Voices From the Kitchen: A Restaurateur Chronicles Immigrant Workers’ Hardships and Resilience

Voices From the Kitchen Puts Immigrant Restaurant Workers Front and Center

Anthony Bourdain long argued that American restaurants could not function without immigrant labor — workers who not only take on tasks many US-born employees reject but often perform them faster and with greater skill. In a blunt warning to the Houston Press in 2007, he said:

“The entire restaurant industry in America would close down overnight, would never recover, if current immigration laws were enforced quickly and thoroughly across the board.”

That dependence remains visible today. Millions of immigrant cooks, dishwashers, bussers and servers — both documented and undocumented — work in US kitchens while facing increasingly aggressive immigration enforcement. Marc Meyer’s new book, Voices From the Kitchen, compiles 27 candid interviews with current and former employees of his Bowery Group restaurants, giving human faces and life stories to a workforce too often reduced to headlines and statistics.

From Prep Tables to Leadership

Meyer co-founded The Bowery Group in 1999, the company behind New York City eateries including Cookshop, Shuka, Shukette and Vic’s. After more than four decades in professional kitchens, he understands how essential immigrant workers are to restaurant operations in the US and abroad. Influenced by oral historians such as Studs Terkel and Svetlana Alexievich, Meyer began informally interviewing staff about three years ago, capturing conversations in quiet moments in prep kitchens and empty dining rooms and transcribing them for posterity. A trip to Mexico and encouragement from friends there convinced him to assemble the interviews into a book, which Beacon Press published in November.

Meyer says the book was not meant primarily as a political tract; rather, he wanted to record the people behind the food — farmers, porters, dishwashers, bussers and line cooks — whose labor makes restaurants possible. As he told colleagues: “We wouldn’t have these beautiful ingredients. We wouldn’t have the staff to produce the food. We wouldn’t have people to build restaurants. We wouldn’t have the guy who cleans the restaurant overnight and goes to a second job in the morning. These are the stories that make it work.”

Hardship, Hope and Mobility

Data back up Meyer’s perspective. A National Restaurant Association report this year found that 22% of US restaurant and food-service workers were born abroad; in states with many independent restaurants, notably California, New York and Texas, the share surpasses 30%.

The interview subjects come from Bangladesh, Bosnia, Burkina Faso, Ecuador, Ireland and many other countries, reflecting the industry’s global reach. Their stories are often traumatic: Jakeline, a former nun from Lima, Peru, began as a prep cook and rose to morning-shift supervisor at Shuka after being robbed at gunpoint of $30,000 back home; Jenny, a line cook from Bogotá, was stabbed and nearly killed; Mohammed, a dishwasher from Gambia, went 23 years without seeing his parents; and Jairo, a busser, learned his grandfather had been kidnapped and murdered near Puebla, Mexico, even after his family paid ransom.

Some interviewees advanced to leadership roles within Meyer’s company. Anna Marie McCullagh, an Irish immigrant who overstayed a J-1 visa 35 years ago, is now director of operations and a partner; Carlha Azcona, a Dominican immigrant who worked her way up from line cook to chef de cuisine, now runs the kitchen at Shuka. Other stories reflect the frustration of being overqualified: Fatou Ouattara, who worked in finance in Côte d’Ivoire, began her US career washing dishes before rising to become a chef and co-owner in Portland.

Fear and Resilience

Even employees with legal documentation, like Ángel Vásquez — a former lawyer and activist from Venezuela who now manages a restaurant part-time — describe anxiety over immigration raids and enforcement. Employers feel the strain too. “If I lose even a couple of key players on my kitchen team, my restaurants couldn’t function,” says Jamie Kenyon, executive chef and co-owner of Bottino and ’ino in New York City.

Rosa Maria Sanchez, the soft-spoken server for whom an East Village restaurant is named, has worked with the Bowery Group for more than 15 years. Born in El Salvador, Sanchez endured childhood sexual abuse and a violent caravan attack while seeking passage to the US. She describes sharing her story as therapeutic and hopes it reminds people that immigrants deserve dignity and respect: “There is always a light at the end of a dark tunnel.”

Why This Matters

Voices From the Kitchen is a collection of testimonies that humanizes a workforce central to American dining culture. Meyer’s interviews underline the complex reasons people come to restaurant work — survival, escape, aspiration — and underscore the industry’s reliance on immigrant labor as well as the human cost of current immigration pressures.