Thankfully, No. 7 is a very long restaurant—an 1800-square-foot indoor playground, but with cooks to sneak up on and plenty of ice cream in the freezer. We’ve used up all the good hiding spots for hide-and-seek, but recently we’ve taken to drawing pictures of monsters and taping them up in crafty places, like under the soda gun or on the top shelf of the walk-in. Then we go around, find the monsters, and “defeat” them by vigorously pointing our magic wands (markers!) at them and shouting “Powers!” because YouTube must have taught her that is how magic wands work. Sometimes one of them will freeze me and I will fall to the floor, unable to move, until Barbara finds the nearest monster and neutralizes it.
But even with an oblivious three-year-old sprinting around, the restaurant feels somber. Every time we unlock the door and wrangle Barbara’s stroller into the entrance, she asks where everybody is. She says hi to the cooks, or gets shy and hides behind me, even though she’s known these guys her short but entire life. I suspect it’s the masks. The guys are here because they want to be, but they’re worried about the future, and so am I. We’ve all made the choice to accept an increased risk of infection, the significance of which I don’t mean to casually understate. But my hands feel figuratively tied to feeding the front line. Clueless Barbara is just along for the ride.
I know if we didn’t have her with us all day, I would feel more comfortable about all of this. I know we would all be less exhausted. I know we could take more orders from the group paying us to cook for the hospital workers (go to brooklynforlife.org to learn how you can help, and when I say help I mean give them lots of money!!). And with more orders, I could be paying my undocumented kitchen staff more money, which is the reason I’m doing this in the first place, because the government has yet to address the lack of a safety net for restaurant workers. My guys work hard and pay taxes but aren’t able to collect unemployment or stimulus checks or get access to health care—even when they’re in a situation like one of my favorite uninsured cooks who is sick at home with what seems to be COVID-19, which is deeply troubling.
But I can’t help value this time with Barbara anyway.
When we’re not running around, she “helps” me cook, essentially by making a huge mess. She likes to stir things, but it’s a little scary when it’s 10 pounds of boiling macaroni and cheese. And she is entirely in charge of putting unicorn stickers on the finished take-out boxes (I don’t want to steal any credit there). The cooks find my constant need to entertain her in itself entertaining, and I’m glad we can provide some comic relief in all of this. When she’s not feeling shy she will dance and insist that the cooks look at her iPad from time to time because sometimes a joke is so funny that it needs to be shared to really experience it, even when you’re three. The restaurant is starting to feel more like home for her instead of just a place where Daddy takes her in between brunch and dinner while Katherine finishes her shift and I get ready for dinner service.
A monster hiding in a pile of meatloaf sandwiches.
Photo by Katherine Pangaro
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