I founded Emma’s Torch about eight years ago. I am the daughter of immigrants — my parents came here from South Africa — and my great-grandparents were also immigrants. For me, the conversations around the refugee crisis and how precarious and important that issue is have always been a part of my life. I started my career in public policy, and I was volunteering at a homeless shelter in Washington D.C. and having conversations with the women at that shelter about food, food justice and what nourishes us. It made me think that there must be something there — this common thread of humanity.

As is the way of many 25-year-olds, I had a crazy idea. I’m very fortunate to have a little bit of a crazy husband and best friend who both encouraged me and said, “If you have this idea, why don’t you at least explore it? Why couldn’t you be the person to make this happen?” That’s really how Emma’s Torch came into being. It was a lot of finding community partners, getting their feedback, and making sure that what I thought was a good solution actually served the needs of our community. I went to culinary school. We moved to New York and launched our first short-term café classroom in 2017 and our first flagship location in 2018.

Emma’s Torch is a restaurant that’s also a non-profit. This is an oxymoron because restaurants are generally built around making money. Tell me a bit about this model and how you see it working in the restaurant industry beyond Emma’s Torch. 

We operate as a social enterprise, and there’s different types of social enterprises — for profits and non-profits. For us, it was a matter of if we want to see the change, let’s be the change. If we want to create a learning environment that is super close to what our students will actually experience and give them that critical set of skills that can only come from experiential learning, let’s run our own business. It’s always program first. The social enterprise is part of the program. 

If we look at our outcomes and the success our students have had, we think a lot of it is due to the fact that by the time they’re going on the job search and graduating from our program, they’ve worked in a real restaurant. They don’t just hear us saying, “What you’re doing is delicious!” They’re seeing the plates come back empty. They know what it is to clock in and clock out. In the eight years we’ve been doing this, we’ve seen a lot of models. I get a lot of calls and questions about what works, what doesn’t. We have our own formula, and we’ve had the great honor of consulting with other people to help them. But, I think there’s so much more space in here to figure out this intersection of what it means to create programs that are based on and actually operate in our economy. Nobody has totally cracked the code, but we’re all trying. 

There are always refugees in NYC, but the last few years have brought a major migrant crisis, which has been affecting the city in many ways. How has this affected the work at Emma’s Torch?

Toward the end of the year, we started going into this mentality of meeting the moment. Emma’s Torch was named after the Statue of Liberty, Emma Lazarus’s poem. We’ve always been a nation and a city of immigrants and refugees. Right now, we are seeing this acute level of need. Our waitlist has tripled. Last week, we had a piece in Univision, and we had a huge number of applicants, both in New York and D.C. Yes, there is acute need. It is a crisis. It is also a tremendous opportunity. I had a meeting with an employment partner yesterday, and they are so eager to hire our graduates. While a lot of the rhetoric is focused on the negatives and the things we can’t do, there actually is quite a big subset of things we can do. We can give people the opportunities they need to build the lives of their dreams, and that’s actually better for all of us. While I think that it’s easy to be pessimistic by just seeing the sheer magnitude of the issue and the intransigence around finding solutions, it’s also been incredibly uplifting to see people say, “This is not a drain on our economy; this is an opportunity.” That has made our work feel so mission critical and so deeply optimistic. 

Most graduates of Emma’s Torch get restaurant work after they finish the program. Is there a particular graduate story that sticks out to you?

We are closing in on 400 graduates. A year ago, I got an email asking about a quote for a new restaurant. I was like, “What?!” It was one of our graduates. Mazen, whom I love, was one of our first students. His family had fled Syria and had arrived in this country, and his dream was always to open a restaurant. His sister submitted an application for his birthday. His path wasn’t linear. Opening a restaurant is an expensive, difficult and risky undertaking. He put in the work, made the relationships and opened Syko, which is a Syrian-Korean restaurant with his brother-in-law. He was part of Cohort 1. We brought Cohort 45 for a visit. Every time we interact with a student, we get to open these doors that they can, not just walk but run through. 

In a few weeks, we’ll be graduating our 50th cohort. It’s so humbling to think of so many people in New York who are doing such tremendous work. Each of them is the star of their story. 

The menu at Emma’s Torch is pretty “American,” with a few hints of international flavors. How is the food influenced by the people cooking it? Are there any ingredients or techniques that have been brought to the menu?

We talk about our menu as being New-American prepared by new Americans. It’s our education tool. All the techniques are built around what our employment partners are counting on us to give the students to be successful in a restaurant. That’s evolved over the years, but it’s always been a core part of it. If you’re eating at Emma’s Torch, it’s totally delicious, and it’s also our students’ homework. The other part is this interplay you mentioned between what is familiar and what is different. We work with students from over 40 different countries, and we’re learning from them every single day. Nobody is or needs to be the flagbearer of their entire country’s cuisine. 

There might be somebody telling us how his grandmother used to prepare a dish, or the way we use spinach is similar to the way they used a braising green called sukuma in the Congo. That definitely comes out in our menu, and over the years, it has also come out in special or graduation dishes. The driving force behind the menu is what our students need to master to get those jobs so they can thrive.

Emma’s Torch recently opened up a location in Washington, D.C. How is this location different from the Brooklyn location, and why did you choose to open there? 

We’re in a different city with a different team and different dynamics. We always want to center our community. The menu is pretty similar, and the philosophy underlying our work is pretty similar. Other than that, we’re learning from our neighbors and students here, who are different from our students in New York. The overriding ethos and how we approach the work is the same. 

In 2021, we were given the opportunity to dream big about what would be the catalytic scale and change for the organization. We came up with a three-pronged approach. One was to scale and replicate in New York. The other was to build out the capability to consult for other organizations. The third was geographic expansion. In Washington D.C., there was something so compelling about a city that is the seat of power in the United States. It is also deeply philanthropic. It is also a place with incredible diversity and refugee resettlement. We thought it was a textbook example of what we were looking for. We ran a couple of pilot programs, and last night, we graduated our eighth cohort. Things are ramping up. 

What’s next for Emma’s Torch?

The million-dollar question! I mentioned our growth strategy. We found a recipe that works, and now we want to get it to more people. We are pursuing a number of opportunities both in New York and farther afield around replication and scale. That is something I will be able to speak more concretely about in the next couple of years as we grow and bring this work to more and more communities.whi