\n<\/p>\n
T<\/span>hroughout his lifetime, celebrated chef and author Anthony Bourdain was unequivocal in his belief that the restaurant industry in the US could not function without immigrant labor. These indispensable workers, Bourdain argued, were not only willing to do the jobs that most US-born citizens would look down upon, but also they did them better and faster.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople have differing opinions on what we should do about immigration in the future,\u201d Bourdain told the Houston Press <\/em>in 2007. \u201cBut let\u2019s be honest, at least, about who is cooking in America now.<\/em> Who we rely on \u2013 have relied on \u2013 for decades. The bald fact is that the entire restaurant industry in America would close down overnight, would never recover, if current immigration laws were enforced quickly and thoroughly across the board.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, the US restaurant industry employs millions of immigrant workers, both documented and undocumented, who now find themselves caught in the crosshairs of military-grade immigration policing that threatens their very existence. Marc Meyer\u2019s new book Voices from the Kitchen, a compendium of 27 gut-wrenching transcribed interviews with current and former employees of his restaurant group, gives a human face to these workers at a time when immigrants are being systematically dehumanized by nativist policies.<\/p>\n <\/span>Marc Meyer is the co-founder of the Bowery Group in New York City and author of Voices from the Kitchen.<\/span> Photograph: Jennifer Davidson<\/p>\n In 1999, Meyer co-founded the Bowery Group, which includes popular New York City restaurants such as Cookshop, Shuka, Shukette and Vic\u2019s. After working in professional kitchens for more than 40 years, he acutely understands how vital immigrants are to the restaurant workforce, both in the US and abroad. Inspired by oral historians Studs Terkel and Svetlana Alexievich, Meyer began conducting informal interviews with staff three years ago, stealing moments in prep kitchens and empty dining rooms, and transcribing the responses for archival purposes. A chance visit to Mexico and the encouragement of personal friends there convinced him to compile the stories into a full-length volume published in November by Beacon Press.<\/p>\n The book is not intended as a political statement. Meyer had been approached in the past to write cookbooks but never felt comfortable authoring a book that would omit the individuals behind the scenes \u2013 farmers, dishwashers, porters, bussers, and line cooks \u2013 without whom his restaurants would not be possible.<\/p>\n \u201cI have an extensive number of recipes, but something just wasn\u2019t sitting right with me,\u201d said Meyer. \u201cWe wouldn\u2019t have these beautiful ingredients. We wouldn\u2019t have the staff to produce the food. We wouldn\u2019t have people to build restaurants. We wouldn\u2019t have the guy who cleans the restaurant overnight and goes to a second job in the morning. These are the stories that make it work. That kept bouncing around in my mind.\u201d<\/p>\n According to a report by the National Restaurant Association this year, 22% of restaurant and food service employees in the US are born outside of the country. In some states \u2013 especially those with a higher concentration of independent establishments such as California, New York and Texas \u2013 this percentage exceeds 30%.<\/p>\n The subjects in Voices from the Kitchen come from all over the world \u2013 Bangladesh, Bosnia, Burkina Faso, Ecuador, Ireland and other countries \u2013 which Meyer said illustrates the diversity of the restaurant community, something he considers to be one of its greatest strengths. \u201cI was shocked by how some people\u2019s lives were threatened in their home countries or what they went through to get here,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n If I lose even a couple of key players on my kitchen team, my restaurants couldn\u2019t functionJamie Kenyon, executive chef and restaurant co-owner<\/p>\n Many of his staff work multiple jobs to survive and have been estranged from their families and their homelands for decades. The book includes the harrowing stories of immigrants like Jakeline, a former nun from Lima, Peru, who started as a prep cook and became a morning shift supervisor at Shuka. Back home, she was robbed of $30,000 in borrowed funds at gunpoint while running a makeshift clothing business and illegal currency exchange. Jenny, a line cook from Bogot\u00e1, Colombia, was stabbed by her abusive former spouse, puncturing one of her lungs and nearly killing her. Mohammed, a dishwasher from Gambia, went 23 years without seeing his parents. Jairo, a busser and food runner, learned that his grandfather had been kidnapped and murdered in his hometown near Puebla, Mexico, even after his family had paid his captors ransom.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is no single explanation as to what has moved countless people to seek jobs in the restaurants in New York,\u201d Meyer wrote in the book\u2019s preface. \u201cAll of us had something that we needed to leave behind \u2013 a need to hide, to escape, to break the patterns of the past.\u201d<\/p>\n Some of Meyer\u2019s subjects have risen to the most senior positions in his company. Anna Marie McCullagh, an Irish immigrant who overstayed her J-1 visa after finishing college 35 years ago, is currently director of operations and a partner (she\u2019s since been granted legal status). Carlha Azcona, a Dominican immigrant who put herself through culinary school and worked her way up from line cook to chef de cuisine, now runs the kitchen at Shuka, the Bowery Group\u2019s Middle Eastern and Mediterranean-inspired restaurant in downtown.<\/p>\n <\/span>Mohammed, a dishwasher from Gambia who worked at Cookshop in New York City, shares his story in Voices from the Kitchen.<\/span> Photograph: Photo courtesy of the Bowery Group<\/p>\n Their stories illustrate how the restaurant business has been a consistent and reliable source of opportunity for immigrants. But many of these workers are often overqualified for the entry-level jobs they\u2019re offered. \u201cA lot of us come from backgrounds where we had jobs that we were proud of doing,\u201d said Fatou Ouattara, the chef and co-owner of Ak\u00e2di in Portland, Oregon, who immigrated to the US from C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire in 2009 to escape political unrest. \u201cBack home, I worked for my dad in finance, and I never thought when I moved here that I would be washing dishes and cleaning toilets to get started. But that\u2019s the story for a lot of us.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00c1ngel V\u00e1squez, a former server at Shukette, was a lawyer and activist before he defected from Venezuela in 2016 to avoid political persecution. Despite his previous career, he came to the US speaking little English and took a job as a dishwasher. Today, he manages an Italian restaurant on weekends to supplement his income as a patient navigator in a medical office. \u201cI\u2019ve been learning to do different things during my time here,\u201d said V\u00e1squez, \u201cwhich I think has helped me grow as a person.\u201d<\/p>\n But even though V\u00e1squez is earning more money than he could back home, he feels increasingly anxious about the rising threat of immigration raids across the country. He said he almost never goes out anymore, despite having proper documentation, to avoid the risk of detention.<\/p>\n Restaurant owners are feeling anxious, too. \u201cIf I lose even a couple of key players on my kitchen team, my restaurants couldn\u2019t function,\u201d said Jamie Kenyon, executive chef and co-owner of Bottino and \u2018ino in New York City. Kenyon, himself an immigrant who came to the US with his family from Manchester, England, when he was 14 years old, is familiar with the challenges of proving yourself in a new country, having earned his stripes in such acclaimed restaurants as Daniel and Bar Boulud. \u201cMy kitchen staff understands the DNA of my business, which is irreplaceable. They feel pride in the restaurant.\u201d<\/p>\n Rosa Maria Sanchez has worked with the Bowery Group in various roles for more than 15 years. Although most guests who dine at Rosie\u2019s in the East Village would never know it, the casual Mexican restaurant is named for the soft-spoken server from El Salvador, who was part of its opening team in 2015. Her journey to this country has had many tragic twists and turns \u2013 she was sexually abused by her father as a young child and her caravan was viciously attacked while attempting to gain passage to the US. But Sanchez hopes that sharing her story of resilience will remind people that immigrants are hardworking people who deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was like therapy,\u201d she said. \u201cBut I hope my story shows people that there is always a light at the end of a dark tunnel, and we always need to look for that light.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Throughout his lifetime, celebrated chef and author Anthony Bourdain was unequivocal in his belief that the restaurant industry in the US could not function without immigrant labor. These indispensable workers, Bourdain argued, were not only willing to do the jobs that most US-born citizens would look down upon, but also they did them better and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36325,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[20305,20306,19827,20307,150,20304,2161,1623,514],"class_list":{"0":"post-36324","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-chronicling","9":"tag-hardships","10":"tag-immigrant","11":"tag-kitchens","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-restaurateur","14":"tag-staff","15":"tag-stories","16":"tag-work"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36324\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/36325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}