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.
Together they make thousands of meals a day for health care workers and people who are food insecure. This is the Migrant Kitchen.
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NewsTranscript
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.