The Tastemakers: Mera Kitchen Collective

rom the very start—first as a series of community pop-ups, then as a catering company and a JFX farmers market stand, and finally as a brick-and- mortar restaurant—Mera Kitchen Collective has been a communal project. The four women who began hosting dinners in 2018—Iman Alshehab, Emily Lerman, Aishah Alfadhalah, and Liliane Makole—weren’t just doing it to feed people, but to bring them together, realizing how food can unite diverse communities.

At the start of the project, Alshehab, a hotel chef in her native Syria, did most of the cooking, but soon Mera’s repertoire expanded from Middle Eastern dishes to include those from Mexico and West Africa, reflecting the home cuisines of the growing kitchen crew. This translates to Alshehab’s classic dishes of falafel, mutubal, and dolmas, plus Ramadan specials, as well as plantain bowls and bissap, and carne asada tacos, chicken tinga fries, and tamales.

In 2022, Mera opened its first restaurant in a Calvert Street rowhouse in Mt. Vernon, now the base of operations for the cafe—and a kitchen that makes 600 meals a week to donate to those in need in Baltimore, part of an ongoing project that began during the pandemic and has resulted in more than 200,000 free meals. They now have a staff of 21, whose languages include not only English, but Spanish, Arabic, and French and who share the 20-percent livable wage fee added to every order, including dine-in, take-out, and catering. “The servers are paid the same as a line cook,” says Lerman. “It’s not just one person. If you don’t have a good dishwasher, the whole restaurant is going to fall apart.”

Now, separate from its for-profit cooperative restaurant, Mera is also a nonprofit foundation that works to address food insecurity and recalibrate the relationship between food systems and the hospitality industry around the city. The free-meals operation, originally funded in part by José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen, is now subsidized by the City of Baltimore, though that income stream may not last. “We started with nothing, we did a pop-up, we did another,” she says—and they’ll keep on cooking the food they believe in for as long as they can.