000-000-0000 · closed Mondays
Five people, and about eleven altogether
A restaurant is the people in it, which is the sort of thing every restaurant website says. Here are the five whose decisions you can actually taste, and what each of them is responsible for.
Chef and owner
Nora opened this room in 2016 after eleven years cooking in other people's kitchens in Manhattan and one very instructive year running a food stall that did not work. She writes the menu, works the pass four nights a week, and is the reason the roast chicken takes half an hour rather than being part-cooked in the afternoon. She will tell you, unprompted, which dish on the menu she is least happy with.
English, French
Head chef
Marcus runs the kitchen day to day and owns the section that changes most — the wood oven. He came here in 2018 from a much larger restaurant and says the best thing about this one is that he can change a dish on a Tuesday without asking three people. He does the ordering, which means he is the person who decides that the fish is not good enough this week and the menu changes.
English, Igbo
General manager
Priya runs the floor and the book. If you have been told a table is not available at seven thirty on a Saturday, she is the reason it is honest rather than a holding tactic — this room genuinely has eighteen tables. She handles every private dining enquiry personally and would rather talk you out of the room than sell you a booking that does not fit.
English, Tamil, Hindi
Bar manager
Sofia built the bar list and keeps it short on purpose. She is responsible for the three non-alcoholic drinks being made with the same care as the others, which she argued for on the grounds that a designated driver paying eleven dollars deserves better than sweetened soda. She rewrites the wine glasses roughly monthly.
English, Portuguese, Spanish
Pastry
Daniel bakes the bread each afternoon and everything on the pudding list each morning. He is the only person here who starts before eight. The olive oil cake is his and has not left the menu since 2019, mostly because attempts to remove it have been unpopular with the staff before the customers even noticed.
English, Yoruba
About eleven people work here altogether, and the six not on this page are servers, cooks and the person who washes up, which is the hardest job in the building. They are not listed individually because a restaurant's floor team changes and a page of names that went stale two years ago is worse than no page at all — but they are in the tip pool on exactly the same terms as everybody else, which is on the tipping page.