This NYC restaurant feeds food-insecure communities with immigrant cuisine and a taste of home

“When you're feeding people, you're really not just nourishing them with food. You're nourishing them emotionally and mentally as well.”

The Migrant Kitchen has served over 3.5 million meals to communities in need in NYC

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- It's really important for us that we serve those meals with dignity and respect. Because food is not just survival, but it's a taste of home.

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DANIEL DORADO: The Migrant Kitchen is a fast casual restaurant in New York City that focuses on fusion of Middle Eastern and Latin cuisine. My name is Daniel Dorado. I'm the Executive Chef of Migrant Kitchen.

JACLINN TANNEY: My name is Jaclinn Tanney and I am a co-founder and President of The Migrant Kitchen Initiative. The Migrant Kitchen initiative is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and we work to end the hunger crisis in New York City. For every meal that's purchased, we donate a meal to someone in need. We focus primarily on communities of immigrants and those in need.

And what we do is we prepare culturally relevant meals that are made by our chefs in our kitchens and we distribute them to the communities. If we are in a Latinx community, we are producing meals that have those flavors. We do a roasted chicken, we do rice and beans, we do plantains. If we're going into a Muslim community, we have vegetarian and halal options. If we're going into a Caribbean community, we do jerk chicken and a mango salsa with all of the components that feel like home for that community.

- Hello, everyone. We're back here at in our kitchen today on Monday and we are serving, Chef, what are we serving today?

- We are serving pasta Bolognese and garlic bread.

DANIEL DORADO: The pandemic shut New York City down. We were able to reach out to our network of chefs and cooks and bring on board close to 150 people so that we could serve over 10,000 meals a day. But we started with health care workers who had no place to eat while they were still working at the hospitals that were overwhelmed with COVID. Those who work in New York City in the restaurant industry are not the people who get the unemployment benefits. So they were at home with their families, with no money coming in, and we wanted to make sure we did the best we could for them.

JACLINN TANNEY: We were able to do, from our start through now, over 3.5 million meals because the community came out and supported us.

DANIEL DORADO: I can remember Sunday dinners at my grandmother's house growing up. It was the time for the family to get together, a community to get together. The smile, the look on somebody's face when you bring them an amazing meal, that's a feeling that you'll take with you for a long time. Feeding people, you're really not just nourishing them with food, you're nourishing them emotionally and mentally as well.

JACLINN TANNEY: It's bringing people together around a table to share stories, to share cultures, and you do that and you relate to one another through the meal that's on the table.

DANIEL DORADO: And I think that it's nice that we can actually go ahead and give that back to the community here in New York City, a city of over 8 million people with such a diverse population. It's nice to be able to bring people together with food.

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