Miguel Gonzalez wakes up just after 4 a.m. on most weekdays with one thing on his mind: avocados. In the past few years, Gonzalez, who lives in Long Island City, has become the private avocado dealer to dozens of New York City restaurants, from Michelin-starred spots (Daniel and Eleven Madison Park) to low-key brunch places (Sunday in Brooklyn). His avocados can end up in sixteen-dollar avocado-lettuce cups with toasted cumin at abcV, but his daily operations are decidedly no-frills; they start with him sitting on his sofa in the dark, his sons’ Nintendo games strewn about, planning the morning’s delivery routes in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens.

Since March, he has also been delivering avocados ($7.50 for three, $12.50 for five) to individuals, who typically hear about him on Instagram. Ordering from Davocadoguy—Gonzalez’s nom d’avocat—is only slightly more complicated than using Postmates for take-out guacamole: requests are made by direct message a day in advance, with payment via Venmo or Apple Pay or in cash.

The other morning, after collating the day’s orders on a spreadsheet, Gonzalez, who is thirty-seven, drove his white van down still-dark streets to his warehouse, in Queens, not far from a couple of cemeteries. The space holds several thousand avocados at various stages of ripeness. Chefs prize his ability to deliver a perfectly ripe product; his aging method is the opposite of leaving a rock-hard avocado on the kitchen counter and crossing your fingers. He treats the details of his process like the recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken. “That’s part of my trade secret,” he said, adding that developing the method had involved plenty of trial and error.

Given the way that Gonzalez behaved in his warehouse, the formula appears to include obsessively watching the goods, which are stored in cartons in two temperature-controlled rooms that are a bit warmer than a home refrigerator, and periodically prodding them through holes in the cartons. He provides avocados at several levels of ripeness, from firm (a foil for crabmeat in a California roll) to creamy (for mashing). “It’s not my job to assume that you will eat them all right now,” he said. “My goal is to give you something that’s different than the supermarket.”

Gonzalez never planned to deal avocados, although he did grow up in Los Reyes de Salgado, a city west of Mexico City that is known for its avocado farms. (Mexico now produces more than half of the world’s avocados; drug cartels are reportedly fighting for control of the billion-dollar avocado trade.) Gonzalez moved to Long Island with his mother when he was a teen-ager and began selling mortgages at JPMorgan Chase. The work was gruelling and left him with no time for fun, so he quit and joined his brother importing berries from Mexico. Finding that business too seasonal, he shifted to avocados. “I didn’t do any studies or research,” he said. “I just needed something to sell on the slow times.”

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At 7:30 A.M., he made his first drop-off, at a nearby deli, then headed into Manhattan. He stopped at a white brick building in midtown and handed a brown bag, labelled in Sharpie, to a doorman. He headed to the Upper West Side for another doorman handoff, then took the West Side Highway down to the restaurant Perry St. Inside the gleaming kitchen—in lunch-prep mode, the smell of roasting garlic in the air—Gonzalez put down a heavy case and chatted with Cédric Vongerichten, the chef, who told him about a new mushroom dish and the nuanced avocado texture that it demanded.

“It’s almost like pasta,” Vongerichten said of Gonzalez’s avocado variations. “If you want al dente, you can have it that way. If you want it very ripe for a guacamole, he can do that.”

After a stop at Wayan, in Nolita, Gonzalez travelled to Brooklyn, making drop-offs in lobbies and at brownstones. At a red brick house in Carroll Gardens, he discreetly tucked a bag into a designated spot, hidden behind a metal gate. By noon, he was on the day’s final order: a cash delivery in a graffiti-tagged block of Bushwick. The customer stood him up, and Gonzalez left with his paper bag and a dejected look on his face.

Gonzalez said that his delivery business was inspired by childhood memories of a milkman who would deliver bottles every morning to his grandmother’s house. Demand for avocados was high when Gonzalez started, and, after a couple of months of working with wholesalers in Mexico, he went out on his own. Cosme Aguilar, a friend of Gonzalez’s and the chef at Casa Enrique, was his first client.

Gonzalez isn’t starstruck by the celebrity chefs on his client list. “I’m just looking to be part of their back-end team,” he said. “They often don’t see me, but they know that they don’t need to worry about the avocados.” ♦