In the meantime here's an excerpt.
Exhausting. Every Monday, I worked a double, arriving around 6 a.m. to prep the entire station from scratch, worked lunch service, broke down the station, prepped for dinner, set up, then worked until midnight. At most, I took one 15-minute break to shovel food into my mouth. When the night was over, I would take the subway home, arriving home around 2:30 a.m., sleep until 6 a.m., wake up, and go back to work. That's how my team and I started every single week. The constant pressure to perform drives cooks to work at a level most people would consider insane. Showing up hours before schedule to prep—unpaid of course—just to handle the work load. Or clock out, pretend to go home with the team, walk around the block then go back in the kitchen and work for free for hours.