one would know of any of it whilst they nibbled on their wild mushroom risotto and cauliflower croquettes. I wouldn’t have traded it for the world.

Humbling, important, often thankless, and wet; the KP runs the kitchen.