Our purpose is service and sharing.
We want to share our culture.
We want to share our story, our food, our traditions.
It's a very easy way to bring people from all walks of life
together.
One out of four people who filed for unemployment
during the pandemic are coming from the hospitality industry.
If you take that out of a city, you're
taking the soul of a city.
[KEYS CLACKING]
The pandemic hits, the service industry is shut down.
How did this affect your work?
Everything was all over the place in my life.
I was at work March 17 thinking that I was
going to come back March 18.
Nope.
There was a call from my boss that my hours would be cut.
They say necessity is the mother of invention.
And I didn't really know what that meant until March 17.
I've been in the service industry for numerous years
but decided to branch out on my own to start a pop-up kitchen.
It's basically a food truck without the truck.
We move venue to venue doing catering.
The people are good.
The beer is cheap.
The sports are loud.
And that all went away overnight.
We can see them.
I know it's right up here.
We're going to Granel Global Spice
Market, where Knives and Water gets all of our spices.
We decided to go into trap kitchen mode.
We were going to be delivering.
The goal was to have something that would feed
a family for a couple of days.
A lot of the foods that we were doing at pop-ups don't travel
well, so we would have to do things that could be frozen
like gumbo, vegan curries--
and then driven all over Houston,
which I don't know if you know anything about Houston.
It's not a small town.
You can drive two hours from Houston to get to Houston.
It's frigging massive here.
It sounds like your operations have
been completely transformed.
Yeah, I'm still making this up as I go along.
I have no idea what I'm doing--
let's just be real.
But we'll figure it out as we go.
We are here with Chef Mercedes Vargas.
I can't wait.
They're so good.
Food is such a wonderful thing, and it's something
that you usually share in community.
I really wanted to focus on teaching people
to eat empowered.
They smell so good.
And then I found out about Chef My Kitchen.
A chef can consult someone, walk them through making something.
So I partnered with them, and an opportunity
became available to do a live virtual class.
You can get as creative as possible.
It depends on what you like, right?
Food is one of those things that you have to share with others.
I'm sharing it in a different way, virtually,
but I think it's still important.
It does sound like there are creative ways
that people are adapting that could
be positive for the industry moving forward.
Time is a luxury.
Some people can't afford for the industry to turn around.
The restaurant industry is the number one employer
of single mothers.
It's the number one employer of people
who are restarting society from spending time in jail
or in prison.
They're the second employers of immigrants.
And so those are people who already don't really
have a safety net.
When I don't have money, I'm like one of those people that
be like, oh!
I was on probation, and I was a server at Hook & Reel New
Jersey.
I excelled there.
I was one of the best servers that they had.
And I was there until the pandemic started.
I have a car note to pay.
I have a phone bill to pay, cable bill.
So I was really stressed out and aggravated.
It was really difficult for me to change from being a server
to working as a warehouse associate.
It's like cardio for or five hours a day
straight-- throwing boxes and things like that.
I live in Harlem, and this job is in Borough Park.
So I had like three interviews, so I had to take the subway.
Was like an hour and something to get here.
But I didn't care.
I mean, I need the job.
I needed the job back then.
Indeed was the only platform that was working for me.
Did you have any experience working in customer service
or this kind of work at all?
No customer service ever.
And insurance, company benefits--
that's like a whole new world for me,
especially in the United States, especially in English.
Because at the end of the day, it's not my language.
Then they ended up hiring me.
Thank the universe.
How has this time period changed how you think about
work in your future?
My family, my friends from home--
they are the reason why I'm still going.
A lot of people know that I don't like to do things
when it comes to strength.
It makes me sweat.
So to know that I'm actually doing this
and I'm actually doing a great job at it,
it really makes me proud of myself.
And there you go--
to be able to teach someone to make
a dish that they could share with their family, I love that.
Everyone's a social being in our work.
It's more than just a meal.
There's a lot of love, empathy, joy in what we do.
But I do think that the industry is
going to bounce back tremendously
because people just need to--
people need to be together.
[MUSIC PLAYING]