- Welcome, everyone, to "food.

curated.," a show that takes you behind the scenes to meet today's most inspiring food makers.

Stick around for a healthy peek into the growing movement of local plant-based chefs and restaurants.

(upbeat bright music) I'm Liza de Guia, documentary filmmaker and food lover.

I invite you to discover the people and passion behind good food in New York City.

This is "food.

curated."

Funding for food.

curated.

is made possible by: Stele is a globally curated collection of artisanal and independent perfumes.

Hand-picked olfactory experiences that tell a story.

Available online and at two New York locations.

For more info we're at Stele (dot) NYC.

Support for food.

curated.

comes from CMD Psych.

Bringing holistic approach to child wellness and women's mental healthcare.

Helping patients find balance and harmony in their lives.

For more info, head to CMD Psych (dot) com.

Additional funding provided by It wasn't so long ago that plant-based restaurants were hard to come by.

Now, every corner of every borough is seeing more veggie-forward menus and vegan restaurants on the rise.

People are looking for ways to add more plants to their diet, and food makers and chefs, spanning every tradition and cuisine, are answering that call.

(light music) (upbeat electronic music) - New York City is the place that really embraced me, accepted all the things that I am, all my identity.

It's where I found me.

(upbeat electronic music) So why is my style of cooking, is not yet popularized?

I had so much creative energy, like creative ideas, and I feel like, this is gonna sound so stupid.

I'm a trendsetter.

(laughs) (singer sings indistinctly) I was petrified posting one of my first dances.

Like, "What the F I'm gonna be, what am I doing?"

But then it brings people joy.

So not only obviously I'm doing, you know, sharing recipes but I'm also sharing joy through dancing.

Everybody asks me, it's like, "Do you follow a choreography?"

I'm like, "No, I just let my body move to the music that's playing."

(upbeat electronic music) Hi, my name is Woldy Reyes.

I am the chef and owner of Woldy Kusina located in Brooklyn, New York.

I'm here to sort of harvest some produce for one of my popups.

I like to romanticize my food.

So having colors and different textures, it really speaks to me.

Woldy Kusina started out as a boutique catering company.

And since the pandemic, I shifted to doing popups and I modernize Filipino comfort food with a plant-centric twist.

Knowing that it's homey and stewy and it's very meat-forward, I'm wanting to celebrate the produce in a more fresh and modern way.

Oh wait, look!

This is a bitter melon.

It brings me a lot of really good childhood memories, and it's really good for your health.

What it tastes like, it's bitter So I pickle them.

I enjoy it in salads now, and I enjoy it in, like, sandwiches.

It's how I'm eating today.

I'm being a lot more conscious about how we are treating our world and being intentional.

Before that, I was like, I was eating everything and anything.

(upbeat electronic music) I don't know, I think I bring a lot more, like, a fresh perspective.

Mm, so nasturtium, it has that slight sweetness, kinda like a succulent cactus-like flavor.

Again, this is not traditional in Filipino cooking.

Traditionally, Filipino food is super delicious and super brown, like me, and I just wanna celebrate color into it.

So delicious.

I don't mind brown, but it was mostly brown.

And now I think there's a wave of Filipino Americans who are redefining what Filipino food can be.

Is it really difficult to be a plant-based Filipino chef?

No, you're not a chef if you don't know how to work with vegetables.

(upbeat electronic music) Hey, hi.

Hey, hi.

(Woldy laughs) Hi, we're here at Hungry House Kitchen at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Hungry House partners with up-and-coming chefs, just like me, who feature their signature dishes to make them accessible all throughout Brooklyn.

- [Liza] Yay!

(Woldy laughs) - So the menu I have at Hungry House has mushroom adobo with jasmine rice and baby lacinato kale, pancit noodle salad, mushroom bulaklak with Fresno coconut sauce, and bibingka, which is the Filipino coconut rice cake, which is all plant-based and gluten-free.

(upbeat electronic music) Pancit is Filipino stir-fried noodles.

So the dressing has tamari, has sweet chili sauce, has ginger, garlic.

And my approach to pancit was to make it sort of a colorful salad.

I think I had this sort of love- hate relationship with food.

I was a chubby kid growing up.

I think there was all this shame about my identity, my Filipino American heritage, and also I have a hearing disability and was gay, but at that time I didn't know what that word was.

So I think eating in excess was a way for me to comfort myself.

In a traditional pancit, all the vegetables are supposed to be cooked.

This is a great way to enjoy pancit in a fresher way.

I also saw, like my dad, you know, eat in excess and, you know, and it caught up with him, and he was diagnosed with diabetes and, unfortunately, like, he passed away of a heart attack.

That experience shifted my mindset.

I had to, like, train myself to eat more healthfully.

My next signature dish is the adobo mushroom and rice.

Traditionally, adobo has pork, chicken.

And my approach to this adobo has maitake mushrooms, trumpet mushroom.

And my adobo sauce has creamy coconut milk, umami tamari, lots of specs of black pepper in here so you can see that it is Filipino adobo.

- [Liza] Was your dad a big part of your life?

- My dad was, definitely, a big part in how I cook my food now.

He was unapologetically Filipino.

It ain't Filipino food without the jasmine rice on the table, or on the plate.

We cook Filipino food, we ate rice every day, we sat at a table, we ate with our hands.

I'm getting emotional just thinking about my dad.

(chuckles) I didn't know this was gonna come.

Growing up, it's like being in the kitchen with my grandmother and my dad, I was just sort of like in love with the process.

You know, Filipinos, the way they show love is through food.

Like, that's how they show love.

We never really said I love you a lot, but food was just that thing that showed me love.

So I treat food now as my creative expression.

For me, like, I want to romanticize food, make people feel excited, make people feel hopeful.

It makes me feel good.

(light music) You know, one of the important things is the collaborations that I do with other chefs.

I wanted to work in a space that, like, it's gonna uplift me So I've always gravitated towards women, people of color, queer, LGBTQIA because they're my people and they're my community.

If I'm doing a job and that's gonna pay me, I'm gonna keep it in that community.

We all know how hard it is to be our authentic self.

And we're all there for a common goal, it's to nourish somebody.

(enigmatic music) The Woldy Kusina experience should be, like, a multi-sensory experience.

Food is the center of it, and then everything that surrounds it should be reflective of that.

I'm still on this ongoing journey of, like, fully accepting myself and all of the things that I am.

I'm a bold person, I'm wearing a bold sweater, so I think that shows in how I approach my food and how I wanna share my food.

I want it to be exciting.

I'm exciting.

I wanna educate people to utilize vegetables in Filipino cooking.

And I'm glad that we're being more visible and desirable, so I'm gonna celebrate that.

(enigmatic music) (light music) (upbeat electronic music) - When people think about soul food and Southern food, it's usually the meats or like the animal products that we use, or like some of the fats.

It's, like, probably like chicken, mac and cheese, collard greens, yams.

There's just certain things you think about and usually they aren't vegan, unless you make them vegan.

I don't think everything or, like, every meal needs to have, like, meat or pork or animal products.

Hi, my name is Shenarri Freeman.

I am the executive chef of Cadence located in East Village, New Yor (upbeat electronic music) So we're here in the kitchen of Cadence.

These are some of the classic dishes that have been on the menu since we've opened actually.

So Cadence is a vegan soul food, plant-based restaurant.

We just really value, like, health and wellness, so I think the food is kind of an artistic expression of that.

There's just, like, endless possibilities.

I had already been cooking this kinda food for quite some time.

So this is our palm cake.

It's like a vegan crab cake, if you will.

It's made out of chickpeas and heart of palms.

We have a little bit of kelp.

It just reminds me of like seafood.

I'm from Virginia, my family is still in Virginia, so having vegan soul food and Southern food I think it's very different and unique, and I think people are intrigued by it.

So I have some slaw here, but we make this with some zucchini, some red onions, some carrots.

Wanna incorporate as many textures into a dish as possible In terms of where we are now with vegan and plant-based food in New York, I think we're in a great place.

I'm starting to see more fine-dining vegan restaurants, different cuisines with vegan restaurants as well.

And New York alone has over 1,500 restaurants that are either vegan or vegan-friendly or vegetarian, so it's nice to see that shift.

We love microgreens.

Just amaranth here.

This also adds like a nice little pop of color too.

Try to put microgreens on most of our dishes.

The thing that sets me apart is that I'm actually cooking vegetables.

I'm not cooking this wild stuff that's been invented in a lab or anything like that, you know, I'm generally finding my way through vegetables.

And there we have it.

For instance, like, most people are familiar with collard greens and soul food, right, but not probably the way I make them.

Traditionally, they are prepared to kind of like stewed down in a broth, usually cooked with meats.

So this is definitely a different way to prepare them, rolling them up and stuffing them with, like, local seasonal vegetables.

Like, I don't wanna serve anyone anything that I wouldn't eat myself or that I wouldn't make for someone that I love.

I try to keep the ingredients as simple as possible, but create something amazing 'cause I really want people to absorb the food, but also, like, absorb the knowledge behind it.

So this is our collard green wrap with a chickpea miso broth, and then inside we have a seasonal succotash.

Designing a menu, I definitely put things that may be familiar to the palate on there.

My grits, probably the best grits you'll ever have.

I'm gonna go ahead and start our lasagna.

I was always known for making great lasagna, vegan or not.

It's like my signature dish.

This is a lasagna noodle.

And then inside we have a layer of pine nut ricotta and then a layer of red wine Bolognese, both which we make here in-house.

It's crunchy but, like, the inside soft, and then, like, you have, like, sauce in there, it's like a lot of flavor.

So it's a really fun dish to eat Southern food, people love to fry things.

So I think having anything fried with Southern food is just gonna be great.

The lasagna holds a special place in my heart.

The world of plants excites me because having just so many options of how you can eat vegan food and how you can approach it, like I really wanna be remembered and, like, I wanna be remembered for caring about, like, the health and the wellness of my community.

It's just like a testament of what we're capable of when we put our minds to it.

(light music) (light music) - I make a joke about the foot-long bok choy.

Okay, bok choy was not grown to be this big, all right?

Bok choy is going to be about yay big, all right?

'Cause when it's this big, it doesn't taste very good.

It's fibrous, it's chewy, you can't chew through it.

It's terrible, right?

But when it's this big, it's fantastically crisp, non-fibrous.

I don't want someone's interpretation of what Asian greens is or what a bok choy is to them, and they sell it and nobody buys it.

No one is servicing the Asian American market.

We wanted to grow something different.

Oh, this is so much fun.

Hi, my name is Judy.

I'm founder of Allwell Greens, an indoor vertical farm growing Asian greens in Queens, New York.

- Oh, get out of my shot.

(Judy and John laugh) This is my time.

- John is my husband and co-founder.

And we are the first indoor vertical farm to grow Asian greens.

And part of our process is harvesting.

So right now, the grow is ready to be harvested.

You see the really nice bulb over here that it's forming, and we want it as a petite size rather than a full size.

So that's a perfect specimen.

- [John] So this is Shanghai bok choy, and we're utilizing 98% of what we're cutting.

So there isn't a lot of waste.

- When we began Allwell Greens, we were really looking for a way to modernize the production of Asian greens.

We saw the produce market move towards pesticide-free, organic, prepackaged produce, something that lasts longer, something that is versatile.

You can eat it as a salad, you can eat it cooked.

It's convenient.

So this bulb, look at the interiors.

There is no dirt, there is no grime.

It's really clean.

(soft music) Oh, these are bigger now.

This is my baby.

In Chinese supermarkets, you don't see pesticide-free bok choy.

So if you go into your H Marts, your 99 Ranch, your Cheng San, all the Chinese supermarkets and Asian supermarkets, there was no such offering for Asian greens.

The growers are not providing that type of product.

- Really what we've kinda set up here is a laboratory.

So we're trying to grow and bed down the growing process for as many of our crops as we can before we move into a larger space to kinda produce them at full scale.

So we do a lot of research in here, we do a lot of experimentation.

These systems are systems that we built.

They're not from a kit, they're sort of DIY.

We've got a couple of different plumbing systems we're working with.

We use these racks to test different lighting systems, as well as things like planting density, temperatures.

We've planted over a thousand batches in this space.

This is yu choy seed.

Yu choy being one of our core products.

So we've grown a lot in here in the last year and a half since we started really getting, digging deep into the process.

- [Liza] What are we looking at here?

- We've got some Thai basil here So this is one of our first initial grows for this.

But we're doing some herbs.

We're testing a few different types of herbs.

Now, a lot of this stuff hasn't really been tried in this context before, and we get to be the first ones to do it.

(gentle piano music) - It used to take 35 to 40 days in the field, right?

For us, we grow it in half that time.

- [Caleb] So just finding the right blend of growing mediums here.

You wanna provide that structure for that seed to grow in.

You wanna provide access to nutrients.

- The whole idea here was to really, really understand if we could actually grow a product that was commercially viable.

You know, this is the size of farm that we're building out.

This is a good starting point for us.

- So right now, we're building a 5,000 square foot vertical farm in Queens, New York.

This is something that we see that's long past overdue.

We wanted to provide that option for everybody out there.

(light music) I'm really spoiled 'cause I've always had access to Asian produce.

My parents owned a wholesale produce business that I grew up in.

Our background and my family wholesale business gives us an advantage.

There's no searching for, "Oh, who am I gonna sell my stuff to?"

So this is my mom, Mary.

She founded this business back in 1987.

- Seven.

- And this is where I grew up.

I spent some of my weekends here culling through vegetables, unwillingly.

You know, learned a lot though.

(chuckles) When it's cold, it affects the vegetable and so we have to cull through.

- [Mary] Usually, we don't have this one that's flat.

Flat top the cabbage.

And this variety is from Japan and Taiwan.

Very tender and very sweet.

-[Judy] Back in the early '90s, there was no dou miao.

Dou miao is pea tips.

My mother contracted a grower in California to start a program to grow pea tips, okay?

Now, that went from like 10 acres of pea tips to hectare acres of pea tips.

From pea tips, they grew Chinese celery.

American celery is solid inside, but over here the stems are hollow.

So at one point there was no Chinese celery in the US market.

So, you know, she taught them everything that they need to know to grow a certain crop and then we would wholesale it for them.

- [Mary] Nice quality.

- [Judy] They started seeing, "Okay, the market is missing this, and the market is missing that."

Her invoices went from, you know, 50 items from like scallion, ginger, garlic, broccoli to 100, to 300 offerings.

All these things that were not available are now available because of her building a farm program, you know, from California, Mexico, South Carolina, New Jersey, Canada, you know, to provide vegetables all year round for the New York Asian market.

(Judy laughs) You see the happy look on her- -[Mary] I love it.

-[Judy] See the happy look on her face?

She's like... -[Mary] I love the vegetable.

And I try to teach my two kids, my daughter, how to know the quality and how to cook.

And I love it, because I love to eat.

(chuckles) - [Judy] Because I grew up with a mom who has a green thumb, it's implicitly expected that I have a green thumb too.

When I showed my mom what I wanted to do, you know, she saw the vision with me.

You know, she was like, "Oh, this can be fantastic."

You know, "This could be something really, really awesome It's, you know, carrying on my parents' business or inspiration from their business and, you know, bringing it on to ours.

(light music) (whimsical music) You know, there's so many things you can do with them.

You can roast them, you can barbecue them, you can stir fry, you can steam, boil, whatever.

For me, if it's a little undercooked, it's okay as long as it's crunchy.

Most people overcook their greens.

I'm gonna taste one.

(upbeat electronic music) A lot of what we grow is not only for the Chinese community, you know, it's for the Korean, it's for the Japanese, it's for the Indian, it's for the Southeast Asian.

There's a lot of crossover that every culture eats at one point or another.

As a baby green, you can pick it up and eat it in one bite, which is fantastic.

- [Caleb] One of the interesting things about this is not only learning new dishes in the Asian tradition, it's also learning to use these greens in the kinda more Western tradition that I'm used to.

- Being in the pre-pack, it's less contaminant, clean, and it keeps the product longer.

Smells good.

We're gonna hit the ground running.

All our testing for our first six products are already done.

We hope that it changes the world, and it changes the produce, and it changes people's eating habits.

There's 22 million Asian Americans in the United States, each one of us wants to be heard.

Delicious.

- [Liza] What did you forget?

- We didn't add salt.

(laughs) - Plant-based diets are no longer a fad.

Now they're being embraced across all cultures as a better way to eat.

I hope that you will explore the versatility that vegetables have to offer.

That's it for this episode of "food.

curated."

I'm Liza de Guia.

Be sure to connect with us on social media and eat more stories.

I'll see you next week.

(light music) Funding for food.

curated.

is made possible by: Stele is a globally curated collection of artisanal and independent perfumes.

Hand-picked olfactory experiences that tell a story.

Available online and at two New York locations.

For more info we're at Stele (dot) NYC.

Support for food.

curated.

comes from CMD Psych.

Bringing holistic approach to child wellness and women's mental healthcare Helping patients find balance and harmony in their lives.

For more info, head to CMD Psych (dot) com.

Additional funding provided by (bright music) Craving more about the stories behind the craft?

Dive deeper into the makers we care about, on our social pages, and at food.

curated.

dot com (bright music) (music) (music)