Natalia Méndez is the co-owner and head chef of La Morada, a family-owned and Michelin-listed bearing Oaxacan restaurant and community hub in the South Bronx that seeks to preserve Indigenous Mexican cuisine while creating sanctuary, family and community for all who enter its doors. Méndez is one among a long line of curanderas (healers) and applies her knowledge of ingredients’ nutritional and healing properties to develop her cuisine. True to the saying, “donde come uno comen dos (where there is enough food for one, there is enough for two),” she welcomes everyone into La Morada, through which she also connects with New York City Indigenous women in the struggle for immigrant rights, human rights, Indigenous rights and food justice.
After her family battled its own wave of COVID-19 at the beginning of the pandemic, Méndez transformed La Morada into a soup and mutual aid kitchen, providing 1,000 meals daily for several weeks, and later, 650 meals a day to members of a community in need. Méndez and her family not only distributed food aid in the short term, but also seek to reclaim land and utilize community gardens and farms for their ingredients so that more neighbors may have access to food production and farming. She and her family engage in the pedagogical project of passing on transgenerational information about Indigenous foodways and good food as medicine--as a source not solely for health but also for healing. Her cooking has received numerous awards and recognition and is favored by top chefs. Méndez received the Three Kings Medal by El Museo del Barrio in 2017 for her significant contributions to the Latinx community and a Doctor of Humane Letters from Lehman College in 2022. La Morada has received glowing reviews from The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine and is a three-time James Beard finalist.
