From The Washington Post: "At a New York relief kitchen, urgency meets empathy as immigrants create thousands of meals a day"
This story was originally published in The Washington Post, and covers the historical and more recent actions of The Migrant Kitchen.
At 5:30 a.m. in a godforsaken industrial crevice of Queens, Daniel Dorado recently waited in a line of mostly undocumented restaurant workers before the opening of Restaurant Depot, a wholesaler like Costco on steroids available only to the industry. His goal was 2,000 meal containers, and, boom, he was in and out in 12 minutes.
The containers would soon be packed with sumptuous entrees: citrus garlic salmon with Cuban black beans and coconut herb rice, or moussaka-stuffed zucchini with dirty rice and beans, or mojo chicken with chimichurri and roasted potatoes with grilled shishito peppers. “But really there’s only one meal we serve,” said Dorado, as he loaded up his SUV. In response to the president’s anti-immigrant sentiments, “We make Donald Trump eat his words.”
Dorado, an American-born son of a Mexican immigrant, has been running what is probably New York’s largest restaurant-quality active cooking operation during the pandemic lockdown, serving 6,000 meals a day. Last year he and two former colleagues from Ilili, a Lebanese-Mediterranean restaurant in the Flatiron District, formed the Migrant Kitchen NYC, ostensibly a catering company, which orchestrated an alliance with four other kitchens. Leading the operation are Dorado, who has been a chef for 20 years, the team’s heart; Nasser Jaber, a Palestinian immigrant who was an Ilili waiter, the team’s social media-manic mouth; and Kelly McCaffery, an event manager from the Astoria neighborhood in Queens who was Ilili’s catering director, the team’s brain.
As much attention as beleaguered restaurants have gotten in the pandemic’s lockdown, far less attention has been paid to catering companies, which can produce food on a massive scale but not within the limits of a la carte orders available through delivery apps. Enter Migrant Kitchen. They pay wages of $20 to $25 an hour in their kitchen, Jaber said, and with the four other kitchens pooled 40 largely undocumented workers from Make The Road, a civil rights group — plus workers and volunteers who handle packing and delivery. Migrant Kitchen’s GoFundMe campaign has raised more than $100,000 so far. And, Dorado said, celebrity chef José Andrés’s World Central Kitchen also agreed to pay Migrant Kitchen $7 per meal (less than the $10 average it pays restaurants) for up to 1,200 meals a day, increasing its reach greatly: What started out on March 13 with 100 meals to hospitals and shelters quickly grew to 6,000 meals a day to 13 hospitals, four food pantries, three homeless shelters, three senior centers, public housing complexes in the Bronx and Queens, a Queens mosque and dozens of covid-19-infected families. The needs change dramatically day to day, too often because of hospitalizations or deaths. …