A Family Tradition

A legacy of innovation and goodwill has brought enormous satisfaction to restaurateurs Van Haidas ’97 and Michael Haidas ’98—and to the Cape Cod community their family has served for three generations.

Story by Alexander Gelfand
Photographs by Simon Simard

If you’re inclined to think of the phrase “History repeats itself” as either a warning or a lament, consider the delightfully recursive story of the knack, a mini-chain of restaurants founded by brothers Van Haidas ’97 and Michael Haidas ’98 on Cape Cod. Approaching the order window at either of the two knack locations, your first impression is most likely to be that of a refreshingly modern take on the classic Massachusetts beach shack and its nostalgia-inducing menu of seafood, burgers, and soft serve—an experience that generations of visitors to the Cape have enjoyed on a hot summer’s day.

But while that vibe is wholly intentional, it does not capture the whole story. For the knack also represents the latest iteration of an oft-repeated family tale—one of seeking broader horizons, only to be drawn back years later to a place that was a source of great purpose and pride, and of carrying on a family tradition of treating the community it serves with fairness and respect.

Van and Michael’s parents and grandparents launched their own eateries on the Cape in the 1950s and 1970s. And just like their father, Jim, and his brother, Connie, Van and Michael left the Cape to attend school, built careers in New York City, and ultimately returned to the place where they grew up to raise their own families and build food-service empires.

In 1953, Van and Michael’s paternal grandparents established the Kream ’n Kone, a soft-serve stand that evolved into a seafood restaurant, which is still in operation not far from where the brothers grew up. (Their maternal grandfather, meanwhile, had a lunch counter in New Orleans. “It’s really in the blood,” Van says.)

Jim and Connie earned MBAs from Cornell and founded a Wall Street brokerage firm together. But after more than a decade in New York City, the stock market crash of the early 1970s and ensuing bear market persuaded the elder Haidas brothers to return to the Cape and enter the family business. In 1977, they opened Cooke’s Seafood in Orleans, followed by another in Hyannis a year later. There Van and Michael spent much of their childhood. (The Orleans restaurant is today run by another branch of the family. Jim and his wife, Frances, eventually opened a third Cooke’s in Mashpee.)

“There are stories of me putting Michael in the flour bin,” says Van, who is older by one year. “We would chase the workers with tongs and pinch everyone.” As kids, the two stood on egg crates to punch out onions for onion rings; as teenagers, they worked full-time during the summers, even after shipping off to Milton—Michael as a sophomore, Van as a junior.

By then, the two were eager to leave both the Cape and the restaurant business. “We had grown up in it and done it for so long that we were ready for something new,” Van says.

For Van, that meant earning a degree in classical civilization with a minor in economics from Colby College, his father’s alma mater. Not sure what to do after graduating in 2001, he worked at Cooke’s for the summer, saved his money, and spent the next nine months backpacking around the globe.

When he got back, his father arranged a summer internship with an old Wall Street colleague, and a stint fetching coffee for traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange led to a full-blown career. “I became a broker myself and stayed on the floor for 10 years,” says Van, who spent his free time exploring the endless variety of restaurants across the city. “There’s no place like New York for food: there’s always something new, and you never get bored,” he says.

Michael, meanwhile, graduated from Brown in 2002 with a degree in history and an interest in law and government. He was accepted to Northwestern Law, in Chicago, but deferred enrollment to work for an NGO in South Africa for a year. After completing his law degree, he joined Van in New York City, where he worked as a litigation attorney at the white-shoe firm Shearman & Sterling. He found his true legal calling, however, doing pro bono work on a wrongful-imprisonment case involving a man named Carlos Morillo, who had been convicted of murder in 1991. “There was basically no evidence tying him to it,” says Michael, who served as co-counsel to the Legal Aid Society, which provides legal services to low-income New Yorkers.

In the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, the firm offered its associates a year’s partially paid leave, and Michael transitioned to a position as a public defender with Legal Aid in the Bronx. He loved the job—in addition to his official caseload, he continued to work on the Morillo case, helping to exonerate the man in 2011—but it was also draining, and after five years he knew he was nearing the end of the road. “I didn’t have much more in me,” he says.

The timing was propitious. Van had already decided to head back to the Cape to raise a family in the close-knit community that he and Michael had known as kids; and the fact that their father was ill provided an added incentive to return home and try his hand at the restaurant business. He left the trading floor after celebrating Michael’s wedding in May 2012 and was scouting possible locations with his father by June. For nearly two years, every property they lined up fell through; until one day, while driving through Orleans, Van happened across a taco stand that had sprung up on the site of an old Dairy Queen. Something about the place—its visibility, the way the road turned into it—intrigued him. He brought his father out to see it. They ate a taco. Van called Michael. And the idea of the knack began to take shape.

(The name has nothing to do with the rock band best known for “My Sharona”—a song more than a few customers have sung while approaching the counter. Instead, the brothers wondered if they could build a brand around a word; and while flipping through a dictionary in Michael’s Brooklyn apartment, Van stumbled across “knack.” “Knackburger” was an early candidate, but didn’t seem quite seafood-friendly enough. “Would you buy a lobster roll from a place called Knackburger?” Michael asks.)

By then, Michael and his wife, Erica, were expecting their first child; and when Van asked Michael to join him in the restaurant venture, the siren song of the Cape—made even more compelling by a shared desire to spend time with Jim, who was struggling with kidney and heart disease—was too strong to resist. What Michael had originally envisioned as a temporary paternal-leave arrangement turned into a permanent relocation that saw the brothers fully recapitulating the journey their father and uncle had made more than three decades earlier.

But Van and Michael were not content simply to repeat the past. Rather than recreating Cooke’s, they wanted to update the traditional counter-service model, raising it to a level that could compete with the best of New York City.

That meant adapting what had most impressed them—including locally sourced ingredients and an artisanal approach to production—to the constraints of a small roadside stand doing a high-volume business.

There were hiccups. When Van and Michael opened the knack for a brief trial run in 2014, they were determined to make everything from scratch—including the french fries, which they cut by hand, parbaked on sheet pans, and fried to order. “Before we even opened,” Van says, “our dad was like, ‘That’s a mistake. Don’t even try it.’”

He was right: Despite assistance from Van’s now-wife, Vivian; their general manager, Chris; and Michael’s friend Sam, from law school, the task took so much time and effort that they were clocking in at 4 a.m. and out at 1 a.m. every day. Within just a few days, they’d switched to frozen fries. (It didn’t seem to hurt them: In 2024, the knack’s fries were voted best on the Cape by readers of the Cape Cod Times.)

When the stand opened for real in a completely redesigned building in 2015, everything on the menu except the fries and buns—including the pickles on the burgers and the peanut butter in the shakes—was made in-house. The meat for the burgers was ground fresh every day, and the seafood was sourced from the same local fishermen that Jim and Connie had used.

Even the batter for the fried seafood and onion rings had a local origin: It was a variation on the recipe that Jim’s mother had originally invented for the Kream ’n Kone, versions of which have since spread through the family network to a half-dozen restaurants on the Cape.

That first full season brought both joy and sorrow: The knack was booming, Van married Vivian—and Jim passed away. But not before he’d had a chance to see his sons succeed at the family business. “He couldn’t believe what we were doing,” Van says.

As if getting one restaurant off the ground wasn’t enough, in 2016 Van and Michael acquired Cooke’s Seafood in Hyannis. (The owner, who had previously bought the business from Jim, had himself decided to retire.) “We didn’t necessarily want it at that point, but there was so much legacy and nostalgia that we didn’t want it to go to someone else,” Van says.

For five years, Van and Michael operated both restaurants. Cooke’s, however, was in slow decline owing to changing tastes—“People don’t go out for whole-belly clams three nights a week anymore,” Michael says—and an aging clientele. So when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and demand for takeout from the knack surged even as Cooke’s dine-in business suffered, the brothers decided to turn the Hyannis Cooke’s into a second knack.

There were other considerations as well. Although it now boasts a heated wooden enclosure that can seat 44 customers, the knack in Orleans initially had only limited outdoor seating under an awning, making it more of a summer destination than a winter one. But the brothers wanted to provide stable, year-round employment for their full-time staff rather than paring down during the off-season. “We wanted to keep people year-in, year-out, and not have them scramble or go on unemployment over the winter,” Michael says.

So in 2022, they reopened Cooke’s in Hyannis as a second, larger branch of the knack with indoor seating for 100 and outdoor seating for 30. The brothers created a large commissary in the basement of the Hyannis location that now handles food prep for both knacks, with a cold truck running supplies to Orleans daily.

Today Van and Michael spend less time working the line and more time managing a full-time staff of 35 that can swell to 100 during peak season, supplemented mostly by college students home for summer vacation. (They’ve even begun bringing their kids in to help out, just as their own parents did.) And their commitment to their workers, and to the surrounding community, has become part of their brand.

In addition to year-round employment for their core staff, the brothers provide health insurance, paid time off, and higher-than-average wages. They also donate 10 percent of all dessert sales to local charities—a number that recently surpassed $250,000, distributed across 10 organizations involved in everything from healthcare to food and housing security.

Like their emphasis on fresh homemade products, those commitments mean more work and higher expenses. But they inspire considerable loyalty from the knack’s clientele and its employees. “We just have so much goodwill in the community, because people understand that doing all this doesn’t come easy, and they appreciate it,” Michael says.

That goodwill translates into repeat customers and low employee turnover—a virtuous circle that refutes the idea that success in the fiercely competitive restaurant business has to be a zero-sum game in which one party’s gain is another’s loss.

“We learned a lot of this through our life experiences, including, first and foremost, seeing how our family treated the people who worked for them, and our experience at Milton—what community means, and how to be good citizens,” Michael says. “We’ve taken all that and said, ‘Okay, there are things we’re not going to compromise on.’ And it’s worked out very well for the community, and for us.”

Alexander Gelfand is a freelance journalist living in New York City whose work has appeared in such publications as Wired, The Economist, and The New York Times.