The newest eatery opening less than one mile from the White House offers more than just a spot to grab a quick meal. Immigrant Food, as Peter Schechter, one of the three founders of the restaurant told The Washington Post, is about food, yes, but it’s also immigrant history, advocacy, and community. But while Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies are abhorrent, Schechter stresses that the restaurant is not about him—it’s about immigrants.
“It’s one of the few things in Washington that’s not about Mr. Trump,” Schechter told the Post. “We’re in a period in the States where suddenly one of the most basic things about being an American is suddenly in doubt.”
Immigrant Food opens on Tuesday, Nov. 12. That’s no coincidence. Nov. 12 is the same day the Supreme Court begins to hear arguments on Trump’s plan to kill the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. This move would be catastrophic for the hundreds of thousands of Dreamers who are qualified to work and receive legal protection thanks to the program.
“Just a block from the White House, Immigrant Food's fresh, creative dishes reflect how we see America at its core: diverse, nourishing and welcoming,” Schechter told The Hill. “This is our small contribution to the fight against a new intolerance in America.”
Immigrant Food isn’t just honoring immigrants with lip service. The restaurant will also provide a rent-free space for non-government immigrant service organizations and advocates to meet. Meeting space (especially free meeting space) is hard to come by in D.C., especially in a location so close to the White House.
The food menu highlights cuisines from local immigrant populations in D.C., including Ethiopian and El Salvadorian. “I pulled everything together in a piece of paper going … through countries, the spices that they use in their countries, ingredients by countries, and then started crossing lines, trying to connect countries,” chef Enrique Limardo, originally from Venezuela, explains to Eater. “It was like a spiderweb—very confusing at the first time, but … it was a perfect way to start connecting flavors and why I can substitute some ingredients for others.”
In addition to a unique food menu, Immigrant Food offers an “engagement” menu that encourages customers to donate their time, money, or skills to immigrant nonprofit groups. These engagement menus also list five local immigrant-service organizations to get people started: Asian Pacific American Legal Resource Center, Ayuda, Capital Area Immigrants' Rights Coalition, CARECEN and CASA. Basically, the engagement menu pushes customers to put their money where their mouths are.
All of this happening within a restaurant actually makes a lot of sense. “Restaurants have always been a place where immigrants have gone to make a living, created community and showed off the cuisine of their heritage…. Without them, there would be no restaurants,” Schechter tells The Hill, adding, “Immigrants feed America.”
There are strong arguments to be made against partisanship framing on any issue, but especially social ones—in an ideal political world, even conservatives would recognize the humanity of immigrants and support policies that protect, celebrate, and welcome them. Trump’s administration is astoundingly anti-immigrant; he, for example, erroneously referred to DACA recipients as “hardened criminals” just before today’s SCOTUS case, but these issues, sadly, won’t disappear when they leave office. If there’s one thing that shouldn’t be partisan, it’s humanity.
“It’s definitely not a pop-up store or a one-time restaurant,” Schechter tells Washingtonian. “Celebrating immigrants is what we want to do, whether or not Trump is in office.”
For the curious, political affiliation is actually a protected class in D.C., so a restaurant—and perhaps especially one located at 1701 Pennsylvania Ave NW—that ran on an entirely partisan foundation would probably have some issues. Immigrant rights are bigger than Trump, and making this restaurant endeavor bigger than the president, too, may provide the cause with some necessary staying power.