Kitchen notes: a morning with Stanford's Stern dining team.

Chef Maria has been at Stern Dining for nineteen years. She knows the regulars by their orders: oat-milk latte and a banana, scrambled with extra hot sauce, the kid who always asks for two waffles.

We spent a morning behind the line watching breakfast go out. Two thousand eggs. Forty pans of bacon. One enormous pot of grits that nobody, statistically, will rate.

The grits, for the record, are excellent.