Line Cooking

Four tickets come in at once. The line cook drops fries, flips two burgers, plates a salad, and calls back to the expo without looking up. Line cooking is a timing problem solved by hand, under heat, with tools that are hot and surfaces that are slick. It is one of the most compressed examples of physical multitasking a camera can record.

Our footage comes from full service shifts in operating restaurants. The head camera records what the cook actually looks at: the ticket rail, the grill marks, the fryer timer, the sauté pan being tossed and the spoon going in to check. Fixed cameras above the line and at the pass show the cook's position relative to other stations and the plates moving to the window.

What a researcher gets is not just recipes executed. It is a cook deciding when a steak is ready by pressing it with a finger, pulling a pan off the flame a second early because the next ticket needs the burner, and wiping a plate rim before it leaves. These are the behaviors that separate a cook from a sequence of steps.

Episode segmentation diagramONE EPISODE01Fire02Cook03Plate04Pass05ResetEACH STEP: LANGUAGE LABEL · OUTCOME TAG · OPTIONAL HAND / OBJECT TRACKS
A typical line cooking episode, cut into the steps your labels attach to.

Episodes are segmented per ticket or per dish with labeled steps and success or failure tags, including remakes and timing misses. Hand, tool, and ingredient tracking can be added. Data arrives in your schema to your storage. Cooks are consented and paid, and the footage is cleared for commercial model training.

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