about us
Food brings people together, no matter where you are from. It’s a ritual, we gather with our friends and family around the table, not only feeding our bodies but feeding our souls, connecting with people we care about.
Mera Kitchen Collective is a community-driven food business in Baltimore, where we’re building our own worker-cooperative. We focus on the empowerment of chefs from around the world by celebrating our skills and talents in the kitchen, highlighting the value newcomers bring to the fabric of our society.
We love Baltimore. We also recognize that policies and systems can create structural barriers that make it harder for some individuals to gain access to resources and opportunities -- and easier for others. Our goal as a collective is to amplify our skills and talents.
Why 'Mera Kitchen'? We chose the name Mera Kitchen because it contains the Greek word meraki, which has no direct English translation. Both a verb and an adverb, it connotes that when someone is doing an activity — like cooking — with so much care, devotion, and attention to the task at hand, that they leave a piece of themselves in it. In a world where our attention is often divided, we believe that there is immeasurable beauty and power in the collective act of creating and sharing food made with love.
What we do: In October 2021 we opened our first restaurant, and now we have a space to call our own. We grew from hosting small pop-up dinners in our homes to a weekly booth at the Farmers Market…to opening a restaurant! We also offer catering services throughout Baltimore City. Our chefs and cooks come from all over the world; many are here seeking refuge, eager to put skills back to use to re-establish an independent, sustainable livelihood. We hope to connect you with our chefs and our chefs with their local community.
Our first restaurant! It was a dream of ours to have our own space that embodied our culture and values. We envision our new home as a place that represents our diverse cultures as a team at Mera, and the community that we integrated into Baltimore. It is a vehicle to share our cultures; the aroma of cardamom in a rice dish, the tangy spices of salsa verde, fruity, tropical baked goods, and the refreshing gingery mint juices of Burkina Faso. This space is an opportunity for our cooks and chefs to fully express themselves, re-invent their food, collaborate with one another, and most importantly take the Baltimore community on a culinary adventure around the world. We believe in the power of communing over food, on long tables, with shared plates, in conversation, and in pausing to connect with new and old friends.
Mera Kitchen Collective is a building a worker cooperative - we participate democratically as we build our business together. This allows for each of us to only strengthen our culinary expertise and have a voice in the operations. We hope to use the cooperative model as a successful tool for wealth generation and fostering empowerment.
We find that people often assume that Mera Kitchen Collective is solely a non-profit, and we’re often correcting them. (You can read about our non-profit arm, MK Foundation here). We explain that our goal is, and has always been, to build a thriving for-profit worker-cooperative, where the members have a share in the ownership and profits of the business. In that respect, we want to make sure we are very clear on a few things about the ownership of Mera. When we started, we hoped and assumed it would be very easy to have multiple owners. We quickly learned otherwise.
Since our inception, we have been working with the Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy, which has provided us with technical assistance on how to build a democratic business and connected us with lawyers and accountants who do the same.
Due to many systemic and political issues, we learned that it would be impossible for some to be owners, and potentially detrimental to others. So for now, we’re acting with the most caution and care. We hope that policies in our country change to make this easier as individuals should be able to enjoy the benefits of being a business owner.
We have always put the specific needs of people first, which is why we’ve taken so much time and resources to do our due diligence in this area. Despite this, we’ve always been able to run our business democratically, creating a structure where everyone can participate in the decision-making, and so far we’re really excited to see how it has helped us to develop and grow.
But we’re not perfect and things take time, especially when pushing against systems often designed to make things more difficult for newcomers in this country. Our goal has always been to remain as transparent as possible while putting the interests of our members first.