Make Cafe is finally open in Normal Heights. It’s a pretty remarkable place.
They’ve got the chef from Cellar Hand in the kitchen, their own farm down the hill, and a house full of women getting a foothold on a new life.
Gotta try the congee. Chef Ashley McBrady soups up the rice porridge—a breakfast staple in millions of Asian homes—with jammy eggs, mushroom XO sauce, and sesame-chili crunch.
Make is a really good, farm-food cafe, period. The difference is the entire staff is refugee women who’ve found safe harbor in the US. Now they have to learn to speak the language, the customs, the norms, the everything. Make helps them find their footing.
Make Projects was started during the pandemic by Anchi Mei. To help the women, she took over a tiny plot of land in North Park, planted some food, and threw pop-up dinners. The women cooked street foods and specialties from their cultures.
“Make Projects is something that I wish my dad had gotten when he was an immigrant to the US,” says Mei. “Growing up in a first-generation Chinese-American household, I just saw him as this kind of sad, sad guy. Largely because he wasn’t able to speak the language. But every now and then he’d see an old friend from his childhood and he was like another person—laughing, joking, happy.”
Women spend 12 weeks in the program—four on the farm learning how to grow their own food, four in the kitchen with McBrady, and four in the front of the house. Usable skills for a way forward.
After her work at Cellar Hand, McBrady could have taken some glitzy job. “Some of the women come in and they’re like church mice—quiet, nervous, so scared,” she explains. “And by the end of it, they’re just so open and you see them blossom.”
That’s why. And the congee.
