It’s OK to Find Parenthood Boring Sometimes
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
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.
ON A SCALE from 1 to oppressive, the love I feel for my daughter rates anywhere from 12 to 27, depending on the day and mood. I love my daughter more than I love anyone or anything in the current perceivable dimensions.
She is the tiny but powerful light of my life and when I look at her I see a reason for hope and optimism because this little girl is entirely potential and I can’t wait to see what she becomes. But our conversations tend to mostly be about Roblox and Minecraft. She feels few of the pressures of contemporary life—bank accounts and politics and relationships and substance abuse—but without knowledge of those things, what do we really have to talk about?
Also, currently, she is my best friend. She doesn’t know that, because I don’t think you’re allowed to tell your kid they’re your best friend, because then they might grow up weird, but outside of work she is the person I spend the majority of my time with and I love her, so how could we not develop a close friendship?
And sometimes it feels like I am hiding my anxiety from one of my closest confidants. So my two nights with her can make me feel like I just need somebody to talk to, but the only other person in my apartment is seven years old, and I am so tired that I make her Nutella toast and let her watch YouTube while I smoke weed in the bathroom and try to figure out stuff to do with her and let me tell you, it gets boring.
I’m used to dealing with boredom at work. Restaurants are monotony with four walls, providing consistency to the customer and an enervating sameness to the staff. To be a professional chef means to find joy in perfecting a craft, to relish the repetition because practice makes perfect and perfection is the whole fucking point! But it can wear on you and burn you out and without alcohol, there really isn’t much of a cure. There’s nothing quite like plating a brand new dish, but even the new dishes end up chewed and digested and evacuated the next morning.
On TV we see chefs shouting, running around, smoking cigarettes, and being anything other than bored. The reality is that while we are often shouting, running, smoking, furiously tossing salad after salad, and seasoning the 100th steak of the night, these are the same motions we’ve been going through every night for years and years.
Different dish, same hands, same faceless customers, same bleat of the printer; I really can’t overstate this point, but I’ll say more: The irony of becoming great at this is that I can expedite tickets while cooking pasta, plating salads and pastries, and keeping an eye on the grill and fry stations on a slammed Friday night and still get bored.
Barbara is not a station in the kitchen or a dish on the menu, but seven hours with her can feel surprisingly similar. I don’t have to pay a great deal of attention to her, even when she’s talking, to get the job done. As long as I keep nodding and saying yes while constantly plating food for her, she is pretty content.
She currently doesn’t have a ton of interests, mostly she cares about herself, so she doesn’t ask a great deal of me. Here are the things she likes to do: watch YouTube, play with dolls, eat something we don’t have, or make a mess. Or at least, those are the things she wants to do at my house. When the weather is nice I can sometimes wrangle her for a trip to the grocery store or to the laundromat, but that’s really about it.
And so we do those things and while sitting on the floor, going through the usual Barbie scenarios of, “It’s this girl’s birthday,” or “It’s this girl’s first day at school and these girls are mean to her,” or “It’s this girl’s first day at school and it’s also her birthday so they’re going to have a singing contest you go first,” I think about what she’ll be like when she grows up and if this time is even going to register as memories beyond happy or sad, and she’s mostly pretty happy. And I wonder if all of my hard work at the restaurant is actually getting me anywhere. Actually, I spend a lot of my time with Barbara thinking about the restaurant.
No. 7 is my favorite place on earth, but it can be miserable and grueling and it can be boring, but much like when I’m home with my daughter I can’t just mope about my problems, I’m there for my staff at the end of the day. Because they are doing this relatively thankless job for money and survival, not for the glory I seek.
So we talk to each other, stare at our phones, play games that the customers don’t know about, and generally pass the time, and I try to maintain my exuberance for the job, inspiring everybody around me to maintain theirs. Monotony is the fucking mind killer, and the thing I have learned about it is that you cannot let it become a thing, you have to find a way to embrace it. Whilst in it, the world can go gray, and a shift or a night at home can feel like a huge waste of time in a relatively short life.
“Barbara is not a station in the kitchen or a dish on the menu, but SEVEN HOURS with her can feel SURPRISINGLY SIMILAR.”
But I assure you, that is the point and there’s nothing you can do to change that as a chef. Sure, you could flail around, constantly making new things, but then you’d miss out on the finer points of the process. The daily grind of a restaurant is never a waste of time if you want to become the best chef in the world.
To a degree, you will never truly master every component of the vast amount of knowledge and skill involved in cooking, but teaching your body the innate skills and muscle memory of service is progress, I promise. Looking back on my career, despite all of the monotony, I never stopped showing up to work, and now I am an unstoppable line cook, the definition of economy of motion, whirling around the kitchen like I don’t even give a fuck.
I am still trying to figure out if the restaurant can relate to our life at home, but restaurant life is really all I know at this point so I hope so! Recently I hooked up the Nintendo and while that may be screen time, she is actively engaged and we both actually enjoy it which seems positive. She likes to play this arcade-y Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game in which we beat up robots and robotic ninjas and she’s getting a lot better! And for some reason she still likes to play Mario Kart even though it’s the one thing I refuse to let her win.
But our favorite is Luigi’s Mansion. I play as Luigi and she plays as Gooigi, a Luigi-shaped blob of goo, and together we suck ghosts into our vacuum cleaner backpacks. We’ve already beat it, but we just keep playing it and Barbara is getting better and better at it. Practice makes perfect after all and repetition is a reason unto itself. Or I’ve wasted my life away and I’m wasting my daughter’s very childhood, but I doubt it.
I’m working towards perfection and enlightenment, a form of acceptance and appreciation for the mundanity, a life without regrets because at the very least, I know that I’m putting in the work.