IF you want to talk turkey about cooking Thanksgiving dinner, get a professional chef in New York City on the phone. In matters of experience and scale, they have much advice to offer the rest of us, whether we’re preparing an off-a-truck Butterball for the 20th time or a $150 heritage bird for the first.

They certainly cook enough turkeys. At Bar Americain, the chef Bobby Flay’s restaurant in Midtown, nearly three dozen turkeys will be served Thanksgiving Day, Mr. Flay said. Andrew Carmellini, the chef and an owner of Locanda Verde in TriBeCa, said he would be ordering 80 birds for his restaurant’s wood oven. Jimmy Bradley, the chef and an owner of the Red Cat in Chelsea and the Harrison in TriBeCa, said that the restaurants served more than 300 pounds of turkey last year and that he expected to equal that number again this year. Thanksgiving is the biggest day of the year for both restaurants, Mr. Bradley said.

He is by no means the only restaurateur here for whom this is the case. It is a curious feature of New York that it may be the one city in the United States where it is perfectly normal, though by no means mandatory, for restaurants to be open for the holiday feast. Manhattan restaurants are crowded enough on the fourth Thursday of November that it’s possible to imagine widespread panic if they were not. The turkey is so large, after all, and our ovens so small. Some of us have no choice but to eat out.

The rest may benefit from the insights of those who prepare the meals. Lesson No. 1 in preparing food for the holiday, chefs say: Cut up the bird before cooking. Abandon the Norman Rockwell ideal of serving a whole turkey in its golden-roasted splendor. If your bird looks like that, Mr. Flay said: “Something’s wrong. Something’s either overcooked or undercooked.” To achieve the correct balance, he said: “I roast the meat until the breasts are done, and then cut off the legs and thighs. The breasts can rest, and you can cook off the legs in the drippings left in the pan.”