Bronx restaurant steps up for community with free meals

The special dish at La Morada, a small Mexican restaurant in the Bronx in New York, varies from day to day: Perhaps it’s enfrijoladas, handmade tortillas covered with black bean sauce and pico de gallo. Or beef with a side salad.

One thing doesn’t change: It’s free. The family- run restaurant, which opened in 2009 and has won Michelin acclaim for its Oaxacan food, has also served as a soup kitchen during the pandemic. While serving paying customers, it makes about 650 meals a day for the unemployed, New Yorkers who live without gas and can’t cook, older adults or the disabled. When La Morada’s soup kitchen opened in April, people lined up in the street and 200 orders of soup were gone in less than an hour, the family said.

“We always say that activism is our secret spice, so I feel like it was just very natural for us to serve the community with what we have,” said Yajaira Saavedra, 32, co- owner of the restaurant with her parents. “It also goes back to our Indigenous roots when we all pitched in, gathered small ingredients and made a big pot as a meal.”

The family was sickened with COVID-19 symptoms early in the pandemic, and had to close the restaurant for a month. When they reopened – with help from an online crowdfunding campaign – they started cooking for the poor as well.

Before the pandemic, La Morada was a community book exchange center. Images of protests and of immigrants demanding an end to deportations of family members decorate the restaurant’s purple walls.

Today, volunteers and local service organizations, churches and businesses help distribute the food and donate ingredients, and a Brooklyn nonprofit, Rethink Food, provides key funds.

The soup kitchen runs Tuesday through Friday. On Mondays, Méndez and several helpers do prep work, cleaning and chopping lettuce, garlic, onions, tomatoes and other ingredients.

Volunteers come and go throughout the day, grabbing boxes of food to distribute.

“It is mostly the community pitching in and friends and allies just saying, ‘ We are going to do this, we are going to fight together and survive,’” Saavedra said.

BEBETO MATTHEWS/ AP Natalia Mendez cooks a meal with pork chops, jalapeños and nopales ( cactus) in the kitchen of La Morada, an award- winning Mexican restaurant she co- owns with her family in the South Bronx. After recovering from COVID- 19, the family raised funds to reopen the restaurant, which they also turned into a soup kitchen serving 650 meals daily.