Local governments rarely look to independent restaurants to solve community hunger. Jacob Bindman is making the connection with the SF New Deal.

At just 9 years old, Jacob Bindman got his first food job: volunteering for CUESA, the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture, a San Francisco nonprofit that runs the city’s famed Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. The knives and the fire of the cooking demos drew him in, but it was the connection to the bigger food system and the people who create it that kept him in the food and restaurant world.

Now 23, Bindman is the director of service operations for SF New Deal, a nonprofit he co-founded with his friend and mentor Lenore Estrada in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. After the city shuttered restaurants last spring, the pair saw an opportunity to support those businesses with cash while providing good food to community members in need. They secured a million-dollar pledge from a tech CEO — a friend of Estrada’s who was looking for a way to aid small businesses — and quickly got to work, paying restaurants to make meals and forging partnerships with local activists, organizers, and groups to distribute the food. One year into SF New Deal’s effort, Bindman now leads a team of more than 20 people working on multiple feeding programs. And he has also been working with the city of San Francisco to encourage local government officials to contract with small businesses instead of huge corporations.

Eater: How are you making change in the food world?

Jacob Bindman: One of the things I’ve been really excited about with SF New Deal is thinking about how sustainability extends beyond the very literal agricultural meaning — to understand what the sustainability of food systems at large looks like as it relates to fair wages, worker practices, and distribution channels. And I think a huge portion of what sustainability looks like has to do with the extent to which communities are in partnership to support one another. Everyone needs to eat and engage in their community.

SF New Deal thrives on serving as a facilitator and mediator for people who touch our food systems in not necessarily the most obvious ways. We’re working with farmers and providers, but we’re also working with the city of San Francisco, with restaurants that make these meals, and with members of our community who eat these meals. If we are going to build a sustainable system, it can’t look like what’s been happening. And a lot of the change that I’m excited to be a part of is change that really centers and gives voice to the people who are closest to the system, either because they are the individual essential workers who are going in every day and doing this work or because they rely on food support from the government, and the services they have been getting are lackluster.

How did you get started in the Bay Area food scene?

I grew up in San Francisco and started going to the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market as a very young kid with my parents, and I started volunteering with CUESA. What was so surprising to me as a kid, and even more so in retrospect, is how much the Ferry Building — and CUESA in particular — really serves as an intersection of so many food communities in the Bay Area. I was welcomed into this space really early on and volunteered with CUESA through high school until going to college. Through the work I was doing at CUESA, I got to know a bunch of different chefs, restaurateurs, and farmers and spent most of my summers growing up working in those kitchens. Restaurant kitchens were a space where I felt engaged and able to participate in a food system that is driven by working to be sustainable and provide great service. But also, day-to-day, there’s a pace that I found quite fun.

What are you most passionate about with your work?

The reality is that food insecurity is something that has so long existed in San Francisco that by virtue of growing up here you just see it and are thinking about it all the time. There are all these people on the street and people who so visibly have not received the resources and support they need from the city. And when starting SF New Deal, that kick-started an opportunity to say, “How can we use this as a chance to provide some immediate relief during a time of acute pressures on individuals who need food support?” But also, from the get-go, we acknowledged that we weren’t solving a new problem; the people who were hardest hit have been deeply impacted for decades.

Community feeding is working to make sure that the basic needs of members of our community are met. Doing that means understanding holistically who the individuals are who are receiving services. And, by virtue of what food represents, overwhelmingly the people we serve and the people who are food insecure in San Francisco have received an insufficient level of support in a whole host of areas; they might also be housing insecure or unemployed or need mental or physical health services. So why I’m excited about working in a space that touches community feeding is that it really serves as a mechanism to touch so many important and vital things that dictate what a thriving city should look like.

In San Francisco, and in cities everywhere, the challenges we’re working to address have so long persisted that it can feel as though they cannot be solved. What I find inspiring is the simplicity of our model and the extent to which all it mandates is that community members show up for one another. And so many different people have come together to make this project work. Truly, it’s a collaborative effort: It’s community leaders, it’s the city of San Francisco, it’s our meal recipients, it’s the restaurants. It is so inspiring to see all these individuals come together.

The second piece I find really exciting is thinking about how the government and small businesses engage with one another. We have really been focused on community feeding and making small businesses eligible to receive city, state, and federally funded contracts, which is something that is incredibly challenging to do. Usually small businesses are completely cut out of these opportunities, and the scale of these opportunities is just so significant. It’s really disheartening the extent to which Sysco and Aramark are set up to receive these contracts and really no one else. I’m inspired by the extent to which the small businesses we work with have demonstrated that they’re capable of meeting the needs of a city contract and providing those services. That’s a piece I really hope will last beyond COVID, the extent to which we see small businesses as a tool by which cities can meet the needs of their community.

What do you hope to accomplish in this next year?

A big goal going into this coming year is working in our advocacy but also in our direct service to not let the vaccine rollout and the optics of opening back up overshadow the reality that the people who have been most impacted by this past year are going to continue to have a lot of challenges for years to come. We recently did a survey of over 185 participating restaurants, and overwhelmingly, restaurants are estimating it’s going to take them between a year and a half to two years to recover financially. For individuals who have been experiencing food insecurity for the past decade, a widespread vaccine rollout does not shift that reality. For the communities we serve, we really want to provide sustained support through recovery, acknowledging that recovery is going to be a lengthy process.

How can readers support your work?

Supporting our work means supporting the work of individuals and groups addressing food insecurity and the challenges faced by small businesses at large. To support the work of SF New Deal directly, you can donate on our website, sfnewdeal.org. I think what’s also incredibly important is to acknowledge the advocacy level that each individual has at their localized level; individuals should feel encouraged and empowered to reach out to their local politicians and ask them what they are doing to support small businesses and support members of their community who are food insecure. One of the things that has been really eye-opening for me in this past year is the extent to which there are individuals in every single neighborhood in San Francisco experiencing food insecurity; there’s a false perception that there are certain neighborhoods in which challenges don’t exist and all the challenges exist in 10 square blocks. That is not the reality. So I would encourage individuals to acknowledge the challenges in their neighborhoods and demand of themselves, their politicians, and their community to find ways to meet those needs and make sure people receive the fundamental and core human support they need.

Michelle K. Min is a food photographer based in San Francisco.

Kiani Conley-Wilson wants to remake the food system

If there’s one thing the pandemic has brought to light, it’s the rampant inequalities that exist across our food systems. One in four households experienced food insecurity in 2020, and food pantries and mutual aid networks have struggled to keep up with demand. The question of who can eat, and eat well, and who can’t has never been more urgent.

Soul Fire Farm in Petersburg, New York, which is dedicated to “equity in access to land, sustenance, and power in the food system,” is working to fix those inequalities. With an eye toward Indigenous and Black rights, its food sovereignty programs help feed and teach more than 10,000 people a year, whether by providing raised garden beds to city dwellers, delivering free “solidarity shares” of produce to local residents, or working on land-return initiatives for northeast farmers. And when it comes to inspiring others to join in the mission, Soul Fire Farm relies on Kiani Conley-Wilson.

Conley-Wilson is a community organizer, activist, and food-justice gardener. As the community empowerment coordinator at Soul Fire, they organize programming around such topics as racism in the food system and teaching children how to grow plants from seeds. They also engage directly with the community in their role as founder of Common Greens, a local community garden and education center. And at 26, Conley-Wilson is further spreading their message by running for city council in Troy on a platform of protecting renters and immigrants and committing to environmental stability.

Eater: How do you see yourself making change in the food world with Soul Fire or any other projects you have going on?

Kiani Conley-Wilson: My biggest impact is probably with Soul Fire. We focus on two things there: food apartheid — making sure that folks have enough food to eat and have agency over the food that’s growing and available to them — and stopping racism within the food system. I work on both of those with the Soul Fire in the City program, providing raised [garden] beds for folks. Sometimes I get to help harvest for our solidarity shares that go out to families and help those in need. I also do our training: It’s almost like an introduction to racism and the history of the food system and how it functions today, breaking down the ways that our food system has been and continues to be oppressive. I also have a community garden where I teach some kids on the block how to grow food and plant seeds.

How did you get involved in community farming and education?

I was introduced to urban farming in college. I studied sustainability studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which is here in Troy, so I put down roots. I took a class that really highlighted the good, the bad, and the ugly of the food system. And it really opened my eyes to how there’s a way we can connect with one another. We can make differences and changes on an environmental aspect, on a style aspect, and even on an economic aspect.

I picked that up a bit more after I graduated. I did an internship with a local community garden group when I was still in school, but after I graduated, I realized that I really liked to get my hands in the dirt, connecting with other folks and teaching and learning about the food system.

What advice would you give to someone who’s interested in doing similar work — especially right now in a pandemic where these issues of food insecurity and racism around food systems are more apparent than ever?

I would recommend they check out their local farm. Soul Fire is not the only farm that’s fighting racism and also providing food for folks in need. And I would say don’t be afraid to kill any plants. I’ve killed so many plants in a few days! You really wouldn’t believe it. I barely consider myself a gardener. Don’t get discouraged, and do whatever feels right for you. Not everyone’s going to be good at gardening, and that’s totally fine. There are different ways to get plugged into the food system. It doesn’t just have to be growing things from seed.

What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned in the past year?

I remember when the pandemic first hit and I was like, “Oh, quarantine; we all have to social distance.” I was just going through my head: How is all this going to work? How are we even going to have meetings? How are we going to get our groceries, our necessities, and all that stuff? Seeing how we’ve been able to adapt and do things more virtually, do more phone calls, things like that have been really fascinating to watch.

What do you hope to accomplish in the year ahead? You’ve got your city council race coming up.

June 22nd is the primary, and then November 2nd is the general election and that’s across New York State. So obviously that’s a goal of mine, to hopefully win this primary and the general election as well. There has been a lot of really great energy around that. With Soul Fire, it’s making sure that these programs I’m hosting are successful and people find them fruitful and helpful. And then with Soul Fire in the City, it’s trying to nourish those relationships and make sure everyone has what they need. I think one last goal is just making sure I rest. Because I feel last year I didn’t see too much resting, and this year, I’m really trying to prioritize that.

How can readers support your work?

Soul Fire has a whole bunch of resources (including this food sovereignty guide). You can support Soul Fire and follow us. But something that we really emphasize with Soul Fire is thinking beyond the hero narrative: It’s not just Soul Fire that’s doing stuff. I really encourage readers to look for the things happening around you that interest you.

Konrad Odhiambo is an award-winning portrait, wedding, motocross, and lifestyle photographer in Troy, New York.

As the founder of the Chocolate City’s Best cocktail competition, D.C.-based bartender Kapri Robinson is opening doors for hospitality workers of color

Though she’s working hard to tear down inequity in the hospitality industry, D.C.-based bartender Kapri Robinson considers herself a builder. “If you’re creating something of your own [that] is naturally dismantling what you see is wrong, it’s taking away the energy of constantly shouting at a wall of white supremacy, racism, sexism, ageism — all of the -isms,” the 28-year-old says. “Instead of just constantly yelling at that wall, create something that just naturally breaks it down.”

Chocolate City’s Best, a cocktail competition for bar professionals of color that Robinson founded three years ago, has grown into an educational hub and platform for mentorship, camaraderie, and connection. With Empowering the Diner, an event series she recently co-founded with sommelier Erica Christian, she’s advocating for customers and workers of color to create a more inclusive experience in bars and restaurants. And her work as an organizer for Back to Black’s pop-ups and partnerships helps raise money for causes that give back to Black communities while constructing a written record of past and present contributions Black people have made to eating and drinking culture at large. For Robinson, it all adds up to a schedule full of virtual meetings and committee calls that dominate most of her nights, but she says the prospect of finally getting back behind the bar gives her joy: “If you don’t do anything that gives you joy, you’re going to burn out.”

Robinson is about to start a job on the bar team reopening Allegory, the ambitious cocktail bar inside the Eaton hotel in downtown D.C. As the country begins to emerge from the pandemic, she’s looking forward to wowing customers with her craft and carrying a torch for a standard of hospitality that QR codes can’t deliver.

Eater: How are you making change in the food world?

Kapri Robinson: I believe I’m making change in the food world by confronting topics that are hard to talk about, getting people to talk about them, and getting people to think of ways that we can change in the industry. I’m not speaking for everyone, but for some people of color and Black people, there’s an intimidation factor going out to eat, especially in fine dining. One of my goals is to break that wall down so more communication can happen and people can feel more welcomed where they are, wherever they want to go eat.

I help create doors and opportunities in the educational field for people of color and Black people in the industry. This is a very huge point for me. Chocolate City’s Best is working on a scholarship effort right now. We’re also working with the Wine & Spirit Education Trust on pushing a group of BIPOC leaders through their educator course. Hopefully we get to grow that and take that nationwide, which is going to be a really awesome effort, probably you’ll see in the next year or so. Those two things are really huge for me. Empowering guests of color and also empowering industry members of color to just go for their passions, communicate what they want, and not be intimidated anymore by the Euro-led, colonizer-led lens that’s on our industry at the moment.

When did you know you wanted to plan a competition specifically for Black bartenders and bartenders of color?

I knew for a fact that I wanted to do that at the 2017 Tales of the Cocktail conference. And it started off as, “How do I see more people like me in these areas?” I reflected on my career up until that point and asked myself, “What has helped me grow?” The answer was competitions. The thing about competitions is you can find camaraderie there, awesome peers to help you grow. The networking, the knowledge learned, the opportunities gained just by being a part of a competition, really, I saw all of that, and I saw how all of it just added to my career growth. And winning, of course, helps a lot, too. I wanted to create a competition, one for Black people and people of color, because I wanted to highlight them, get them in the forefront, and get them on the national stage. But also because I believe the way we do our competition is like no other.

We really focus on education, mentorship, connecting people to brands and mentors. We also focus on camaraderie. We want them to come together. We want them to talk to each other after this competition and create that family. We give a lot of grace with ours. We give a lot of explanations. We give a lot of help. We try to do as much as we can so the bartenders are not coming out of pocket for anything. We really think about our competitors a lot, and I think that shows before, through, and after the competition.

How does your work with Back to Black and diving into the storytelling part of it fit into your mission?

Not only are we telling the story of the bartenders themselves, but raising the money that goes directly to charities that specifically help Black communities is huge. Constantly collecting the stories is something we need to do so we are no longer void of stories of Black people in this industry — what they do, their growth, and how they’ve contributed to the industry. We’re going to need all those stories in 50 years’ time. Not only are we telling our stories, but we’re also telling past stories. It’s necessary for generations after us.

What’s your favorite part about being behind the bar?

The energy. It is the energy with your team, the energy you’re creating with the guest, being in the swing — I wouldn’t necessarily say being in the weeds, because, honestly, being in the weeds is kind of annoying, but being in the swing. I know where everything is, my mise en place, and it’s like a seamless moving. That’s fun for me.

I’m definitely missing people. I’m ready to hear about people’s lives again so I don’t have to think about mine too much. Let’s talk.

What do you hope to accomplish in this next year?

I want to help put Allegory on the map with my bar team. I’m not in charge of it; we’re collaborative. I’m going to be putting a lot of time into helping create a bar program that is very meaningful, impactful, and a lot of fun.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to do work that’s similar to what you’re doing?

My advice would be to make sure what you’re doing is not beating you back up. If it’s advocacy work, if it is behind your bar, if it’s on social media, or you’re creating a platform, go the route of creating instead of just pointing the problems out. Create not just the solutions but the doors to the solutions, the steps to the solutions. It doesn’t have to be the whole thing, but maybe it’s a piece of the puzzle of what you see is wrong. Create something that’s either dismantling what’s wrong or is building it up so someone else can dismantle it.

The constant callout without actually trying to create anything is a burnout, too. It’s triggering. It’s emotionally and mentally draining. So try to do something that’s going to recharge you at the same time if possible.

Lots of people want to speak out now, and I love that. I think it’s needed. We have to do that. But also we have to remember that speaking out takes a toll on us. If you’re not doing anything that seems rewarding, you’re just going to want to stop. I’ve seen it to the point where people don’t want to be in the industry anymore. I don’t want people to have that feeling. There is more than one avenue in this industry.

How can readers support your work?

People can go to Chocolate City’s Best. We have many projects in the near future that will impact Black and brown lives in the industry. They can also make their way to Empowering the Diner to purchase tickets for our virtual event series Empowering the Diner Through Wine. This is where I’ll be having tough conversations about the state of the industry and what we can do to dismantle harmful practices and then grow anew.

Rey Lopez is a food, portrait, and architectural photographer and head photographer for Eater DC.

Salimatu Amabebe turns to food and art to nourish Black people

Years ago, Salimatu Amabebe almost left the food world entirely. After working as a line cook in kitchens, they weren’t sure they could find a space that allowed them to live a healthy, fulfilled life. “It took me a while to understand that [cooking] was something I wanted to do as a career path, because I worked under people who were deeply unkind to me in a personal sense,” they say.

Amabebe, 29, realized that if they made their own space, things could be different. These would be spaces where everyone is treated with respect — spaces filled with Black chefs and Black customers, honoring Black artists. That was the starting point for Black Feast, a dinner series they launched in Portland, Oregon, in 2016, where the poetry, books, or music of a Black artist set the tone and inspired the dishes for the evenings, which also take place in California’s Bay Area and in New York City.

Then in the summer of 2020, as protests against racist violence burst forth in cities around the globe, Amabebe felt the need to do more, something wholly centered on care — not a seated dinner with a price tag but something free of charge. The result: Love Letters to Black Folks, a collaboration with poet Annika Hansteen-Izora where Black individuals in Portland and Berkeley, California, received care packages with desserts, teas, skincare products, and notes. That nurturing of Black people and celebration of Black art and culture — both with Love Letters and Black Feast — has become foundational to Amabebe’s work. “I want to communicate that no one gets to determine our value but us,” they say. “My mission is not only to make space at the table for Black folks but to design a whole new table for us.”

How are you making change in the food world?

Salimatu Amabebe: I hope to be making changes in the food world. I feel that we will never find a way out of a racist, classist system through capitalism. It’s really difficult to figure out how to be a person making food and selling food outside of a system of capitalism. But a big part of how I want to change things is by interrogating that system and working really hard to offer things on a sliding-scale model or entirely free for Black people.

When did you know you wanted to cook?

I grew up cooking. My dad and my mom are both incredible cooks, and my sister worked as a sous chef and a dessert chef. When I was about 18, I got a job as a line cook to save up money so I could move to New York to work at an art gallery. Cooking was something I relied on as a source of income and I knew I could do all over the world.

But it wasn’t. It took me a while to understand that cooking really was something I love to do as a career and part of that was because I was working under people who were deeply unkind to me and others. It felt really unsustainable, both in a physical sense and also in a mental and emotional sense. A lot of the other people I was around in the kitchen were coping with drugs and alcohol, and as a person who doesn’t drink, it was really challenging for me. I’ve worked 17 hours in kitchens, and to do that without drinking and having minimal water, minimal food? It’s a really rough thing for one’s body.

When I started working for myself, I realized that that process can be a lot slower and more methodical. There’s still a lot of stress involved, but when you’re working with people you love and respect and you have a caring and respectful way of talking to each other, it completely changes what that does to your body and what that does to your mental state. Creating supportive kitchen environments that are really fun, that’s when I started to see food as something I could stick with and something that contributed to my own growth as well.

Both Black Feast and Love Letters to Black Folks incorporate not just food but other forms of care and art. Why is that intersection so crucial to your work?

A big foundation of Black Feast is merging food and art, and a reason that’s important to me is because my background is in art; it’s what I studied. After going back and forth from the food world to the art world, Black Feast came as a way to merge those things together. As an artist, I think about service as a core practice, of how you can be of service to your community. I wanted to create something that I felt provided care and service, offered nourishment and also a space for people to really just come together as a community.

What is the most surprising thing you’ve learned in the past year?

I don’t feel like anything has surprised me. And that’s sad, but at this point, I feel like there have been many things that have been discouraging, but I haven’t been surprised. There’s been things that have confirmed a lot of my fears, and one is definitely the communal attention span for caring about things that are happening. That’s really disappointing, but it also doesn’t surprise me.

So much of your work addresses the dismantling of racism and white supremacy in the food world. What do you see as the starting point for restaurants and food businesses trying to dismantle the impact of white supremacy in their businesses?

Black leadership is a really good place to start. A lot of businesses are in this place where they’re having to reckon with the inequities they have contributed to and the ways they have supported white supremacy and white privilege. That is a tough spot to be in. Simultaneously, there are a lot of excuses or reasons that people can give for why that exists.

There are people who work consulting on how to have a better business model — I’m not one of those consultants, but I can say I see a lot of superficial support. Support that looks like having more Black people on your webpage or showcasing more Black artists or creatives but that isn’t actually compensated. It doesn’t last longer than that specific moment to make that brand or that company look good. So if that investment doesn’t go beyond that moment for the person whose work you’re showcasing — because exposure isn’t enough — you have to pay people, you have to actually want to see long-lasting effects. You might have to change your entire business model and start from scratch, because you can’t really build on top of a broken foundation. A lot of businesses, a lot of structures will need to be entirely disassembled. And hopefully in their place we can build something better, with Black people getting benefits, long-term positions, leadership roles, etc.

What do you hope to accomplish in this next year?

I hope to keep doing what I’m doing. I would like to produce a Black Feast cookbook featuring previous Black Feast-featured artists and also ones we have not yet featured. I would love to be able to have the funds to keep doing shit for free. Long term, I would love to have a permanent space where artists can give workshops, show their work, and we can also hold food events and run a small cafe to have an artist residency program. I would hope that we could have a Black Feast building, somewhere on the West Coast.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to do similar work?

Start small. Just start with something you know you’re good at. It doesn’t have to be the biggest thing if you’re doing something with other great people whose work you admire, people who you trust, and you’re putting your full effort into it. Something you really care about will be successful, whatever success means — things will grow organically. The most important thing is to really surround yourself with the right people and do things because you feel truly moved to do that.

Also: Ask people for advice and help. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. If you have the funds, pay someone you really admire for a 45-minute consultation.

How can readers support your work?

People can always support our work through donations; you can donate via Venmo @blackfeast, PayPal blackfeast@gmail.com, Cash App $blackfeast. We want to keep giving out food for free and at a sliding scale, and that tends to be the best way to make that happen.

Chelsea Kigano (she/her) is an artist living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Sharing opportunities is central to the mission of Ed Szymanski and Patricia Howard’s upcoming NYC restaurant Dame. The fish and chips are great, too.

In 2019, Ed Szymanski and Patricia Howard were sitting on a bench in New York City’s West Village neighborhood when they shook hands and agreed to open Dame, a British fish and chips restaurant. The project would be a culmination of their many years in the restaurant industry — including Howard at Red Gate Bakery, Szymanski at Cherry Point, and both at the Beatrice Inn, where they met.

But on top of being a celebration of the duo’s careers, Dame is a restaurant driven by community. It began in February 2020 as a pop-up, pivoted this past winter to a grocery store that still sells sought-after fish and chips twice a week, and will open this June as an English seafood restaurant in a brick-and-mortar space next door. But Dame truly embraced its business model last summer and fall when it hosted a weekly pop-up series in which friends took over the restaurant space, with proceeds benefiting various charities. Howard, 29, and Szymanski, 27, see their restaurant as not solely theirs but one they can share with chef friends, former dishwashers, and current staffers who want to try out their own restaurant concepts or simply cook for a crowd for just one day.

Eater: What does a typical day look like for each of you?

Patricia Howard: We live together, and we just got a new apartment that’s a three-minute walk away from Dame, which makes our lives a lot easier. We signed a 10-year lease on the restaurant, and all of our eggs are going to be in that basket. It made more sense to be as close as possible should anything go wrong or if we need to get our early morning deliveries. We usually come in to work together, and right now, we’re running the grocery store, but we also have our build-out going on right next door to our current pop-up space. It’s very convenient to be able to pop in and check with the contractor, see what tasks are on the day’s docket, and then go help customers in the grocery store.

Ed Szymanski: First thing always is to see what the construction zones are like, and then I prep mise en place for the grocery store, or if it’s Friday or Saturday, I prep for the fish and chips, which is a lot of french fries that get cut and a lot of fish that has to be broken down.

On Fridays and Saturdays, we’ll do service until eight o’clock and then shut up the shop. Because this is the last time in 10 years we’re going to have the evenings to ourselves, we’ve been going out to dinner. We try to support restaurants as much as possible, but also, from a cooking perspective, you get a great exchange of ideas from eating out.

How did your weekly guest pop-up series start?

ES: It was very organic. When we first started the Dame pop-up, I was by myself in the kitchen, running up and down the stairs every day because the fuses kept blowing. It was a catastrophe, honestly. A friend of mine came in one day, and I was like, “Hey, do you want to cook on Sunday?” And he said yes. He wasn’t planning on opening his own restaurant, but he’s Galician and he wanted to cook Galician food, so he came and cooked in this tiny little kitchen, which has one stove and electric deep fryers and that’s it. His event was a huge success. We also used the event as a way of raising money for charity, which was a big part of our business model. The next week, I got in touch with an old dishwasher of mine who, during the pandemic, had been selling tamales out of his apartment in Bushwick, and I told him he had to do a pop-up.

There’s been a lot of talk about how people are going to change the restaurant industry and what could come out of the pandemic. We definitely don’t have all the answers to that, but this seemed to be one thing we could do to be part of a better future — using our platform as a West Village restaurant to highlight other people who maybe don’t have access to the space or the network, media, all that stuff.

PH: It’s cool that we’ve provided an incubator for people who want to open their own restaurant, and they can come here and do a pop-up with us. But [Tio Rey and Nemi Calderon from the Tamales y Tacos pop-up] don’t have the goal of opening their own restaurant. Just to give them a kitchen and a West Village restaurant on a popular block and let them have the stage for a day, it was really cool to see. It really mattered a lot to them.

What advice would you give someone who wants to do something similar to what you’re doing?

ES: If you’ve worked up to the point where you own a restaurant in New York, you have people whose stories haven’t been told or who haven’t had the opportunity to share their [expertise], whether it’s a line cook or sous chef or dishwasher or server. We’re seeing a lot of these micro businesses and people baking out of their homes, subway car churros, that kind of thing. There are plenty of people who want to do pop-ups in your restaurant.

PH: We firmly believe that this pop-up has been an amazing launchpad for the future of Dame. For other people trying to open a restaurant, if they’re young or they don’t have much of a budget, I would definitely recommend doing a pop-up first. We’ve created an audience of regulars, and it’s a great way to get your story out there. A pop-up is kind of a test run, and we did it for under $1,000. We bought all the outdoor planters and flowers, and we did it very scrappy.

Fill in the blank: The past year and a half has been ________.

ES: Challenging is the first thing that comes to mind, but I don’t think that’s fair. It’s hard to look back fondly, even though on a personal level we’ve achieved a lot; there’s been a huge amount of suffering across the world. It feels wrong to say it’s been good in any way, but it’s been very eye-opening. We’ve come a long way; we’ve grown a lot as people and as a business and as business owners. The personal growth is actually what led to this pop-up in the first place. We started Dame Summer Club as a way of raising money for Black Lives Matter causes. We weren’t out protesting everyday, but running a restaurant, we knew how to do that, so we figured we could do a pop-up to raise money for charity.

What is the most surprising thing you learned either about yourselves or the industry this past year?

ES: A lot of people we spoke to told us not to do this. Even pre-pandemic, a lot of restaurant owners were like, “Never open a restaurant. It’s the worst thing in the world. Don’t do this. You’re too young.” It’s been surprising to me that it’s not that bad. It’s definitely tough, but I don’t want other people to get the impression that they should never open a restaurant because it’s so difficult.

PH: There is this notion out there that opening restaurants is impossible, and don’t do it until you’re 50, and you need a million dollars, but people do open for cheaper and on a quicker timeline. We don’t have a million-dollar investment yet, but we have a few investors, mostly friends and family. We’re doing it on a tight budget, but it’s still going to be, we hope, a fantastic restaurant. We’re trying to come up with a way to package a how-to guide to opening a restaurant, our advice on opening a restaurant on a budget.

ES: Tip 1: Open a restaurant that’s 500 square feet or less.

What do you hope to accomplish in this next year or in these next few months?

ES: Open our restaurant is number one. That’ll be the biggest achievement of our lives to date. Patricia mentioned that we did take on some investors for this project, and they are all friends and family, so paying that back quickly would be a pretty important goal to us. Hosting a bunch more guest chef dinners and Sunday series events — we’re already putting our roster together for this summer. It would be nice to eventually win a Michelin star [but] probably not this year. We’ll get to that. First I just want to be cooking in shorts and running around outside and having fun with our customers.

PH: If our opening team is still with us in a year, I think that would be a huge accomplishment in this industry. We aim to be successful in creating a place that our best friends want to work at and can make enough money at and have enough free time and enough vacation. We want to create a place where everyone’s happy to work there. That’s a rare thing in kitchens these days.

What are some other ways you’re making change in the food world?

ES: Paying people more equitably, giving our employees room to grow beyond the four walls of the restaurant is a big thing. We’re committed to opening more restaurants with our staff and incorporating them as partners in our business, too, because we are very young and we have a long way to go and grow, and we want our core team to do it with us.

We’re bridging this thing between a restaurant being a place to get dinner and a community space. We’re not going to be like a true community center, but it would be nice if we could use our space to continue to raise money for charity and causes that matter to us and highlight other people. I think it really betters the staff you have, because sous chefs get to see a different side of cooking, and they can grow with that, too.

How can readers support your work?

ES: Come eat at the restaurant.

PH: We try to be as transparent as possible on our Instagram, and right now, we’re posting a lot about the build-out process, so definitely follow us on Instagram. If you ever have a question about how we’re doing what we’re doing, or if you’re a chef and you want to do a Sunday series with us, send us a DM.

ES: And if you’re an investor reading this, give money to everyone who did a pop-up at Dame. One thing that would be amazing coming out of the pandemic is if smaller restaurants get a real grip on the downtown New York dining scene again. If restaurants are filled with young and interesting operators, and the downtown New York money gives people the capital to do the right projects, that would build a new and I think much better restaurant community.

Clay Williams is a Brooklyn-based photographer specializing in food, drinks, and events.

An urban farmer, seed keeper, and member of the Tlingit Nation, Kirsten Kirby-Shoote is uplifting Indigenous food sovereignty

Five years ago, Kirsten Kirby-Shoote booked a one-way ticket to Detroit and never looked back. An urban gardener, seed keeper, and member of the Tlingit Nation, Kirby-Shoote grew up near Portland, Oregon, and moved to Michigan to join WWOOF, Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms, a program where workers trade farm labor for room and board. Now 28, Kirby-Shoote has woven herself into the fabric of the local food scene, establishing a network of growers and laying the foundation for a system that uplifts the Indigenous food sovereignty movement while supporting and protecting the health and spirit of their community with nutritious, culturally relevant foods.

While working with Michigan farms and groups like the Indigenous food organization I-Collective, Kirby-Shoote has developed a vision for the legacy they want to leave behind — one that’s rooted in the past, the present, and the future of Indigenous people. That work has manifested in the establishment of a seed keepers network across the country and the preservation of traditional and medicinal foods outside of capitalist profit systems. Kirby-Shoote has also made their home into a local gathering space and hosted pop-ups that raise awareness about native culture and cooking. Lately, Kirby-Shoote has spent their time cultivating land in Highland Park, including tending to a cornfield. But they have no plans to sell corn to local bakeries. To them, that food is sacred and belongs in the hands of their community.

Eater: How do you approach urban farming? And how is it different from other approaches you’ve experienced?

Kirsten Kirby-Shoote: A lot of urban agriculture — especially in Detroit and especially with nonprofit structures that are inherently toxic — is still based on capitalism: how much food are you producing, not how many people are you nourishing with the food. It’s not a numbers game for me. It’s very much about interpersonal relationships that are heightened by the ability to nourish, and not, like, “Here’s some free kale.” I believe that plants have agency and they have autonomy, and who am I to say “produce” or “meet your marks”? It’s a lot more about creating an environment where things feel at an equilibrium. I’d rather have a meadow than a hoop house in the middle of the city.

How are you cultivating Indigenous foods in the city?

I work with a lot of other seed keepers, especially in the native community. It’s a nice thing to be able to talk about seeds as our relatives; somebody has given their utmost attention and blessings to a seed before it ever reaches me. These seeds have been handed down by our ancestors, and the fact that they are here today is just a testament to how much care everyone put into them. Continuing that and not buying from big ag companies is a lot more meaningful to me and I’m sure meaningful to the soil that I place them into.

I just went on this huge trip and met up with a lot of my seed-keeper friends. Just being able to activate trade routes in that modern setting is insane to me. I’m carrying these seeds like a lit torch, and I’m not doing it for myself. I’m doing it for future generations — generations I can’t even comprehend — because somebody else did it for me.

Indigenous cuisine has increasingly become a part of mainstream conversations around food. What do you think is driving this?

It’s strange because [Indigenous food has] always been there, and the pull for having visibility in the media and creating a wider audience is a total double-edged sword. There’s no good way to do it. It’s very hard talking to people about it, because there are parts of it that are so sacred and not shared information, and the general public — nonnatives — don’t understand that. And then in today’s society, where everything gets shared and regrammed, there’s a real lack of consideration for the sacredness around food and around growing.

But having a platform is crucial to keeping our sovereignty visible and alive in a lot of ways. I want a little Indigenous person to be like, “Oh, I can do that. That’s a real thing,” because when I got started in food, I had maybe five people to look up to. The media was a huge part of that. Typing into Google “Indigenous farmers” and “Indigenous chefs,” the results are slim. Being able to let our children’s children know that this work is valuable, keeps our people healthy, and keeps our traditions alive, I think it’s worth it.

What’s your greatest fear about communicating with traditional media?

Sharing too much — sharing something and then exploitation, because that is historically what happened to our land and our water and pretty much everything. Once settler colonialism came in, our life and our ways were treated as a resource. When people pin something as a resource, it removes the connection you feel. When water becomes a resource, it’s no longer alive. There’s no longer a relationship with the water; it’s treated as a commodity, and I don’t want Indigenous food to be commodified.

When did you know you wanted to work in food justice?

After my father passed away from a preventable disease, wanting to change the food system became a very concrete idea in my head. A large component of the pop-ups and any gathering I do is educational in nature and tied to wanting to protect the land, the water, and the plant relatives. So by having that platform and cooking for people, I don’t want any of it to be lost on people that this food is our past and it’s our present and it’s our future.

What do you hope to accomplish over the next year?

I’d like to create a food access point for Indigenous folks in the city to be able to access traditional food and medicine. It’s like a food bank but not a food bank, because I used to go to those when I was younger. I want to turn the definition of having food access. I want it to be a source of pride for people to stop by and just grab as much wild rice or corn as they need and not have it be associated with guilt in any way. The systems in place right now don’t allow that because of capitalism, but if you look toward plant relatives and how much they care and provide and then kind of transpose that into human-to-human interaction, there’s this huge amount of depth there. I think doing that and being able to feed people that food and provide that for the community is what I want to really hone in on this year.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to do similar work?

Even if there doesn’t appear to be a path, or if it’s not as clear-cut as some other paths in life, we have the ability to clear paths and take our own route. Whether it’s something you’ve seen somebody else do or something you feel nobody else has done, pursue that path and know that the ancestors are guiding us every step of the way, so you’re never alone in that path making.

How can readers support your work?

I’m so bad at allocating work or asking for money, but I think I’m going to have some sort of crowdfunding going on soon to buy chest freezers and some other equipment, like the grinder for cornmeal and some packaging. But also I recommend researching the Indigenous people of the area you occupy and realizing that space and land is somebody else’s; do that work yourself of going to these websites and run them some coins. I-Collective is a really good resource for that. Our job is to inform the public of Indigenous farming and culinary practices.

Rosa María Zamarrón is a Detroit-based documentary and portrait photographer.

The restaurateur wants to create a network of community centers in LA

Brittney Valles starts her day at Tiago Coffee Bar & Kitchen in Hollywood. After a few hours of directing operations, setting up meetings, and making fundraiser phone calls, she heads to Silver Lake to oversee the construction on her next restaurant, Gogo’s Tacos. She finishes the day in yet another location, checking in with the team at Guerrilla Tacos, the Arts District restaurant she opened with chef Wes Avila in 2018.

Almost a decade ago, Valles fell in love with hospitality while working behind the counter at Handsome Coffee Roasters. There, she met regular coffee drinker and seasoned restaurant owner Bill Chait. She never missed an opportunity to ask him questions about restaurant operations, and when Chait opened Petty Cash Taqueria in 2013, Valles joined the team as a host and later a floor manager. While still working at Petty Cash, Valles started her own bookkeeping business, where she met Avila, a client who in 2017 would ask her to partner with him at Guerrilla Tacos. Valles accepted and worked there full-time raising funds, managing construction, and selecting vendors for the restaurant. Three years later, she became its sole owner.

But running what’s soon to be three restaurants isn’t all the 28-year-old has planned. She’s working and fundraising to open a network of independent community centers where young Angelenos can learn the basics of financial literacy and how to prepare healthy meals, whether professionally or at home. Ultimately, Valles hopes to leave a lasting imprint on Los Angeles, its youth, and the restaurant community.

Eater: How are you making change in the food world?

Brittney Valles: People often overlook us, but we do try to be top of the market and pay. Before the pandemic, we offered Spanish and English classes. We also provide health insurance — medical, vision, and dental. Whenever we make decisions, it’s not so much what’s gonna make us the most money or what’ll look the best, but what is literally the right thing to do.

In July of 2020, I lost somebody to suicide during the pandemic. Juan Carlos was 25. And that was really tough for me; I really started to question the meaning of life. Nothing felt worth the effort anymore, for a good couple of weeks. I knew that in order to get out of that rut, I had to figure it out and needed to get meaning. I was doing reiki, whatever I needed to heal. And one of the things the practitioner did was have me pick a card. It was about kids. And I thought, “This is so stupid. I hate kids.”

But the next day, I woke up with such clarity. I thought to myself, “When could somebody have intervened in Juan Carlos’s life?” He grew up in not the best neighborhood to grow up in, was a latchkey kid, and his mom had him at 15. Both of his parents worked; he’d come home and be by himself and just struggled. That was my upbringing in a lot of ways, though my parents were wonderful, for sure. But I would go to Boys & Girls Clubs of America or things like that. It was a lot like sheep herding; it didn’t feel right. I woke up the next day and thought, “I really want to open a community center.”

In the back of my mind, I also knew I wanted to make something that was more of the way I ate and the way my mom fed me, because my mom would never come to Guerrilla if it wasn’t mine. She’s not interested in foie gras; I had to pay my Uncle Ralph $5 to try the sweet potato taco. I always had it in the back of my mind to do something Mexican-American as a scalable taco concept with multiple units. In order to protect Gogo’s Tacos and fund my nonprofit, the nonprofit has an ownership stake in the restaurant. And so that’s where Gogo’s Tacos was born. I ended up doing 100 pitch meetings, and I finally found an investor who’s interested. This was around November, and we’re going to open in July.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to do similar work?

People will always tell you, “That’s not how people do this. That’s not how X and Y does this.” That’s not really a thing anymore. You make your own path.

If you have an idea, even if it differs from the status quo, go after it if you have a very clear vision and direction. It’s now such a new world and people have so many ideas and inventions. I would say, just do it. But vision is key, because otherwise, you’re just a mess.

What is the most surprising thing you’ve learned in the past year?

Finding my own voice and identifying my importance in the hospitality world. It’s always about the famous celebrity chef, and I’ve always been cool with that. But now, my side of the street has come to the forefront.

Discovering that what I do is important, very cool, and fundamental to making sure people have money, food in their bellies, and stuff like that.

What do you hope to accomplish in the coming year?

Definitely opening Gogo’s and fundraising for the nonprofit so we can start hitting our goal. I’ve been doing Re:Her [a nonprofit focusing on the empowerment of female restaurateurs], which has been really great and helped us to give grants to women in business. Beyond our industry, I want to start utilizing my network and the restaurants I know to start to build this nonprofit and this community center.

If you’re making money off of a community, you should be giving back. It’s really easy to forget that Boyle Heights is across the bridge, and it still has many gangs there. It gives me chills, because it makes me think of my family. And there’s still a lot of income inequality, so I want to make sure for 2021 and 2022 we really take a stand and we’re not complacent. We also want to help others around us and be more vocal.

With the community center, we want to open it in five years. I’ve been doing my budgeting, and I think we need a little under $5 million. And so if Gogo’s achieves the financial goals I’ve set for it, and with independent funding — which we have already — I think we can buy a building and be able to create a network of five or six community centers in LA over the next 30 years.

How can readers support your work?

Come to the restaurants, tip well, support the staff, advocate for restaurants and legislation [that supports restaurants]. Support me and women like me who own businesses that are trying to make their way up, and don’t just go to the places owned by white men. Be a conscious restaurant eater and find places that are owned by women of color. Supporting women like me supports me. Support restaurants that are a little bit off the beaten path.

Wonho Frank Lee is a photographer for Eater LA.

Eric Sze has made a name for himself by keeping his NYC restaurant 886 afloat and starting the grassroots initiative Enough Is Enough

Despite a pandemic that stalled his restaurant business, Eric Sze has never been busier. He’s made a name for himself in the past year by making pivot after pivot to keep his New York City restaurant 886 afloat — and by being the change he wants to see in the industry. He’s made thousands of bento boxes for front-line health care workers and local shelters, raised money for his out-of-work staff, and started Enough Is Enough, an initiative to bring awareness to hate crimes against Asian Americans.

At the age of 28, Sze already has two — soon to be three — restaurants under his belt. There’s the Tang, an East Village noodle shop he co-founded after college; 886, the nearby Taiwanese spot he opened with business partner Andy Chuang after leaving the Tang; and Wenwen, a new restaurant that’s slated to open in Brooklyn later this year, assuming all goes well after weathering the COVID-19 storm. But if Sze’s history is any indication, he’ll find a way to make it work.

Eater: When did you know you wanted to open your own restaurant?

Eric Sze: When I was a senior in college, I made a food startup, selling what were basically direct-to-consumer prepackaged beef noodle soup kits called Scallion Foods. I was cooking it in my apartment, which was very illegal, but people liked it, and it was fun. I turned down a few full-time job offers from restaurant groups; I really wanted to bet on myself at the age of 22, being way too innocent and naive.

But then I had a skiing accident and tore my ACL, which left me bedridden. Operating Scallion Foods, I had been cooking, buying ingredients, delivering it myself — and then I couldn’t do anything. While I was stuck in bed, an acquaintance pitched me this idea of a noodle restaurant in the East Village. I hadn’t really worked in a restaurant before; I had interned at Momofuku, but it was mostly office work. I was like, “Fuck it, I don’t have anything to lose.” And so the Tang was born. That was my foot in the door. I got to run a restaurant very gung-ho, making up shit as I went.

My business partner, Andy, is also from Taiwan. We really wanted a place that was Taiwanese for us to hang out and drink, so I sold my shares for the Tang, and the next day we were signing a lease for 886. My identity crisis has gone through different shapes and molds, but I think the core has always stayed the same: just wanting more Taiwanese food.

Fill in the blank: The past year and a half has been _________.

The past year and a half has been sort of a mirror because it reflects who you really are. We certainly had opportunities to just take a PPP loan and call it a day; we could have taken the government’s money, closed up, and we would have made a profit on 886. We could’ve weathered the storm and opened a new restaurant after that or gone into a different industry. But it never even occurred to us to do that. When things are really bad, and you’re losing money month after month, and there just doesn’t seem like there’s a glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel, it takes some guts to keep marching on. It’s been a marathon, and it showed me more of who I am and why I’m in this industry. It’s because of the people.

I’ve always known myself as an optimist, but in this past year and a half, I had to pull out every single trick up my sleeve and keep improvising. When indoor dining was closed and outdoor dining too slow, I was personally delivering those Scallion Foods beef noodle kits, which we made about $1,000 a day from as a bonus revenue item. We had to change the menu to be delivery friendly and more classic and homey. We adjusted our prices; instead of going up, we actually went down. We had to buy a bunch of new, aesthetically pleasing stuff that would make our outdoor dining look like Asia. I used to hate plants, but now I can spot a bird of paradise from a mile away. I accidentally bought one and planted it on our patio, and a month later, it bloomed into this gorgeous plant, and some dude came and stole it. It was just pivot after pivot after pivot, and everything we did was a reflection of our abilities.

What is the most surprising thing you’ve learned in the past year?

I was surprised by my front-of-house staff. A lot of my friends in the industry are having so much trouble hiring because it’s easier to sit at home with a stable unemployment check — and nobody would blame you for it; it’s a pandemic — but every single one of my front-of-house staff who is in New York reached out and offered to return because they know we need a staff. People are willing to sacrifice and commit to our cause. My personal ethos has always been to surround yourself with good people. Good food plus good people equals good times. The “good people” part is arguably the most difficult. I think I was surprised by how good people are.

From one Asian American to another, how are you feeling with this swell of attacks on Asians across the country this past year?

It hits me so hard. I was born and raised in Taiwan, so I consider myself a foreigner here. I’ve always looked up to American culture; diversity is the beauty of America. But now, I don’t understand how humanity has come to this. I can’t shake the feeling that whatever we try to do, it’s nothing but putting a bandage on a gunshot wound. I’m feeling helpless and powerless because what else can we do? What else can I do?

Can you tell me about your grassroots initiative Enough Is Enough, aimed at addressing some of these issues?

We started Enough Is Enough in February out of my frustration from seeing a lack of representation, whether it’s in mass media or among the rich and wealthy Asians who are influential. I find it pretty hypocritical for them to lean into Asian culture when it’s financially beneficial, but when the Asian community needed their voices, they were radio silent. This was about a week after Uncle Vicha, the 84-year-old man in San Francisco who was pushed onto the pavement, died. I started an email chain, and the next thing I knew, I had 20 or so people from a few of the coolest restaurants in New York City. We hosted virtual cooking events. We gathered donations and gave half to Black and brown shelters and half to shelters for Asian communities with food insecurity; we wanted to show solidarity with every community that needs help. We raised $70,000, and I think it brought attention to the cause and empowered people to speak out.

How are you making change in the food world?

I pay everybody a living wage, which sounds hilarious, but a lot of people in the industry are not being paid a living wage. I focus on the well-being of my employees. A lot of cooks are working six or seven days a week, but my cooks work five days a week because time off is very important. There’s so much more I wish I could be doing. I wish I had the scale to implement all the things I want, including benefits, health care, and paid time off. But I am doing what I can for my employees. It’s almost comical that I can say that’s a positive change in the food world, but that’s the reality of it.

What does a restaurant that is ethical to its employees look like to you, in an ideal future?

In an ideal future, we would not have tips; everybody should just be on salary. Cooks and servers should all have health care, and everybody should have paid time off. We should be able to offer that to employees. We can at least provide a safe environment so the people who are in the kitchen all day can afford to send their kids to school. They should be able to afford a decent standard of living. They should be able to feel comfortable staying home when they have a fever and not worry that their paycheck is going to get deducted. That’s not a lot to ask for, really. There’s something obviously wrong with the system, and I am too small right now to fix it — the reality is I run a small Taiwanese restaurant, and if my pork belly over rice is $80, nobody’s gonna buy it — but it’s something I’m eyeing. That’s the goal for me.

What do you hope to accomplish in this next year?

I hope to get the new restaurant in Greenpoint open. It’s called Wenwen, because my mom’s name is Wen and my wife’s name is Wen, so it’s a nod to the women in my life. I hope to create a team there as good as the one we have in the East Village. And I hope that the East Village restaurant will be managed by somebody whom we can really empower to take over operationally so we can focus on the road map ahead. I want to hire everybody back, which we’ve already started — back of house, we already have everybody, and front of house, some people are slowly coming back. I want to make that a sustainable operation and open up the Brooklyn restaurant to really showcase the creative side of me. That’s something I’m really excited about. I can’t wait to see what we can do.

How can readers support your work?

They can obviously buy our stuff or come to the restaurant. They can also support me by reading up more about not just Taiwanese food, but different regions of food. Food can be a political tool for good; if you know about a country or a region’s food, you can be a little bit more invested in their people.

Gary He is a photojournalist based in New York City.

As CEO of Heray Spice, Mohammad Salehi is on a mission to enrich the lives of farming families in Afghanistan

Mohammad Salehi sells saffron to more than 100 professional chefs and an increasing number of home cooks, but he’s hesitant to call Heray Spice — the company he founded in Chicago in 2017 — a business. To be sure, Heray is a business, and a fast-growing one at that, but Salehi’s vision reaches beyond turning a profit or introducing Americans to some of the best saffron in the world. The 27-year-old wants his customers to understand just what they’re supporting when they buy a tiny glowing jar of this precious spice.

Saffron is the world’s most expensive spice, and Salehi is on a mission to prove to the farmers he works with in Afghanistan that growing it is a meaningful and profitable alternative to producing opium. He pays farmers significantly more for the crops they harvest than most buyers, and he invests 10 percent of Heray’s net income into educational nonprofits in Herat, where he was born. Salehi, who has a master’s degree in business information technology, wants children growing up in Afghanistan to have access to the same level of education his family ensured he received. He hopes that as his young company grows and expands to offer other spices, as well as dried fruits, he can shift the way Afghanistan is viewed by so many outsiders. Heray is a spice business, but in many ways selling saffron is just a means to an end for Salehi, a way to enrich the lives of farming families like the one he grew up in, create opportunity for the children in his home city, and introduce Americans to an Afghanistan where fields of saffron paint the landscape beautiful shades of purple and pink.

Eater: What does a typical day look like for you?

Mohammad Salehi: In Afghanistan, I have an office in Herat and spend most of my time meeting with farmers. We have to recruit new farmers, and some days we have training for farmers so they know what to do differently for the coming year. For example, last year, the water was good but they gave too much water for a few acres of land, which caused them not to produce as much crop.

When I’m in the U.S., I also have a part-time job. Because of COVID-19, I have to work as a contractor, a back-end engineer, so I can make a little bit of money so we can survive. And in the U.S., it’s a lot of meetings with chefs. I go to restaurants and bring them some saffron. Mostly, I deliver my own orders when I’m in Chicago; I want to meet the chefs. I have a team of two people making sure the packaging and the deliveries are fine. It’s a lot of work. It’s a startup life. Some days, you have to clean your whole warehouse. Sometimes it’s packaging. You do everything. It’s not like I am the boss so I don’t do this. I do packaging, delivery, cleaning, anything required. You have to do it.

You grew up in farming but then did work as a translator for the U.S. Army. Then you came back to farming. What brought you back?

In farming culture in Afghanistan, a lot of farmers are not thinking much about how they can make money, how they can make it a business. It’s more a lifestyle. When I was in high school, my family invested a lot of time in me learning English. When I graduated, I wanted to explore another culture, so I found a job as a linguist with the U.S. Army. I knew farming, and I loved to do that, but I also wanted to see what the world had to offer. I wanted to help more.

The problem is a lot of these farmers are the people who are getting the least out of the product. They are selling the product to distributors — to corporations like Whole Foods or in Afghanistan, to big local markets — with a very cheap price. So for me to be able to help farmers, I have to get the saffron to the people. To do all this, I needed to have the knowledge, I needed to have the culture, I needed to know the language. That is why for three or four years, I worked with the U.S. Army, I got a degree, I learned business. So now I have a connection between the two worlds.

When you were first building this business, why did you choose saffron, versus any other crop that grows readily in Afghanistan?

Based on international standards, Afghanistan produces the world’s best saffron. And in Afghanistan, crops like chickpeas, wheat, and corn cannot compete with opium. The regions under the Taliban are cultivating drugs like crazy, and if we wanted to compete, the crops needed to make us the same amount of net income as opium — and that’s almost impossible. We had to find a way we could create a bit of profit. Saffron doesn’t produce much in the first year, but when you come to the second, third, and fourth years, saffron produces three to five times more money than opium. In contrast, poppy seeds — or opium — are an annual cultivation. It needs more care each year, and the production size is linear, meaning that it does not multiply itself annually. With saffron, every year the bulbs multiply and make new offspring. Poppy might produce more money in the first year, but in the long-term, saffron will produce more. Now we can give incentives for farmers: If you cultivate saffron, not only can you help put the world in a better place, but also you’ll make more money for yourself.

I don’t want my country to be famous for opium; that is a big driver for me. The other reason I chose saffron is that my family chose to cultivate it starting in 2008. Before that, we were cultivating potatoes and corn, and we found profit in farming saffron.

What is your business model right now?

My main goal is to help the farming community in Afghanistan cultivate saffron and help them make a good living off it. By good living, I mean not just survival mode, but to be able to educate your children, to educate your daughters, your sons, send them to school. The other aspect of the business is that we are trying to help our international partners, Americans as well as people around the globe, by providing a good product that’s pure, natural, and essentially organic. We achieve all this through two steps. We’re educating farmers on how to clean the saffron in a way that is acceptable to the Western world: It has to be naturally heated or naturally dried, without any microbiological viruses, not produced in a dirty environment. In the U.S. market, we are educating chefs: If you put fake saffron into water, it’s going to have a chemical taste. It’s food coloring plus safflower or corn silk. It’s not saffron.

Fill in the blank: The past year and a half has been _____.

A transformative year. Because we had to transform from wholesale — selling to restaurants — to online retail business, selling direct to customers. We now focus a lot on the public. It was a challenging year, but I don’t know if that’s the right word because I don’t want to give it a negative connotation. It was an opportunity full of challenges. But it created transformative thinking.

How are you making change in the food world?

I am helping people who need the most help. I am helping farmers. No one listened to their voice; they were making the least amount of money. But now we are changing that. We’re paying them more, we are educating them, we are empowering them. And I’m helping a community of chefs in America to not waste their money on a product that they don’t know the source of. We are connecting these two communities. There was a big distance between them — not a lot of chefs knew where their saffron came from — and I wanted to fill that gap. When I started the business, I could not imagine a day when I’d be helping more than 120 chefs and working with distributors in five different states. I’m still not thinking about Heray as a business. Helping more became a business model for me.

How can readers support your work?

Simply put, we need more demand. Every sale is good for a community of 30 farmers. Very little goes a long way for Afghani farmers and pushes them toward a brighter future.

Fazl Ahmad is a photographer and graphic designer based in Herat, Afghanistan.

Chicago restaurant owners have complained about these practices from Grubhub, DoorDash, and Uber Eats

From the Editor: Everything you missed in food news last week

This post originally appeared on May 1, 2020 in Amanda Kludt’s newsletter “From the Editor,” a roundup of the most vital news and stories in the food world each week. Read the archives and subscribe now.

In February, I dined in the quiet backyard of a trendy Mexican restaurant in Brooklyn with a friend I hadn’t seen in awhile. We caught up on each other’s lives, on work, on post-pandemic vacation dreams. And we gossiped. About someone in particular. At length.

Of course that person was sitting at the next table, which I noticed on my way to the bathroom, where I hastily texted my friend and accomplice. How long had she been sitting there? What did she hear? Did we say her name? Can we hear what she’s saying? Is she also being indiscrete and therefore must not know we are also within earshot? We went into a full spiral.

Turns out I’m rusty at this! But it’s not just me. At another outdoor dinner a few weeks later, a friend of mine asked the waiter for “a wine” when he asked what she wanted to drink. Another stood up to leave before we paid the bill. Meanwhile, a colleague told me this week he is relearning to withhold burps while socializing.

I doubt you need the reminder that we’re all, at best, a little out of practice at all dining out and socializing (and at worst, completely feral). But remember we’re all in the same boat. And if you want to share your awkward re-entry stories (or even stories about weirdo customers where you work), I’m here for it (amanda@eater.com).

On Eater

— Registration is live for the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, aka the $28.6 billion in government grants covering full-year 2020 losses (up to $10 million). They will start handing out grants on Monday, prioritizing establishments owned by women, veterans, or people from economically and socially disadvantaged groups. Here’s our explainer on the program.

— Portland is once again closing indoor dining as cases continue to rise, but across the country, New York’s mayor would like the city to fully reopen by July 1.

— Recipe site Epicurious will no longer publish new beef recipes.

— Responding to restaurant complaints (and legislative commission caps), delivery company DoorDash announced a more flexible tiered pricing program for restaurants.

— Filing under The Rich Get Richer: While most restaurateurs limp out of this pandemic, Major Food Group opened four restaurants so far this year and have nine more planned before the end of 2021.

— LA chef David Schlosser threw shade at Japanese restaurants for not respecting and promoting the cuisine the way he does at his restaurant Shibumi. The blowback was immediate and predictable.

Rey Lopez/Eater D.C.

— D.C. is enjoying an enviable focaccia boom.

— A somewhat offensive and excessively tacky trailer park-themed bar opened in Houston.

— When my co-worker Jamesy went to South Korea in December to see his family for the first time in seven years, he had to quarantine in a facility for 14 days. There was no bed, but they delivered delicious dosiraks three times a day. Here’s his food diary.

— Ryan Sutton files on an exciting destination for both Korean wings and Nashville-style hot chicken sandwiches in New York.

— Feeling very jealous of people in LA and San Francisco who can order these beautiful egg tarts and caneles from Spoons Patisserie.

— Watch as my podcast co-host Dan Geneen visits America’s only eel farm. Skip ahead to minute nine to see him try to butcher one.

Off Eater

— Julia Moskin has a jaw-dropping exposé (even for these times) of the work culture (racist, sexist, dangerous) and business practices (deceitful!) of Willows Inn, the locavore destination off the coast of Washington State. [NYT]

— Welcome to the golden age of pizza in America. [F&W]

— Guy Fieri recently renewed his contract through 2024, and the alleged eight-figure deal is “said to be the biggest talent deal of its kind for Discovery Inc.” [THR]

— The allure of the Japanese fruit sando. [Atlas Obscura]

Even at 100 percent capacity, some coronavirus precautions will remain in place