FSR September 2022

Perspectives

What’s the story behind the Planet Word Museum location? TI: The founders of the museum actu ally came to Immigrant Food for brunch one day, and they said, ‘We’re looking for partners. We want a restaurant, but not just any restaurant—a restaurant that aligns with our values.’ It was the per fect partnership. e space is very beautiful. We cre ated this bar top that is inlaid with book covers and letters written by immigrants and the word ‘home’ in 28 languages. We wanted to create a special cocktail menu with seven different specialty cocktails from seven different continents. Each is named after a literary work from that continent. For example, the Asia cocktail is named Siddhartha. e North Amer ica cocktail is named Beloved. Enrique and Mile were also inspired to create a more upscale evening menu. Do you plan to continue growing? TI: Absolutely. at was always part of the business plan. e idea is to have five locations in D.C. So hopefully in the next one to two years, we’ll open two more in Washington, and then the goal is to expand beyond that. Philadelphia is a city that’s been named, given the proximity, young population, college town, etc. Atlanta is somewhere that’s also been named and obviously Texas is something that we hear a lot. But we’d love to stay a lit tle bit more local for our first expansion, and, hopefully, if everything goes right beyond that, we’ll see what’s possible. Can we expect to see more ‘cause casual’ restaurants in the future? TI: A question we get is: Are we alienat ing people because we’re so out there in terms of our values? e answer to that is actually no. More and more, we see people wanting to put their money where their values are and wanting to support and spend their money with companies that they believe in. You see it in retail and so many things, but you really haven’t seen it that much in food and beverage yet. We want to be part of that wave.

IMMIGRANT FOOD OPENED ITS MOST UPSCALE LOCATION IN PLANET WORD MUSEUM LAST YEAR.

IRENA STEIN

different. It’s not just the recipes from your Italian grandmother or your Chi nese uncle—it’s also new things that come out of that fusion. We also want to advocate and educate on behalf of immigrants. We partnered with five immigrant-services NGOs that do incredible work. ey’re local, and that way we can make the biggest con tribution; we can donate our space for volunteer training, English classes, cit izenship lessons—whatever they need, they can use our space at no cost. Many people feel very strongly about the issue of immigration, but they’re busy with their own lives, so we try to make it easy. We have a food menu, a drink menu, and an engagement menu. Every Sunday, we put out five different ways that you can engage with the com munity, whether it’s a donation or sign ing a petition or joining a march. Education is another cornerstone of Immigrant Food. How does that come into play? TI: There is so much misinformation about immigration. I worked at think tanks, and Peter did, too. ey put out great work, but it’s often geared toward experts, so we created what we call the ‘ ink Table.’ We take one issue on immi gration, whether it’s Dreamers, sanc tuary cities, immigration courts, vot

ing rights, you name it. We speak with experts. We’ve hadmembers of Congress. We’ve had Tom Friedman of The New York Times talk about climate change and migration. We’ve had Reshma Sau jani, the founder of Girls Who Code, talk about female entrepreneurship and immigration. And then, we create four-minute vid eos, infographics, and short columns about the issue. at way, when you’re scrolling through Instagram, you get some real facts and learn something new about a topic you may have heard of, but you didn’t know a lot about. Given so many global cuisines, how do you create a cohesive menu? MILE MONTEZUMA: How we start is we recognize all the spices or ingredients that different cuisines use. en we mix them up like, ‘Oh, you can find cumin in Mexican cuisine but also in Asia.’ at is how we create the bowls that we have right now. So you can find different fla vors that go hand in hand because they use similar spices in many cultures and things like that. But it has been a chal lenge because we’re trying to do differ ent cuisines in just one dish. For me, I’m always reading about different cultures or the products that you can find in dif ferent places. And then I try to connect all the dots.

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SEPTEMBER 2022