The Migrant Kitchen provides jobs for immigrants during the pandemic

Brut America

This catering company provides jobs to immigrants who lost their livelihoods during the pandemic.   Together they make thousands of meals a day for health care workers and people who are food insecure. This is the Migrant Kitchen.

Transcript

00:00I would like to make a shawarma with impossible meat.

00:13We make a Mediterranean and Latino mix.

00:18I came to USA to first of all to be safe and secondly to make a better life for me

00:31and for my family and I tried to make it happen and then I believe I can do and

00:40now I can say I made it.

00:48I feel really bad when the restaurant shut down.

00:59I have a family and I think how I can figure it out, they pay the rent, the food and everything.

01:07That's what was scary, lose the job and also is getting sick or lose the life too.

01:18I think the inspiration for us is Nasser's Palestinian background and my parents' Mexican

01:34heritage and we found a way to meld some flavors that I think work together, right?

01:39You know, while they have the shawarma spit in the Middle East, you have El Trompo in

01:43Mexico where they're making the same style of meat on those machines so we decided we

01:49wanted to marry that and come up with something new.

01:51I mean, I myself am an immigrant, you know, I came here from Palestine, 17 years old with

01:56$400 in my pocket two weeks before 9-11, truly not the best of times for an Arab immigrant

02:00in New York and we all saw the abuse that happens to a lot of people in kitchens or

02:06in low-wage industries, right?

02:08Deliveries, farming and the pandemic really shone light on the fact that a lot of the

02:18people that were able to make this country run were the essential workers, not just the

02:24healthcare workers but like the delivery drivers, the cooks, the farmers, the people who make

02:32sure that your food is being sustained, you know?

02:36I knew a lot of people who were calling me and looking for work because they were let

02:59go because their restaurants were closed, they didn't have the social security safety

03:04net or the social safety net of unemployment insurance and they were at home, they had

03:08their families to look after, you know?

03:10So we did our best to raise more funds, to feed more people, to employ more people and

03:15that was the main goal, I think.

03:17It wasn't just feeding people, it was getting people back to work who needed the money.

03:20Last year we fed three million people or did three million meals.

03:34We are operational globally, we are in the refugee camps in Lebanon, we are in Jerusalem,

03:40we are now trying to do the Colombia-Venezuela border.

03:44Obviously, we want to be in a business that's profitable but I think there's definitely

03:52a way that we can go ahead and share a little bit more of those profits with the people

03:56that make up the company.

03:57When we started this whole thing, we were like, okay, we're going to do this catering

04:01business, it's scaled, can we pay people above minimum wage?

04:04Yeah, we can, we pay them 20 to 25 an hour.

04:06Can we hire people who, you know, do not look like what, you know, the major food magazines

04:11highlight?

04:14Yeah.

04:29After 20 years of being a chef in this industry and knowing that when you go into all these

04:35meetings and you sit down and you talk about squeezing the bottom line, you're just talking

04:39about squeezing people and that's it at the end of the day.

04:41So, people are not oranges and they're not lemons and they're not limes.

04:45So, we need to figure out a better way to move forward in this industry here in New

04:49York City and I think that every restaurateur, every person in this business can do that.

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