[music]

Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC, we are live from The Greene Space.

[applause]

Oh, you need to hear our guests. Oh, come on. Want to try it one more time? All good. Our next guests are the heartbeat of the Bronx-based culinary collective, Ghetto Gastro. These men do train chefs in a foodie marketing mind. Want to foster a dialogue about creativity, education, social justice, and responsibility, inclusion, and access, all through food. It is a multi-layered approach. There's the delicious aspect.

Founded in 2012, Ghetto Gastro has grown into a much sought-after catering arm with clients like Cartier and Apple, serving them items like the Triple C, cornbread, caviar, and crab salad. There is an educational aspect. Ghetto Gastro presents Black Power Kitchen. That's not just recipes. There are poems, photojournalism, interviews with folks like Thelma Golden, Director of the Studio Museum of Harlem, and of course, unforgettably named recipes like Callaloo, What it do, and What the yams.

There's the educational and entertaining aspect as well. Last week, the collective launched a podcast titled In The Cut with Ghetto Gastro. Each episode investigates the origins of a dish from New York's foodscape, from bodegas to restaurants or somebody's kitchen. We hear from tastemakers and cultural experts. Let's listen to a clip. This is the trio speaking with New York City cookbook author and scholar Von Diaz about the origins of the Puerto Rican dish Mofongo.

Von Diaz: Plantains, even though Tostones, Mofongo, all these things are synonymous with Puerto Rico and synonymous with the Caribbean. Plantains actually are not indigenous to the Caribbean. They were brought to the Caribbean, specifically, to feed enslaved workers. The principal ingredient of Mofongo is one that we can tie directly back to African cooking.

Alison Stewart: Joining us in The Greene Space are Pierre Serrao. [applause] Top it up. Lester Walker [applause] and Jon Gray. [applause]

Jon, when did the first time of you-- When is the first time you all got together?

Jon Gray: Lester and I grew up in the same neighborhood, Co-op City, Section 5 in the Northeast Bronx. My grandmother was actually his younger brother's fourth grade teacher. We've been knowing each other for a very long time. Pierre and I met in the gym in Long Island City. I overheard him talking about [laughter] the tuna tartare, Morimoto and-- It's just-- It's not typical gym conversation. [laughter] I introduced myself and asked him if he was in the food. He told me he was a chef. We became close friends and two years after that, he joined the Ghetto Gastro Mob ties.

Alison Stewart: Lester, why do you describe it as a collective? What does that mean to you?

Lester Walker: Well, it's a collective because we're multidisciplinary. Everyone brings something else different to the table. When we all put our minds together, we create dishes that are monumental and have discussions around them, and engage our clients, our guests.

Alison Stewart: Pierre, what was the original goal when you guys got together and said, "This is what we want to do. This is the heartbeat of this."

Pierre Serrao: Well, for us, it was really about creating space for people that look like us. Typically growing up, when we go into fancy restaurants and different places downtown, you hear the hip hop on the radios, you see the aesthetic that they pull, but then when you look around in the managerial positions and positions of power, there's no people of color. For us, we wanted to create something that-- We wanted to create a brand and an idea where we were in control of the narrative about what luxury food is, who gets to tell those stories. Also, something to uplift our community using food as that tool to liberate.

Alison Stewart: Talking about telling your stories and taking control of the narrative. Tell us about the name Ghetto Gastro.

Jon Gray: Well, the name came down from the ancestors to me in a nap. I used to [laughter] have the ability to nap.

Alison Stewart: As one does.

Jon Gray: I no longer have that privilege, but yes, the name came to me in a nap. We like radical ideas and sometimes polarizing ideas because it's like you're taking two things that people don't necessarily associate with each other. Which is the ghetto and then gastronomy, which is usually something that's high end or high brow and thought about. The ghetto is usually neighborhoods where people reside that are historically underestimated, undervalued and oppressed.

We wanted to take the idea of where we're from and just create something special and reinvent the vernacular and create our own language. It's really-- just like hip hop, we're taking disparate ideas, putting them together, sampling culture, things from elsewhere, and then just creating a new art form with it. That's really the ethos of Ghetto Gastro.

Alison Stewart: In the book and in different interviews, Lester, you've all referred to food as a weapon. Weapons are really tools. They can be used to harm, they can be used to protect. We just really take it from the abstract. How is food as a weapon used to harm certain communities and then how do you want to use it to protect?

Lester Walker: That's an interesting question because when we say food is a weapon, it is a weapon that can kill, that can harm, that is a weapon for class destruction. It can really destroy the classifications. When we talk about a food desert, we talk about a desert which is a natural occurrence. In the Bronx, in the neighborhoods that we grew up in, it is no coincidence and it's no natural occurrence that we don't have access to these foods.

It's systemically programmed that way for us not to have access to these foods. It's more like a food apartheid than a food desert. We like to highlight that in the aspect of, how food is a weapon because we can use it to destroy classes, genres of individuals. It can heal us. At the same time as we see in our neighborhoods, it can also destroy our neighborhoods as well.

Alison Stewart: Pierre, how has being mission-driven impacted the way you do business and the way you want to do business?

Pierre Serrao: Well, I think for us at Ghetto Gastro, we've been the Black Power Kitchen since day one. We've always been mission-driven. We've always been focused on this overarching goal of liberating our community using food as a tool to do that. In different avenues, whether it's doing events or designing kitchen appliances. We have a line of kitchen appliances in Target and William Sonoma with the cookware as well.

Also, we have fed over tens of thousands of people during the height of the pandemic by galvanizing our resources to provide food to people who are food insecure. For us, it's really about just building and really controlling and being the people that we want to see. The people with resources, people with access to money funds, and also making it cool to do those things.

For us it's always been about our community. Because at the end of the day, community builds immunity over here at Ghetto Gastro. We know without these people and the place that we come from, these are the lessons that we've learned and what has made us into the men that we are today. We want to always give back, never forget about that. Just lift our people up.

Alison Stewart: Jon, what's something in your course of doing business where you've just said, "No, we're not doing that. No."

Jon Gray: So many things. [laughter] So many things. It's like usually when we get requests or inquiries, I feel like 9 out of 10 are noes because they just don't align. I think what we do is so specific and value-orientated and we know every dollar isn't a good dollar. For us, it's really about thinking about how the values align, how this is amplifying our message, what we talk about, and aligning with what we deem important.

Also, our price point is a huge barrier to entry. That's also like a huge filter because a lot of people are like, "Wait, what?" I wish I had a Zoom collage of all of the faces when we dropped the radar on them and people's like, jaws dropped.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Your point, that's great. I want to make a t-shirt. Every dollar isn't a good dollar. It's really important to remember sometimes because you can get wound up in it. You can decide, "Okay, we're just going to do this one thing," but that's a little bit of a slippery slope.

Jon Gray: We learned that lesson early. [laughs] We learned that lesson-

Pierre Serrao: A couple of times.

Alison Stewart: You can tell me that off the mic. My guests are the team behind Ghetto Gastro, Jon Gray, Pierre Serrao, and Lester Walker. The podcast, In the Cut. So far there are episodes about chopped Stease and mofongo. Lester, what is a food that tells me you're from the Bronx without saying, "I'm from the Bronx?"

Lester Walker: Oh, Chopped Stease. Automatically Chopped Stease is one of those dishes that is a uptown staple dish. It's typically designed for a hardworking citizen of the Bronx, a blue-collar, doesn't have much money to spare on elaborate lunches and dinners and things of that nature. You walk out of the house, automatically you got to spend $2.50 to $3, just to get on a train to get to where you need to go, come back home, so you already spend about $12 on that. You think about what you want to eat during the course of the day, if it's a hot butter roll in the morning or if it's a chopped cheese, when you get home from work or after school, or a slice of pizza.

It's one of those things that gives us the integrity and gives us the resilience and the type of strength that we come from, turning nothing into something. That's a dish that was comprised by the Yemenis, the people of the Yemenis background who use ground beefs and ground meats to create dishes with hummus and pita breads and things of that nature.

It's all cultures intertwined and is one of those dishes that, it just resonates with the communities. You can either get a beef patty with ground meat inside of it, with a little bit of mozzarella cheese, and that's at the pizza shop. It's like diversity speaks volumes in that dish, the chopped cheese. Actually, in the Black Power Kitchen, in our book, we have an alternative recipe to it because this is what we like to do.

We like to educate our consumers and give them options to what they can have from a classic dish, such as a Chopped Stease or even maybe a spaghetti with meatballs. We give people alternatives to meats and different proteins to give themselves a more high vibrational diet.

Alison Stewart: Yes, there's a lot of plant-based stuff in the book.

Jon Gray: On the chopped cheese episode and In The Cut, it was some debate with our good friends from Philly, Quest Love and Black Thought.

Alison Stewart: We got a clip.

Lester Walker: Run it.

Jon Gray: On a Philly cheese versus the chopped cheese, we staying sturdy and we ripping that chopped cheese to the casket, bro. Do you feel me?

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to that. This is from In the Cut.

Lester Walker: Quest Love, what are your thoughts on the chopped cheese?

Quest Love: For me, I know that a chopped cheese is not a cheese steak. However, I do respect the chopped cheese game of New York. It took me a while. First, I was just like, "No, man." [unintelligible 00:12:13] disappointed.

[laughter]

Pierre Serrao: Black Thought, can you describe to us the quintessential Philly Cheese steak?

Black Thought: The quintessential Philly steak is on an Amoroso's roll. I am saying, you got white American cheese, you got provolone cheese, you got ketchup, salt, pepper, and fried onions. It's very comparable to the chopped cheese, but it's like, where you all lose that, it's the bread. I have zero tolerance for the chopped cheese.

Jon Gray: Really?

Black Thought: Yes, no.

Pierre Serrao: He woke up and chose violence this morning with that statement.

[laughter]

Lester Walker: That's a Philly native right there. He represent-

Jon Gray: I thought of the city with brotherly love. It was a lot of smoke in that room.

[applause]

Alison Stewart: My guests are Jon Gray, Pierre Serrao, and Lester Walker, we are talking about Ghetto Gastro. The name of the cookbook is Ghetto Gastro Presents Black Power Kitchen. I want to hear about some of the recipes. There's a recipe for Highbridge plantain patties inspired by the Highbridge neighborhood in the Bronx. Tell us a little bit about this recipe. Who wants to start?

Lester Walker: That recipe right there, once again, it defines the diversity that we have in our community. All through the zip codes in the Bronx, there are different ethnicities, and particularly, in Highbridge area, in the Southwestern part of the Bronx. There's a huge community of West Africans, and a huge community of Afro-Latinos as well, particularly Dominican, Puerto Rican.

When you have those two flavors, and you have those two homogenous ingredients in the collard green that came from West Africa, and then the plantain that came from West Africa as well, but was imported to these islands, such as the Dominican Republic and Haiti, to feed the slaves that were mining, that were tending the sugarcane fields. These two ingredients right here are key to the survival for these two ethnicities.

I felt it was only right to marry those two, in the patty that growing up in the Bronx, we're used to going to the pizza shop, we're used to going to the Cuchifrito, and getting these patties. Typical Bronx style creators of hip hop, creators of a lot of stease, and a lot of swag, we're going to add our own remix to a dish that comes from the West Indies, such as the beef patty, and we're going to add some mozzarella cheese to that bad boy too, and we're going to make it pop.

We're going to mix it up, we're going to mix up the medicine. That's one of the dishes that I mixed up the medicine way, and we typically do that, we always do that with Ghetto Gastro. We put a little bit of medicine in the cool-aid and just let people know that these are ingredients that are sustainable to lower lifestyles, and a high vibrational diet, make it pop.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Jon, I'm going to put the nutty up. What's a nutty?

Jon Gray: Oh, the nutcracker, a nutcracker is a beverage that, I want to say it started in the Chino Latino restaurants like uptown. I remember floating Mayo uptown in the Heights, and there'll be a drink that they would make under the counter, because they didn't want you to see the components. That might be the original nutcracker. Growing up uptown, summertime you're at Orchard Beach.

You're hitting a park, there'll be people with these coolers, and they're selling nutcrackers, which are beverages where they take everything under the kitchen sink, some fruit juice, and it's like a bootleg alcohol, but it's a delicious drink, and it lets you know that the summer is here. It's also just a way for people that have often been excluded from financial opportunities, to create a living using what they have, because one thing you know you're going to find in the hood, are churches and liquor stores. Sometimes you got to take what you got and make it pop.

Alison Stewart: There's a banana leaf fish. Tell us a little bit about that, Pierre?

Pierre Serrao: For us, when we think about the connectivity and the parallels between West Africa, the Caribbean, South, and Central America, and even Southern parts of the US. There's a lot of similarities in the foods that we eat, and we want to tell the story with that. In the banana leaf fish, basically, we were on a trip in West Africa and Senegal, Jon and I were out there, we did some tours and some visits. There were just some people cooking some fish on the beach, and it reminded me of-- My family's from Barbados. Shout out to Barbados everybody in the 246.

It really reminded me of being in the islands. There's just these moments that we see throughout our travels, where there's just a lot of connectivity to our cultures and the West African cultures, the West Indian cultures, things like that. We just wanted to create a dish where we were telling that story, I would say. We use Black snapper in the book, but you can use red snapper or any other fish. We wrapped the fish in banana leaf, we season it up nice with some seasoning.

First, you got a lime and salt your fish, always. Lime and salt your food. Make a little brine for your fish. It helps pull out the toxins, any worms, or things like that inside of your fish. They've been traveling long ways, depending on where you live, so make sure you season your food properly. Get the book, the rest of the recipe's in there. Long story short, it is really about showing the parallels between the Black cultures around the world and that dish is definitely one thing that is synonymous to our culture.

Alison Stewart: You all are so smart and cool, and you make this look easy, but I know it's not.

Lester Walker: We use the banana leaf, too, to keep that moisture inside.

Alison Stewart: Are we still on the fish?

Lester Walker: Yes, got to add that. Got to let them know.

Alison Stewart: What was challenging about getting this off the ground, Jon?

Jon Gray: Well, a few things. I'll talk about the collective as a whole first. Having a name like Ghetto Gastro, being unapologetically Black, before it was trendy for people to care about Black folks and Black businesses and all of those things, and just being radically creative and different and not bending to fit the mode. We have the privilege of everybody having gainful employment when they started. We didn't have to do it for money. It's like we could really focus on a mission, craft the idea, put one foot in front of the other. I believe, as you stay diligent and consistent, the Universe will bend towards you.

It's been 10 years, but now people are knowing about Ghetto Gastro and the work we do, and it's very meaningful. When we are in the airport or kids walk up to us, I ask my librarian at the school to get this for the school. Those are the things that are super meaningful. Even when we're in Tokyo, we have a space in Tokyo called Burnside. Some young man walked up to us like, "Hey, we started a magazine out here about the counter culture of food scene in Tokyo because we learned about Ghetto Gastro five years ago. Now that magazine is super successful." Just seeing how things scale, because, like Tupac said, we might not change the world, but if we plant the seed in many people, then the world starts changing.

Alison Stewart: If they can see it, you can be it. You got to be able to see it.

Jon Gray: This is very true.

Pierre Serrao: In order to achieve it. Yes, indeed.

Alison Stewart: What can I make from your cookbook on Sunday for Super Bowl Sunday? What should I be making?

Pierre Serrao: Super Bowl Sunday, you should definitely do the Triple Cs, the cornbread, crab and caviar. I think it should be on everybody's Sunday table every Sunday. Treat yourself to something nice, splurge a little bit. Maybe do a green juice, because I know people are drinking a lot of alcohol on Sunday as well. We need to balance and we need to make sure that we're putting premium fuel into our bodies, so maybe hit that green for the money juice.

Lester Walker: The detox and the retox, make some of them nutties as well.

[laughter]

Jon Gray: Sure. I would say for sure dessert, Black Power Waffle with the Coco Loco, coconut gelato we have in there, all plant-based.

Pierre Serrao: If you want the Black Power Waffle you can just buy the wavy waffle mix @ghettogastro.com.

Jon Gray: Yes, plug.

Alison Stewart: Well done.

Pierre Serrao: Just add water.

Alison Stewart: That was well done.

Jon Gray: We're true to this? We ain't new to this.

Alison Stewart: For real. Valentine's Day, one recipe each, more romantic.

Pierre Serrao: Valentine's Day one recipe. What you do is you get your loved one fresh out the shower, lay them on the bed. Get a little bit of that Ghetto Gastro sovereign syrup, drizzle it on them. [laughter] I'll let you figure out the best.

Lester Walker: Recipe for Valentine's Day. Four cups of love, three cups of empathy, one cup of compassion and a little razzle-dazzled pinch of personality.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Is that what they call it now, personality?

Jon Gray: I think for Valentine's Day I'm going to be giving out a lot of food for thought because I got the isms like prism. It's going to be a lot of isms, man. The game is to be sold, not told. Go cop that Black Power Kitchen.

Pierre Serrao: That In The Cut.

Jon Gray: Go listen to that Audible because it's uploadable.

Pierre Serrao: Yes, indeed.

Jon Gray: You heard?

Pierre Serrao: In The Cut with Ghetto Gastro only from Audible available everywhere right now.

Alison Stewart: The name-

Jon Gray: Inbound message.

Alison Stewart: Let's keep on message. Name of the book is Ghetto Gastro Presents Black Power Kitchen. You can pick up hopefully at your favorite local independent bookstore. Also In The Cut with Ghetto Gastro. My guests have been Jon Gray, Pierre Serrao and Lester Walker. Gentlemen, thank you so much for coming, sharing your thoughts, sharing your message.

Jon Gray: Cheers.

 

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