Thoughts about Kitchens and the Declaration of Independence

Two hundred and fifty years later, we’re still fighting to make that promise mean what it says.

I’ve spent almost my entire adult life in restaurants. I’ve worked stations next to line cooks who came here with nothing but a work ethic and a dream. I’ve watched dishwashers send money home to families they haven’t seen in years. I’ve built two restaurants — Dandan and EsterEv — with people who show up every single day, exhausted, underpaid relative to what they give, because they believe in something more. A life here in the good old US.

We all memorized the line in school:

all men are created equal, endowed with certain unalienable rights, among these life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It sounds like a slogan until you’ve spent enough time in a kitchen to watch what it actually looks like when people are denied it. A line cook who can’t see a doctor. A dishwasher afraid to leave his apartment. A prep cook working two jobs and still not able to save enough. That founding promise wasn’t supposed to have an asterisk next to it depending on your job title or your papers.

So when people talk about immigration like it’s an abstract policy debate, I have to laugh a little. It’s not abstract to me. It’s my kitchen. It’s my team. It’s the people who make it possible for YOU to eat and receive the plate that’s gonna make YOUR night. Most of us are immigrants, or we’re one or two generations removed from someone who crossed an ocean or a border hoping their kid could have a shot at those same unalienable rights. That’s not a talking point. That’s just true.

And that’s why I can’t stay quiet about ICE. I’ve seen what fear does to a workforce. I’ve seen good, hardworking people afraid to go to the doctor, afraid to report a wage theft, afraid to just live their lives, because the threat of being ripped away from their families hangs over everything. That’s not what liberty looks like. That’s cruelty dressed up as enforcement. We can secure a border without terrorizing the people who are already here doing the work nobody else wants to do. Abolish ICE isn’t a slogan to me — it’s basic decency, and it’s the bare minimum of what “life and liberty” should mean for our communities.

But it doesn’t stop there, because the same fight for dignity runs through everything else on the ballot this year.

Healthcare. I’ve had employees put off going to the doctor because they couldn’t afford it, and then show up sicker, missing more work, in worse shape than if we’d just taken care of them from the start. You can’t pursue happiness — you can’t pursue anything — from a hospital bed you can’t afford to be in. Affordable healthcare isn’t a luxury. It’s how you keep a workforce, and a family, standing upright.

Free and fair elections. The Declaration is built on one idea underneath all the others: that governments derive their power from the consent of the governed. Not from whoever controls the rulebook. Not from whoever rewrites the outcome before the votes are even counted. I don’t think I need to explain to anyone paying attention why a so-called “Save America Act” designed to manipulate results should terrify every single one of us, regardless of party. The moment consent stops meaning anything, none of the rest of this holds.

Food security for kids. I feed people for a living. The idea that any child in this country goes to school hungry, in a nation as wealthy as ours, is a moral failure we’ve just decided to live with. There’s no pursuit of happiness on an empty stomach. I refuse to accept that as normal and I don’t even like kids.

Childcare and paid family leave. I run a business with about 70 employees between two restaurants. I know exactly what it costs when someone can’t afford childcare, or has to choose between a paycheck and staying home with a sick kid or a newborn. That’s not a personal failing on their part — that’s a system that was never built for working people in the first place, and it makes a mockery of the idea that everyone gets an equal shot at life and liberty.

Affordable education. The next generation of cooks, servers, owners, whoever they end up being — they shouldn’t have to mortgage their entire future just to get a shot at it. That’s not equality. That’s a toll booth on the pursuit of happiness.

I didn’t get into restaurants to get into politics, but when you spend your life around people who are doing everything right and still getting squeezed at every turn, you start to see how connected all of this actually is. It’s not a coincidence that the same people fighting for immigrant dignity are fighting for healthcare, for fair elections, for kids not going hungry, for parents not going broke. It’s one fight, and it’s the same fight this country was supposedly founded on: that ordinary people are entitled to life, liberty, and a real shot at happiness — not just the ones who can afford it.

That’s why I’m not staying on the sidelines this cycle. That’s why I’m speaking up. And that’s why, on August 11th, I’m voting like my restaurants — and my staff, and my community — depend on it.

Because they do. And because two hundred and fifty years later, we’re still fighting to make that promise mean what it says.