Tyler Kord is the chef-owner of No. 7 Restaurant in Brooklyn. He’s the author of Broccoli, Dynamite Chicken, and A Super Upsetting Cookbook About Sandwiches. But he is also a dad—and all of the things that come with it: caregiver, protector, entertainer, Barbie articulator, constant picker-upper, launderer, and countless other tasks. In an exclusive new series of columns for Men’s Health on the subject of fatherhood, called "Fatherhood, on the Line," Kord attempts to hold it all together.
THEY SAY IT takes a village to raise a child but mine is a restaurant and I think my daughter is better off for it. And I am a nicer, cooler person because of the lessons I’ve learned about how to manage a crew of people in an inherently kind of fucked up industry.
No. 7 is a wonderful place for lots of reasons but the best thing about it is the staff. And it’s like Barbara has a dozen aunts and uncles, all badasses at what they do, all sweet as an ice cream sundae, all consistently present in her life.
And my staff hasn’t just helped me care for my child and operate a restaurant, they’ve also taken care of me, throughout the last rocky year, and really the entire time that I’ve owned a restaurant, since long before Barbara was born. They make sure I eat and have clothes, they walk me home from work, and they text me on days off to check in which has been HUGE as I deal with single parenting.
It’s not cool in times of corporate capitalism to refer to people you are paying as family, but No. 7 is not just a restaurant for those of us who spend our time there, and that isn’t because of how benevolent a boss I’ve been throughout the years. I spend more time with my staff than I do my daughter, how could we not be close?
I want to instill in Barbara the same sense of community that I enjoy and benefit so much from, and that inherently involves other people. And other people are infinitely more interesting than me on my phone and her on her iPad with a bowl of microwave popcorn between us.
Barbara has a whole community of friends at school, but we don’t really have playdates at my house since it’s such a short turnaround between pickup and bedtime. But we say hi to all kinds of people and animals while we walk to and from my apartment. The crossing guard knows our names because we often bring her sodas from the restaurant, and when we see people we know we always stop and chat. “Are they regulars?” Barbara will ask? And yes, they usually are.
I have friends outside of the restaurant! Friends from Ithaca where I grew up, friends from Oberlin and The French Culinary Institute, and the friends you make by being chatty in a big city, but I don’t really have time for them. Restaurants are a lifestyle, not just a place of employment, so my closest friends are my team, for better or for worse.
Restaurants are abundant in a sense of community; I would guess that aside from needing to get paid, it’s one of the main reasons people work in this industry. And it’s why customers become regulars, because they too want to be part of a community. That sense of community is what has kept me cooking and at times even kept me alive for just over 20 years. We work together and we eat together and we see each other in relatively extreme circumstances. We tell each other things we don’t tell our real families and we tell our families stories about our work families. And most importantly, we take care of each other.
I take care of Barbara on the nights she is with me because she is 8 and most of our decision making leans heavily in her favor. But I am also honest with her when her requests make me feel like I’m not being treated fairly, like huge messy sleepovers on the pull-out couch, or really anything that is big and messy and involves an undue amount of my labor.
And I want to support her in pursuit of some greater good but I only get just a few short hours to radicalize her before we have to brush teeth and read books. At least she gets an hour or two at the restaurant most nights that we’re open and she is starting to be mature enough to realize that my work is serious and the kitchen is more than a french fry and ice cream machine.
She likes to help on the line, reading tickets for me, running cut fruit out to tables with small children, and asking a LOT of questions about what we are doing and I think she’s going to grow up a more interesting person for it. She’s also getting to see how much I take care of and respect my staff.
We talk a lot about respecting everybody’s time in the restaurant and not turning off the lights in the basement while people are down there prepping because they HATE that. But they baby her and feed her and buy her presents all the same. I want Barbara to think about the consequences of her actions and to consider everybody’s best interests as she moves through the kitchen but also this world as I always try to. I also don’t want her to lose a finger sneaking up on a cook holding a sharp knife so admittedly, I shout at her a lot when she’s at the restaurant. Out of love! I shout out of love!
I can’t see the future, but it sure does seem like robots and 3D printers are going to ace out most of the chefs and restaurants. But I’m hopeful that as long as I can consistently maintain this little community, and we keep doing our jobs to the best of our ability, we’ll survive a while longer. And maybe the aliens will love broccoli tacos!!
This is the worst thing I could ever commit to a computer screen, but a little bit, I hope Barbara will want to become a chef and start working with me in a few years. It’s a tough life, full of cuts and burns and stress, but I could teach her and spare her from a lot of my more painful mistakes.
And she would have a group of people, a mix of ages, races, and genders, happy to teach her how they work and exist in this restaurant that her mommy and daddy built. She’ll get to spend time with me in my natural environment, not just eating pizza and watching youtube in my lonely apartment. She’ll have a million customers to covet, then resent, before she finally accepts the repetition and lets it flow over her like a river as her daddy does every night.
She’s only 8, and I don’t know if I’ll still be at it by the time she turns, what, 12? When is it appropriate to apprentice a child? But assuming I make it that long, I think we would have a blast cooking together.
And she’d get to see the teamwork/dreamwork side of this community, and how much is possible when a group of people take on a task together, like an unholy rocket ship made of broccoli, and look out for each other in the process.
