Inside a Brooklyn kitchen that trains migrants for restaurant jobs, lifting an industry

Jesus Gonzalez, a 33-year-old Venezuelan migrant, spent a recent day learning his way around a New York City commercial kitchen together with a dozen other cooking class students.

Their classroom, a gleaming kitchen in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, rippled with nervous energy. Students in white aprons and hairnets intently whisked eggs, rolled dough and received a bilingual crash course in the American kitchen lexicon: hervir, escalfar, dorar — or boiling, poaching and broiling.

“Everybody has the scones, right?” asked the instructor, chef Kandy Williams, who waited for a beat before following up. “Right?”

“Yes, chef!” came the response.

The five-week course called Culinary Career Pathways for New New Yorkers was launched in April by the nonprofit group Hot Bread Kitchen, which trains New Yorkers for jobs in the food industry.

Although the course is patterned after the organization’s signature Culinary Fundamentals course, it has an important twist: It was designed specifically for newly arrived Latin American migrants who have secured work permits and set their sights on careers in the food industry. But the benefits and possibilities extend far beyond the individuals in this classroom.

More newcomers who arrived in the United States in the last two years are receiving work authorizations, which facilitate their moves out of city shelters and the underground economy. And a growing body of evidence from economists suggests that, far from being a perpetual drain on municipal budgets, migrants are helping power American economic growth.

“Without immigration, the U.S. labor market would be in deep trouble, because native workers are not able to fill job openings,” said Zeke Hernandez, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.

This is something that New York government officials have increasingly acknowledged. In addition to funding from private donors such as the Robin Hood Foundation, the program at Hot Bread Kitchen also benefited from $250,000 from the state labor department. Officials estimate that more than 40,000 job opportunities are available to asylum-seekers and migrants at more than 1,000 businesses statewide, with more than a fifth in food and hospitality.

“Migrants and asylum-seekers came here to work, so let’s put them to work,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said in October.

For Gonzalez, the program is an opportunity for a fresh start. He fled Venezuela after having experienced extraordinary personal loss, and then found himself homeless on the streets of Colombia. He eventually found his way to New York and now stays in a shelter in Jamaica, Queens, with his wife and daughter. But tragedy and deprivation have not curbed his ambitions.

“My ultimate goal is to have my own restaurant, ideally a pizzeria, and employ lots of people who need jobs,” he said.

Some economists argue that it’s not just immigrants who benefit from the jobs they fill. Immigration raised the wages of U.S.-born workers with a high school degree or less by 1.7% to 2.6% between 2000 and 2019, wrote Giovanni Peri, an economist at the University of California, Davis, and Alessandro Caiumi, a graduate student at the same university, in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in April.

“Native workers and businesses would both be significantly worse off without immigrants in the labor market,” Hernandez said. “It’s not just that foreign-born people fill job vacancies. It’s much more than that. Many jobs can’t be done unless there’s a minimum number of people to do them.”

Hot Bread Kitchen’s CEO Leslie Abbey said the organization found its students through referrals from other nonprofits. Although the class initially comprised 18 students, two dropped out due to “family care conflicts.” Still, the organization tries to make things easier for students by providing $150 weekly stipends and child care assistance so they can easily attend class. The group plans to train three more cohorts this year.

“With the right training and the right connections and some social capital, we can place people very quickly into jobs,” Abbey said. “And the food industry offers many opportunities for advancement. After that first job, there are many pathways to grow careers to become managers, team leads, sous chefs and more.”

The program benefits from Hot Bread Kitchen’s ties to the hospitality industry, including the José Andrés Group and Restaurant Associates.

Abe Monzon, senior director of talent at Union Square Hospitality Group, whose large restaurant portfolio includes Gramercy Tavern and Union Square Cafe, said graduates of the program could expect to get full-time jobs as prep cooks that pay up to $20 an hour. Potential recruits at his company would be expected to show they were comfortable working in a team and that they knew their way around a kitchen.

“They do some basic work just to make sure that they can cut an onion or they can do certain things that would be asked of them if they get the job full time,” said Monzon, noting that a recent graduate of Hot Bread Kitchen was set to become a prep cook this summer at USHG’s Tacocina restaurant.

If the graduates were hired as prep cooks, Monzon said they could eventually become line cooks — and then lead line cooks, sous chefs, executive sous chefs, chefs de cuisine and, eventually, executive chefs.

Inside the kitchen

On this day, Gonzalez and the other students followed the instructions of chef Williams, a Peruvian native who guided her class through a recipe for apple muffins, followed by another for scones. In past classes they learned the intricacies of preparing ratatouille.

The kitchen, an expansive space outfitted with bright copper lighting fixtures, was located in the offices of City Harvest, the food rescue organization. Students regularly shouted “behind” to alert their classmates as they rushed across the kitchen with fully laden trays in hand in scenes that looked like montages from “The Bear,” FX’s hit streaming series set in a frantic Chicago restaurant.

Williams is herself a graduate of Hot Bread Kitchen. She emerged from its program in 2018 and secured a job with the hospitality company Restaurant Associates, which operates restaurants at some of the country’s premier cultural venues and corporate facilities.

There she ascended the ranks before she eventually began overseeing events at Google. She returned to Hot Bread Kitchen with a master’s degree in education and now serves as the New New Yorkers program’s lead culinary instructor.

“Years ago I was in the same position as them, looking for opportunities,” Williams said.

For some of the students, the course is the closest thing to a direct path out of hardship. The program’s supporters say that graduates emerge from the course with the very real possibility of landing a fulltime job in the city’s restaurant industry and then climbing up the ranks.

“The restaurant industry as a whole is always hiring,” said Andrew Rigie, the executive director of the NYC Hospitality Alliance, “and workers come and go, so there’s always a general need” for new employees.

While immigrants account for just 18% of the national workforce, they disproportionately fill positions in certain sectors, said Hernandez, the Wharton School professor and author of “The Truth About Immigration Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers.”

This includes 33% of agricultural jobs, 36% in clothes manufacturing, and nearly a third of hospitality jobs. For the most part, he said those jobs go unfilled by native workers.

Hernandez stated in an email that the nation’s labor market would be in “deep trouble” without immigrant workers.

He added, “this is part of a long-term trend that has only gotten stronger with time as more Americans retire and fewer native-born people enter the labor force.”

A path out of the shelter

Gonzalez said the possibility of a job doing something he loves is what motivates him.

As a child in Venezuela, Gonzalez said he grew up in considerable comfort. His family had drivers and live-in servants who prepared all their meals. Gonzalez’s father worked for Pemex, the Mexican petroleum corporation, while his mother was a franchisee for a company that transported liquor.

All of that changed in 2015, when he said his mother was kidnapped and held for 13 days. A criminal outfit demanded a ransom of hundreds of thousands of dollars that the family agreed to pay.

Nonetheless, he said, his mother was severely injured: She permanently lost use of one eye and her foot was broken. The family scrambled to cover the ransom.

He says he also lost his father to government violence.

Gonzalez eventually made his way to neighboring Colombia.

He spent three days homeless, during which time he encountered the owner of a pizza shop, Pizzeria Colombianita. He worked there for 18 months, learning everything he could about the trade. Eventually, he set out on his own and launched a mobile pizza business in Bogota.

Gonzalez, his wife and his daughter moved to New York last summer, and he secured his work permit in March.

Others in the course say they have endured hardships, but also come highly motivated.

Sandra Patricia, 47, had her own restaurant in Cartagena, Colombia, but said she left after she was targeted by guerillas.

“They threatened my life and they made threats against me and my family,” said Patricia, who now lives in a shelter in the Bronx with her family.

Before migrating, Patricia obsessively watched a competition TV show “MasterChef Colombia.”

“I saw these people on the show and I wanted to live that experience,” she said. “Since I’ve been a little girl, the kitchen has been my whole life.”

“I know that I have a gift from God and I want to use it.”

There also is Victor Gonzalez, a 36-year-old Venezuelan native who worked as a waiter there and in Colombia before migrating to the United States. In the class, he was introduced to a gamut of food preparation and knife techniques, and said the knowledge had begun to pay off.

The pasta salad he and other students were assigned to make was “excellent,” as was the ratatouille, which required an understanding of kitchen preparation along with specific cuts to make the dish work. Now he’s hopeful he’ll be able to find a job, either in the kitchen or as a server, and practices what he’s learned each day at home for his three children.

“My dream is to open my own restaurant,” he said.

Powering the economy

For impending graduates of Hot Bread Kitchen, timing appears to be in their favor.

The restaurant industry is thriving nationally. It has added jobs in 38 of the last 40 months, according to the Washington, D.C.-based National Restaurant Association. Overall, restaurants and food service businesses are expected to add 200,000 jobs by the end of this year, for a total workforce of 15.7 million jobs.

At the end of March, there were 1 million job openings in the combined restaurant and accommodation category, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Rigie of the NYC Hospitality Alliance said that while “the labor crunch isn’t close to as bad as it was,” the number of jobs in the city’s food and drink establishments stood at just over 314,000 in March, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

That’s not too far behind what it was in February 2020 – about 8,000 fewer jobs, some of which will likely go to immigrants eager to enter the formal economy.

Restaurant Associated is one employer that may be recruiting some of the program’s graduates. The New York City-based company operates cafes and restaurants at cultural venues, stores and corporate headquarters across the country, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Times, Tiffany and Co., and the U.S. Open.

Courtney A. Willis, the company’s vice president of DEIB and culture, said the company had hired over 80 graduates of Hot Bread Kitchen in recent years.

“These graduates started in entry-level positions but many have progressed to higher-level roles including management positions due to their initiative, hard work, and on-the-job training,” said Willis.

For Jesus Gonzalez, the excitement of the classroom stands in contrast to the challenges of his personal life. He lives in a city-run shelter with no kitchen. Meals tend to involve reheating frozen dinners, which he said regularly left him and his family with upset stomachs.

Unlike some of his classmates, he has no opportunity to practice at home. But he’s been actively exploring the city and its pizza. So far, the verdict is mixed; some of the pizza places he tried underwhelmed him.

Their dough, he said, was simply not up to his standards. Back in Colombia, he noted that he’d mastered six types of dough, including Neapolitan style, Italian, Spanish, spiced and a sweet dough.

His dream is to one day have his own business, serving all sorts of pizza, including specialty pizzas: a chocolate-based pizza, another with fruit. He was reluctant to elaborate.

“There’s secret ingredients that I can’t share yet,” he said.

But eventually, he was certain, it would be one of the 10 best pizza places in New York.