When your father is Han Solo and Indiana Jones, the road ahead can look pretty clear and most people would expect the next generation to join the Hollywood industry, but for Harrison Ford‘s oldest son, Ben, it wasn’t the obvious path. He walked past the film sets and went into the kitchen.Chef Ben Ford is now a restaurateur and cookbook author based in California. Yet his story isn’t one of rejecting his famous father. When asked how growing up in a creative family shaped his career, he told Williams-Sonoma, “There was freedom to explore in my family.” That freedom, it seems, mattered more than any red carpet.It’s easy to assume that the children of famous actors have only two choices, to either follow the parent or step away from the spotlight entirely. Ben chose a completely different option to pick up the habits learned at home, like patience, hard work, and a love of making things, and put them to use in a completely different world.Let’s look at how a movie star’s son built a name in the kitchen away from hsi father’s world in Hollywood
Harrison Ford’s son chose the kitchen over Hollywood: How he built a career outside his father’s world
Ben Ford is a celebrity chef and restaurateur, the oldest son of Harrison Ford among his five children, including , Willard, Malcolm, Georgia and Liam.
A home full of tools and food
Ben’s love of making things started early. The Philadelphia Inquirer, a daily newspaper, reports that he began cooking holiday dinners for his family at age 12, in an old ranger station that always needed fixing. It adds that Harrison was a carpenter before he became famous and passed his love of DIY projects to his son.Ben told the paper, “My dad always had a workshop next to our house.” In a Williams-Sonoma interview, he said his whole family cooked and gardened, adding, “Gardening was the first step in me becoming a chef.”Followed by this, Ben trained at the California Culinary Academy and then worked at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, a restaurant known for local, seasonal ingredients. He later cooked in Los Angeles kitchens such as Opus, Campanile and Eclipse, and was executive chef at The Farm of Beverly Hills.
He helped pioneer the gastropub movement in the United States
Ford’s Filling Station was built around, cooking over wood fire, and a well-run kitchen behind the scenes. It later grew into different kinds of spaces, including an airport location at LAX and a hotel location at LA Live. This taught Ford how to take one idea and make it work in places of different sizes, with different limits and different ways of serving guests, without losing its quality.According to Benford.com, over his career, Ford says he has designed and built more than 20 restaurants of many types. He uses on a system-based way of working that he learned by doing the job himself, from the first idea through construction to daily service. He has also advised on a wide range of hospitality projects.Today he works through his company, CraftDriven, with developers, architects and founders who run their own businesses. He helps them with commercial kitchen design, building prototypes and planning their concepts using his back to front approach.While Ben took his career into cooking, Harrison’s other children, Georgia followed her famous father’s footsteps in acting, while Malcolm took on a career in music, which he shared in his second marriage to late screenwriter Melissa Mathison..