Once upon a time, long long ago, perhaps even out of your memory, did you start doing the dishes, stop, and feed the cat?

If you do it once, and the cat LIKES it, THEN IT IS A RULE!!

So now your cat associates the sound of the dishes with "Oh boy, time to eat, where is it? What are you doing? Are you getting it yet? Huh, huh, HUH?????"

Once a week, or every 10 days or so, I feed my cats canned / wet food. The rest of the time, they eat kibble. Because the wet stuff is messy and the dishes need to be washed immediately aftewards (unlike with the kibble), I feed them the wet food on melamine plates (cheap, and I can store them in the cupboard handy to the cans). Each and every time one of those melamine plates rattles, I get cats running from every direction all over the house. Sparkle and Chestnut start chattering with excitement. The plates and cans are in a cupboard with other things which we use daily. So we have to be careful NOT to rattle the melamine cat plates.

Don't know if any of this applies in your case. But it is one idea!