Doing it Yourself

In America, every restaurant I worked at had professional cleaners doing their laundry. I'm not talking about issued T-shirts or hats that you might be expected to wash yourself, but the napkins, towels, aprons etc were as a matter of course picked up, washed with industrial bleach, and returned to the restaurant super-starched.

Maybe it's because the restaurants in Japan tend to be so much smaller- instead of the average restaurant seating 200 people, it might seat 20-50, 100 if it's really a good-sized chain. This is naturally much more noticeable in Tokyo. In any case, most restaurants do laundry themselves, usually aided by an ancient-of-days rickety washing machine usually located outside, and the wet things line-dried since owning a dryer in Japan is an almost unheard-of luxury. The restaurant I'm in now professionally launders the 白衣 (hakui, chef's whites), but we have to wash and dry the towels ourselves. I'm sure that would be violating all sorts of health codes back the States but it's actually nice to be able to control how many dry towels you have on hand. All the other restaurants I used to work at were nazis about the distribution of towels. On the other hand, during Japan's rainy season, there's no such thing as dry anything.

The washing machine's water is shut off with a little standardized key that you can get at a 100-yen shop. We also leave the washing detergent beside the machine, just off the street. I wonder if the bums have figured this out yet.

Footwear

When I was in the States, it was a sign of machoism to wear anything other than boots in the kitchen. The tough chefs wore hard clogs, but between using a hose on the concrete floors and flying food, hot oil, and dropped knives, it was a risk to have anything other than treated leather covering your toes. Not so in Japan.

First of all, there are no dropped knives in Japan. When you're dealing with lengths of metal that cost as much as a month's rent, you don't drop them. There are no 'house knives' here, and you don't use other chef's knives here, period. The most arrogant way to pull rank in the kitchen is for a senior chef is to use an inferior's knife instead of bothering to break out his own. Secondly, Japanese chefs work clean. Food is rarely if ever dropped, and seen as a direct loss. As a direct result, floors are cleaned less often, more like once a week rather than every night. Usually long boots are provided for said cleaning by the house.

All this leads to most chefs wearing a lot less protection on their feet over here than I am used to. Sushi chefs in particular often opt for 下駄, or Japanese wooden sandals, and socks. I've gone with a pair of rubber clogs with holes for ventilation, and only wipe them down once a week.