The Anti-Brigade: Eda Johnson is Rewriting the Line in Tacoma

By Eric Barton | Nov. 18, 2025

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

Pre-service at Manuscript restaurant in Tacoma doesn’t start with a barked checklist. It starts with Eda Johnson pulling a prompt from the card game “Where Should We Begin? At Work.” It’s meant to build trust and creativity with prompts like: "The part of my job that I'm most proud to talk about..."

Then the huddle breaks. The tickets fly. The grill station blazes. The line settles in to the ritual of filling orders. And through it all, there’s one big thing missing: Nobody is directly in charge.

When Manuscript’s chef left earlier this year, Johnson, the owner and operator, didn’t hunt for a new one. She retired the French brigade, the pecking order that puts chefs above each other. In its place is a flat system where roles rotate, anyone can call an eighty-six, and standards live on paper instead of inside one voice. House-made pasta, Roman-style pizza, oysters—the menu reads familiar; the way it’s made is the story.

Eda Johnson

Johnson didn’t arrive here by grand theory. Her childhood in the South Sound was more parking-lot dinners than long family meals. “Our lives revolved around church schedules, not meal times,” she says. The counterpoint lived at her grandmother’s stove: “Her kitchen was a different kind of church… not fancy, but full of intention.” Restaurants came early and unglamorous, starting at 17 years old at Red Robin. She learned the rhythm, the weird family, the way a kitchen room can feel like a home.

The second education was harsher. Johnson got a job as a paramedic, learning that hierarchy has uses, and costs. The call that wouldn’t leave her was a a double fatality on the highway. When she got back in her rig, her partner asked if she was OK, and before she could answer, told her that he just isn’t bothered by things like that anymore. “That was the moment. I felt this grotesque empathy — not for the patient, but for him. Johnson never wanted to become hardened like that, and so she started working up bars, and ended up running one “as if it were my own.” That’s when she began envisioning a restaurant where care and resilience coexist.

Creamy burrata toast

At Manuscript and now at her second restaurant, Dialogue, the flat model looks deceptively simple. She often runs expo from the kitchen side on busy nights, finishing plates and syncing with the floor; other nights, a veteran cook takes it on without ceremony. Cross-training is constant and human. “Skills can be taught,” she says, “but caring about the person next to you can’t.” The through line that makes it all possible are spec sheets with plated photos, a “Kitchen Bible” of recipes and open/close duties, and the quick pre-service talks. The Perel cards do the connective work, helping build trust, humility, plain talk about mistakes.

Vinyl brunch

Korean Pork Belly Biscuits & Gravy

Flat isn’t frictionless. Early on, equality blurred into nobody’s job; pars slipped, prep gaps slowed the pass. Instead of a scolding, they fixed visibility—tighter par lists, clearer responsibilities, more eyes on the same goal. Some cooks needed stricter lanes and peeled off. The ones who stayed learned the house ratio: calm to care in equal measure.

The results feel measurable and felt. Turnover dropped. Waste shrank. Ticket times fell as the menu narrowed to what the line can execute beautifully every night. Johnson resists the keynote bow. “I don’t have hard proof that it’s sustainable yet — just a gut feeling that it’s right.” What she trusts is the floor-level math of pride. “When everyone contributes, pride takes root. And pride breeds accountability. Not ego, but pride.”

Paramedic Eda Johnson Manuscript Dialogue restaurant Tacoma

Johnson from her paramedic days

The dishes they’re putting out are the final audit. Like the Korean Pork Belly Biscuits & Gravy, which ended up a favorite after one of the line cooks dreamed it up. The pizzas, the pastas, the oysters, all dishes that come out of collaboration. It’s not that the kitchen is leaderless, and it’s not that the brigade system combusted. It faded, politely, into something new, something better.