no. 12 — Matters of Taste: Breaking the fourth wall of dining
S2E2 of The Lineup ft. Chef Ali Ghriskey
This is Matters of Taste, a NYC-leaning edit on food and lifestyle.
Consider this your reminder that Mondays don’t have to suck. And if you’re here in NYC, may I suggest The Lineup?
It’s a dinner series that spotlights the unsung heroes of New York’s culinary scene — cooks working the line at today’s top restaurants. The Lineup effectively hands these cooks a restaurant and lets them assume the role of executive chef for “one night only” productions. And with good reason, Lineup dinners are held on Mondays, the traditional night off from their main hustles.
By the time I attended in December, only a few months after their relaunch, The Lineup had already produced dinners helmed by Agness Kim, sous chef at Bonnie’s; Nadine Ghantous, sous chef at Rolo’s; Jonathan Vogt, line cook at The Four Horsemen; and Drew Johnson, Sous Chef at Don Angie. (Aka the people to watch from the places you know.)
Our dinner was curated by Chef Ali Ghriskey, who The Lineup’s founder and culinary director Elena Besser met while they were both working at Lilia. Ali also worked with Missy Robbins at Misi and with Tom Coliccio at Coliccio & Sons before taking on her current role as Executive Sous to Michael Solomonov at K’far. I’ve written about our evolving relationship with restaurants in the past, and I’ll admit I was intrigued to try Ali’s 12/11 Lineup menu pitched as a nostalgic journey into her past, personal and professional.
So armed with my “IMPORTANT ARRIVAL INFORMATION” email, I navigated my dinner date-husband through the labyrinth that is the Brooklyn Navy Yard to Food52’s slick new 40,000 sq ft HQ, filled with all the gratuities of a bygone era. (They cut 22% of headcount between my dinner and this post, so suppose it was good while it lasted.)
From the start, the experience had notes of micro-wedding to it: a little welcome vol-au-vent and cocktail to kick things off (don’t mind if I do!), forty-some-odd guests of different generations wondering who their assigned seatmates would be, tablescapes that were rustic and practical—low-footed bowls of winter fruit and slim candlesticks so as not to compromise cross-table dialogue.
We all paused ceremoniously for a welcome toast by old friends Elena and Ali, who recalled their first meeting at a Lilia team softball outing.
Elena, a Today Show TV host by day, was TV hosting, while Ali was charmingly uncomfortable, maybe even a bit skittish in the limelight. Like when you suddenly find yourself the center of attention thinking but what do I do with my hands?! Having known her only by resume, encountering Ali’s persona styled with a pair of cropped herringbone pants, tube socks, and high tops felt all US Weekly: Stars — They’re Just Like Us. (As does this interview where she fondly looks back on taking a wheel of brie to the face as a child.)
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At each of our seats was a small booklet of “Menu Stories,” a set of brief notes and anecdotes around what inspired each dish, all written in Ali’s own first person — sincere without taking herself too seriously.
For our first course, we were presented a scallop crudo that was delicate in composition, assertive in flavor. Oil droplets re-expressed themselves around fleshy lobs of scallop and an ombré of winter citrus, administering a Rorschach test within the shallow pool of fluorescent juices. Succulence burst through salinity and nudged me to relinquish my fork for a spoon, the more generous implement. And in that pulse of distraction came the smokey aftershock of calabrian chili — it’s a dish that will indulge in a dramatic pause, if you let it.
After attacking the substantial, fork-and-knife salad of chicories, we nestled into a cappelliti en brodo. Each piece of pasta was individually shaped around a mushroom duxelle filling before setting sail in our bowls of herbed broth. “I hope this dish makes you feel taken care of,” Ali wrote in her notes to the dish. It was an invitation to go slow and savor, to slurp respectfully.
Every element of the main course that followed felt luxurious, in part because a silent film of overhead kitchen footage showcased the art of plating the arrangement: a gorgeous piece of duck breast set atop a wide watercolored stroke of jus, a leaning tower of roasted delicata squash half moons, a handful of golden pickled gooseberries, and an experienced quenelle of something I forgot to get source verification on. The glistening duck skin was crisped in a sumptuous, candied way, by virtue of a maple syrup glaze laced with garam masala.
Ali and Elena reappeared, then, in a way that registered this sort of metatheatrical fluidity of the whole Lineup experience.
Most performance arts operate through an imaginary one-way mirror — the audience sees through a “wall” to observe the performance; actors act as though they cannot. So temporarily suspending this convention (e.g., when a character addresses the reader directly in literature, when Alvy Singer makes eye contact with the camera in Annie Hall) compels the audience to reconsider their relationship with the performance.
Two recent dinners at 4 Charles and Cecchi’s made me recognize there’s a fourth wall in hospitality too. In both cases (and never prior, to my recollection), a member of the team took an empty seat at our table while speaking with us. We obviously talk to restaurant staff at every meal, but the dynamic of conversation fundamentally changes when they sit with you. It’s a small but profound gesture. When you’re looking at Michael Cecchi-Azzolina eye-to-eye, you remember the obvious and important truth that he’s a diner too.
But as with traditional performance arts, the poignancy of breaking the fourth wall owes both to its rarity and its subtlety. Looking back I think that’s why the 4 Charles and Cecchi’s gestures felt so impactful, and also why (I hate to say it) Dept of Culture felt contrived, where the spectacle before each course adulterated the impact of the device.
The Lineup seems to extend this concept in an avant-garde way, breaking the wall between chef and diner and also between back of house and front of house. Amanda Cohen has been at the forefront of the latter in introducing Dirt Candy’s menu attributions, but here the understudy actually takes the lead, and the behind-the-scenes process becomes part of the show.
While the camera crew documenting the evening were conspicuous and heavy-handed, Ali’s commentary and menu provided the necessary counterbalance. They edited out the superfluous.
I honestly can’t tell you what Ali and Elena said in this particular post-duck moment. But turning to dessert afterward, I felt time had sloped the way it does on a good night out — on an accelerating curve.
We had tiramisu that reminded me of that friend who lets his shirt buttons unceremoniously mark the progression of the evening. It read undone. The mascarpone was tousled atop with a heady confidence, but the ladyfingers gave way to the glass divan they were plopped in, forgoing all pretense of sophistication.
Each spoonful was a supremely good, pillowy one. But in the moment I took to relish in that splendid dream, the lights turned on rather abruptly. We were reminded that we were taking part in a performance, and we had to clear the room so the 8:30pm showing could begin. The Lineup’s “one night only” concept is, after all, as ambitious as the chefs it works with.