Kyra Novak is a manager and bartender at Founding Fathers Bar. She has worked at the bar for the past three years. Her family is from Port Richmond in the Northeast. Besides her job as a bartender she is also going to school at Montgomery County Community College to become a Physical Therapist assistant.
What makes customers return and some even become regulars?
I think the staff we try and make it memorable. We want people to come back or that’s my biggest thing. I like being friends with regulars, but I do have my boundaries. Here I want to be involved and get to know them. We are more strict on hiring and have a standard. We won’t hire someone who will serve you your burger and fries and never talk to you again. We want a bit of personality.
Can you describe the routine of Tottenham matchdays?
I have worked the during the last two games. Almost every game the bar is packed and the crowds are insane. We open at 8:40 am if kickoff is at 9:00, but fans will wait outside and wait at 8:00 am. We do our best to work with the people the night before to set up the bar, like normally we don’t have mats out, but for 9:00 am games the bartenders from the previous night will lay out the mats. The day of the Spurs games we will half fill Guinness’s before people come in. When we open we’ll get around 20-28 orders of Guinness and prep waters. We will order extra kegs of Guinness. On Sundays we will shuffle the Spurs fans out so we can bring in the football fans.
Why have you stayed here?
I like the vibes of the bar. There is good energy and the people who come into the bar bring good vibes. I have worked at other places where you go into a bar or restaurant and you usually see the clientele that come in all the time and they are not your favorite people. This place I know the clientele, and everyone is happy to see everyone. Our bar customers make friends with other bar customers and regulars make friends with other regulars. This is a good place to meet people. It’s not your typical bar where you hangout with just the friends you came.
Like our Tottenham group, we have a club that support the Tottenham Hotspurs. That group has gotten bigger every year. The group is friendly with us and we’re friendly with them and we’re on first name basis.
How did the fan club find itself at Founding Fathers?
I wasn’t here when the fan club officially started, but I always get asked why we became a soccer bar in the first place. There aren’t a lot of soccer bars in the city, we were like if there aren’t that many then why don’t we become one? There’s a lot of bars who have Arsenal and Liverpool fans and we found out about Tottenham and how their fans are similar to Philly fans.
How are the similar are the fanbases?
Our fanbases are aggressive in a good way, like how when the Eagles lose our entire city is heartbroken and the team let us down. Like the Tottenham Spurs when they lose they feel so down. Their sports are their lives like here in Philly where we rely on our sports. I’m happy to live in a city with such a good fanbase.
Especially since I grew up playing sports and I would not know what to do if I lived in a city that didn’t love sports. I grew up in a sports family.
What sports did you play?
I played soccer my whole life, lacrosse in high school, right now I play tennis for fun and bike a lot. Growing up I went to a lot of sports game because of my dad. He was a huge hockey head. My first Flyers game I was probably six months old, I had the little headphones on. My whole family grew up here in the city. My mom isn’t into sports which is funny, but my dad’s side of the family were the crazy fans which I loved.
Do you have a favorite sports memory?
I have a few, in 2008 I was in 5th grade and I went to the Phillies game when they won. When you’re in 5thgrade you don’t really know too much of what’s going on so you’re just experiencing an insane memory. I still remember to this day how everyone reacted and my friend called me up and said “you’re going to skip school” and I was like “ok!” I remember telling my dad and he said, “I’m excited for you to experience that.” And when the Eagles won the Superbowl ten years later I got to experience that since I was going to school at Temple. That was also insane, but the difference I was able to do more. It was awesome to live in the city at that time, running with my friends down on Broad Street. My last favorite Philadelphia memory was I went to the second NLCS game. The Phillies won 10-0 and that was another insane experience. The atmosphere was roaring. I felt like whole entire stadium was shaking, like no one sat down for the first four innings which was so fun. We literally made the team who they are. They have their own personality and we have our own. We just bounce off each other. An interesting fact there was like no crime in the city and I think it’s sports related cause everybody is watching their team and that made me happy.
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