Introducing: Immigrant Kitchen
New programming from BIPOC Foodways Alliance for 2025
Many of you have come to know (and love!) our Table Series from 2023 and 2024. If you have attended a Table or supported us in any way, thank you!
In 2025, we plan to continue our Table series, with a Table tentatively scheduled for next month. Keep an eye out for that story– it is poised to be a very special and important edition.
Some of the feedback we have received about our programming is that more people would like to participate and have access.
This is (part of) where Immigrant Kitchen comes in.
As you are all aware, 2025 is a scary time in America. Our incoming administration has had vile things to say about our immigrant communities, and is making many of their lives hell.
We are almost all immigrants to this nation. Unless you are Native American or your ancestors were brought here as forced labor, your people are from elsewhere. And yet, the perpetual rhetoric around immigrants in this country are pernicious lies, and they are racist.
With Immigrant Kitchen, our goal is to tell true stories of the immigrant experience through the lens of food. As you know from our previous programming, we believe that food is the most powerful tool to foster understanding and empathy.
If you haven’t already, check out our year in review to see examples of some of the stories we plan to expand on in 2025 along with new ones, too.
Our goal is to officially launch Immigrant Kitchen this summer. You can expect larger and more frequent events, ticketed on a sliding scale, with continued opportunities for gratis seating and ways to pay-it-forward.
Immigrant Kitchen will be a place for food, yes, but also for storytelling, mutual sharing, and empathy building. Too often, food is disconnected from the stories that tether it. Most immigrant communities in America bring beautiful foods with them when they leave their countries and customs. They share these foods with the greater community in the form of restaurants, and we all relish the opportunity to eat Vietnamese, Mexican, Chinese, Ethiopian and countless other immigrant cuisines that make our lives so much richer. Unfortunately, very often, restaurants must divorce the rich stories from these foods– and perhaps more importantly– the human plight that brought them here for the sake of the bottom line.
With Immigrant Kitchen, we want to “build a better restaurant” so that those stories do not have to be left behind in order to appease the common denominator of the general public.
Building a better restaurant looks like a lot of things, and one of them includes not pushing the immigrant story to the back of the house in order to wash dishes or to prep the components for someone else’s idea of cuisine.
Immigrant Kitchen will instead bring those stories to the forefront– to the spotlight– where they belong. It also means paying everyone involved a wage befitting the work that they do, not overworking anyone to the point of exhaustion, and placing a reverent emphasis on people, not just plates of food.
As always, we will continue to uplift, archive, and share the stories from the perspective of women and elders (and men who learn from women) who are home cooks— the true carriers of cultural knowledge, history, and the predicaments that brought their families to this country.
We will keep a few surprises in store, but please note that we are planning a pilot of Immigrant Kitchen to take place in March, so keep an eye out.
Paid subscribers to this newsletter will get first crack at tickets, which are sure to sell out quickly.
Of course, all of this costs money. If you would like to support us, you can do so here.
As always, thank you for supporting BIPOC Foodways Alliance.