Amelia Nierenberg

They had come to make signs in support of the owners’ son, Marco Saavedra, 29, who will appear Thursday morning in federal immigration court in Manhattan to petition for political asylum. Saavedra first came to the United States from Mexico with his parents, who are undocumented, at age 3.

In 2012, he turned himself in to border agents in Florida, and was detained, so he could publicize conditions from within a detention center. That effort put him in removal proceedings and resulted in the release of 70 immigrants. It was the subject of a documentary, “The Infiltrators,” which won two awards at the Sundance Film Festival this year.

“I had been hiding in the shadows for so long that I just reached a breaking point,” Saavedra said.

In 2013, he flew to Mexico and sought re-entry to the United States — as one of Dream 9, as the group called itself — to protest the treatment of migrants. Wearing his graduation robes from Kenyon College, he approached the border to request asylum as a human-rights advocate.

“We carry this fight in our blood,” said his mother, Natalia Mendez, 49. “My ancestors were never colonized, so wherever we are, we will be fighting for justice.”

Long before the current crackdown on unauthorized immigrants, family members have been vocal about their mixed immigration status: Saavedra’s younger sister and niece are American citizens, but he, his older sister and his parents are not.

“This is the kind of case that we’d have won 10 years ago, but now it’s uncertain,” said Damian Vargas, an immigration lawyer and regular customer.

Through La Morada, open since 2009, the family has fought gentrification, deportations and what they see as unjustified arrests. On its website, La Morada described itself as “undocumented-family owned.”

“There is a lot of fear here, fear of exposure, fear of being seen,” said Liza Austria, 41, a founder and the director of UpBeat NYC, a free music program for neighborhood children. “This family gives the undocumented community such a sense of pride.”

Her shirt read “Todxs Somos Marco,” a gender-neutral way to say “We are all Marco” in Spanish.

“Marco is an American hero,” said Marcial Godoy-Anativia, a regular customer who directs the Hemispheric Institute at New York University, which connects artists, scholars and activists across the Americas. “His self-deportation is on the par with the greatest acts of American civil disobedience.”

On Sunday, La Morada, which makes indigenous Mixtec cuisine, felt like a living room. Pozole, a Mexican stew served at weddings and christenings, flowed freely. At any given time, six different moles on the menu simmer for at least eight hours each. Only the youngest daughter, Carolina, knows the recipes.

La Morada has hosted events for groups that fight gentrification, like South Bronx Unite, and the family often uses the space for community art shows. In hand-painted red letters, the door proclaims “Refugees Welcome,” and large signs protesting deportations hang inside.

“At this time, when there’s so much discrimination against Mexicans, this restaurant gives us a feeling of power,” said Lorena Kourousias, the executive director of Mixteca, an organization serving Latin American immigrants in New York. “It’s a little piece of Mexico in the Bronx.”

The South Bronx, which includes Mott Haven, has higher rates of adult obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure than the city overall, according to a 2017 report by the New York City Food Policy Center at Hunter College; many residents consider serving healthy and affordable food to be an act of resistance.

“Whenever I have to work with frozen food or food from a can, it’s like there are chains around my hands,” Mendez said. “Food is something sacred, something alive.”

Mendez makes a point to offer her neighbors assistance. If they need a cup of sugar, they can have one, no questions asked; if a family member is arrested, someone at the restaurant will know whom to call. A lending library, which runs on an honor code, has books in several languages by former President Barack Obama, JK Rowling and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Saavedra does not expect to be detained or deported Thursday, and he can appeal the Thursday decision if he is not granted asylum. As a visible defender of human rights, Saavedra would be in danger if he were sent back to Mexico, where activists have been targeted, kidnapped or killed.

“We are facing our worst fear,” said his older sister, Yajaira Saavedra, 30. “But whatever happens to my brother will happen to our whole family.”

If the unexpected happens, his entire family is prepared to close the restaurant and move to Mexico with him.

Over a decade of pozole, mole and café con leche, the restaurant has given the neighborhood shelter, community and a place to meet. That’s what the family wanted when they opened La Morada in the midst of the Great Recession. They chose the name from a favorite Bible verse: John 14:2.

“En la casa de mi padre muchas moradas hay,” quoted Antonio Saavedra, 51, Marco Saavedra’s father, and paraphrased the passage: In my father’s house, you will find shelter.

At the hearing Thursday, neighbors will be there, carrying hand-painted signs to offer them shelter in return.

“This restaurant is a lot more than a restaurant,” said César Barros, a regular and the director of Latin American studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz. “It’s also a sanctuary.”

This article originally appeared in

A Mexican Restaurant in the Bronx Prepares for an Asylum Case

NEW YORK — On Sunday afternoon, La Morada, a family-owned Oaxacan restaurant in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, hummed with activity. Children ate tortillas, with fingers stained green and purple from acrylic paint, as their parents strategized over steaming mugs of coffee.

“If I don’t sing that song, people get upset,” he said, sipping a coffee in Midtown. “I’m like, I don’t want to [expletive] sing that song. And I love that song.”

Esparza’s latest character, the chef of a limping 16-seat restaurant in Brooklyn, also chafes at being pigeonholed. His signature is a scallop dish, which he abruptly takes off the menu after a glowing review. Has he done this on principle? Or spite?

The anxiety of an artist pursuing excellence is at the heart of Theresa Rebeck’s play “Seared,” which is now in previews and opens Oct. 28 at MCC Theater. Make sure to eat beforehand: Over the course of two acts, the smells of Esparza’s onstage cooking will waft into the audience.

To prepare, he worked with a chef consultant, watched cooking shows and practiced making the dishes at home as if he were in a restaurant kitchen. Onstage, he’ll be sautéing broccoli raab, plating gnocchi, searing salmon and more.

“I’ve never tried to cook so quickly,” Esparza said. “I’m slicing open my fingers.” He held up a Band-Aid as evidence.

Early last month, he visited Gloria Restaurant, a Midtown seafood spot, to watch a dinner rush firsthand. “The audience will never see it, but all of those details will help me think like the character,” explained Esparza, who has been nominated in all four possible Tony categories for any actor (in plays and musicals both) though he has never won. (He recently wrapped a six-season run on “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” as well.)

Esparza peppered the executive chef, Andy Keith, with questions. Why do you put your towel there? How do you keep track of orders? Why do you fold the tickets? He leaned against the wine cooler, keeping his hands back from the hubbub of the working kitchen, and drew a diagram in a notebook he’d been keeping throughout his preparation.

“Seared,” which had its premiere at San Francisco Playhouse and was staged at the Williamstown Theater Festival last summer, with a different lead actor, comes to New York when cooking and eating onstage have been increasingly popular.

The current Tony-winning “Oklahoma!” revival practically begins with the crack of an egg, for making cornbread, and chili is served at intermission. In 2015, Carey Mulligan sautéed onions in “Skylight” on Broadway. The year before, Hugh Jackman gutted a fish in “The River.” Opening next month is “Now Serving: A Guide to Aesthetic Etiquette in Four Courses,” a performance dinner party where audience members will eat onstage with actors in an experimental bacchanal.

In “Seared,” Esparza alone cooks six or seven meals, all of which are at least partially edible. (He’s not the only one, but you’ll have to see the show to find out why.) Working with knives that can cut red onions like paper and oil that actually sizzles, he must be precise and careful, while also looking like a professional. The 120-ish-person audience can smell garlic sizzling in the pans.

“They’re cooking absolutely everything,” Rebeck said. “I was like: ‘You know it’s a play, and we don’t actually have to do that?’”

To block the action, she and the director, Moritz von Stuelpnagel brought in Benjamin Liquet, a private chef, who began consulting in Williamstown.

“I keep reminding them that no one is eating the food,” Liquet said by phone later. “It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it has to look perfect.”

Liquet taught the actors tricks for being safe, convincing and efficient. He invited Esparza to his home for sessions, showing the right way to hold a knife, the right way to season a dish.

But it took the input of von Stuelpnagel to make sure the play is both culinarily accurate and theatrically adept.

Amid the industrial kitchen set, one complete with a working stove, he and the rest of the cast rehearsed. How do they plate a short rib dish so that it’s visible, but stable enough to be carried as a prop? Where should the towels go? What’s the right way to make a “burn” look realistic?

“In a musical, at least, the dance steps are set to music,” von Stuelpnagel whispered. “This is like, ‘On six counts of eight, make a wilted spinach salad.’”

Esparza, von Stuelpnagel and Rebeck all described “Seared” as a meditation on art vs. capitalism — how business pressures can affect a small, creative dream. But the play is also about the persistence of “the artist”: abrasive, relentless, unblinking.

Take Esparza’s Harry. He’s … particular. He won’t make the scallops. He refuses to settle for just salmon: In one scene, he wants wild salmon, which is almost impossible to buy. It has to be his way, or no way at all.

“Is he an artist? Yes,” Esparza said. “He tries to express what is not visible, or what is not tasteable yet. That, to me, is a kind of definition of genius: the people who aim at things that no one else can see.”

Esparza sees parts of himself in Harry. Whether it’s delivering scallops or “Being Alive,” there’s pressure to live up to both a past performance and the expectations of a persona: Can I do this again? Am I really who they believe me to be?

“A song that is so deeply associated with you becomes an impossible thing to live up to,” Esparza said. “That’s just like the scallops. They are both the thing he does really well, and the thing he is afraid he cannot do very well.”

Still, Harry’s personality generates considerable (and justified) irritation among the three other characters in “Seared”: an ambitious consultant (Krysta Rodriguez); a devoted waiter (W. Tré Davis); and his grumbly business partner (David Mason). They flatter and cajole, seduce and tease, berate and buffalo him as they try to feed customers and — ultimately — save the restaurant.

“That’s something he feels he’s earned,” Rebeck said. At rehearsal, she watched from behind sunglasses, bare feet crossed in front of her. A prolific (if arguably overlooked) playwright and scriptwriter, she said she’d drawn from her own life to write Harry, remembering spats with television producers, whom she described as “vampires.”

“I’m not a typewriter the way he is not a line chef at McDonald’s,” she said. “You can’t separate the creative person from the person.”

Reconciling Harry’s personality with his own has been a large part of Esparza’s preparation. He learned to cook from his Cuban grandmother, who’d teach him recipes by using her cupped palm to measure ingredients. For him, food is about love, friendship and unity: the shared experience of a meal.

To connect to his prickly character, Esparza turned regularly to his notebook. On one page, he wrote “taste, taste, taste, taste, taste,” all the way to the bottom. On others, statements and questions: What’s good about him? Food is sex. Food is memory. What does he love? Why does he cook?

“Being an actor is trying to hypnotize yourself,” Esparza said. “You try to think like another person for a couple of hours, and then you don’t.”

In the lead-up to opening night, that’s what he was thinking: Did he really understand Harry, and could he communicate him to the audience? Could he inhabit Harry’s mind, his skills, his restaurant as if they were truly his?

That, of course, and trying to hang on to all 10 of his fingers through the run.

For Sondheim, Raúl Esparza Protects His Voice. For 'Seared,' His Fingers.

NEW YORK — Wherever Raúl Esparza goes, it seems, people expect him to sing “Being Alive,” the heart-rending Stephen Sondheim ballad from “Company,” for which he earned a lead actor Tony Award nomination in 2006.

He had been fielding calls from friends and family since The New York Times reported on his discovery: a tomato plant with a single red fruit that he had found growing atop a piling in the East River while he paddled his kayak near the Brooklyn Bridge on Labor Day.

But as he made another trip Thursday morning to check on his find, there it was, a few pilings farther out from shore: a second plant, this one heavy with 15 or so little yellow and green tomatoes.

“I just couldn’t believe it,” said Frey, who is a board member of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Boathouse and a teacher with the Kayak Foundation. “It looks like a cherry tomato, like the one I’d get at the food co-op.”

This plant, like the first, was rooted deep in a hole made by a boring nail on the top of the wooden piling. And it posed the same riddle: Who or what had planted it?

Balancing on his craft during high tide, he tugged on the stem, just to see if someone had deposited the plant there in the last few days. “People do crazy things for a selfie,” he said, “but it seemed to be well-rooted. That little hole is the perfect spot for something to land.”

After he found the first plant, scientists interviewed by The Times said the most likely explanation was that a bird had ingested tomato seeds, then excreted them while flying over the river.

News of the first plant touched off considerable glee on social media and even inspired someone (or something) to create a Twitter account called “I, East River Tomato.” That plant has since lost its lone tomato.

“It’s not a real happy plant,” said Jim Giovannoni when he examined Frey’s photo of the first tomato. Giovannoni, a U.S. Department of Agriculture molecular biologist at Cornell University who has been studying tomatoes for more than 30 years, said it looked stressed, because “it’s not very bushy.”

Still, the yellow flowers remained on the first plant, a wink at more to come — and another sign that the river is getting cleaner.

As Frey floated in his kayak and pondered the mystery of the two plants, one thing seemed clear to him: “This is our garden, I guess.”

Another East River Pylon Sprouts Unlikely Tomatoes

NEW YORK — At first, Matthew Frey thought someone was messing with him.

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Amelia Nierenberg

Articles written by the author

A Mexican Restaurant in the Bronx Prepares for an Asylum Case

For Sondheim, Raúl Esparza Protects His Voice. For 'Seared,' His Fingers.

Another East River Pylon Sprouts Unlikely Tomatoes