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The Era of the Line Cook

In a dinner series called the Line Up, line cooks, sous-chefs, and chefs de cuisine from buzzy New York restaurants get to be executive chefs for a night.

That year, as restaurant workers scrambled for gigs and sweated in the trenches of “essential work,” the chef Eli Sussman, who began his career as a prep cook, started posting memes that united denizens of the industry over the daily struggles of kitchen labor: dropping a paring knife behind a lowboy, forgetting to close the roll gate at the end of your shift, barely livable hourly wages. That day, it was in the hands of João Soares Vieira, the production manager, who oversees all kitchen prep and who now stood at an induction burner, stirring a pot of garlic simmering in olive oil, to which he’d soon add walnuts and diced cremini, to make mushroom duxelles. A detailed menu began with a poem about his mother and explained the inspiration behind each dish: the boiled-peanut vinaigrette on a plate of white asparagus reminded him of eating boiled peanuts by the side of the road on the way to baseball games in Louisiana; a course of duck à l’orange was made with satsumas like the ones that grew on a tree behind his grandparents’ house.

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