The Anti-ICE Supper Club launches in LA

Bricia Lopez has spent years inviting friends from Oaxaca to visit her in Los Angeles. Lately, they have declined.

"They say, 'So I can be taken in the streets?'" said Lopez, owner of Guelaguetza, the landmark Oaxacan restaurant in Koreatown. "And I say, 'It's not like that.' But then I think, maybe it is."

Lopez came to Los Angeles from Oaxaca when she was 10, shortly after her parents, Fernando Lopez Sr. and Maria Monterrubio, opened Guelaguetza on Eighth Street in 1994. Growing up undocumented, she was terrified of the police, convinced "everybody was immigration" who could "snatch us up any time." She was naturalized in the early 2000s. When the restaurant outgrew its space and moved to Olympic Boulevard, Lopez worked the floor as a hostess.

Bricia Lopez, owner of Guelaguetza, is hosting a $55 tlayuda experience on Feb. 3 as part of the Anti-ICE Supper Club fundraising series.

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Courtesy Roads & Kingdoms

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In 2012, her father retired and returned to Oaxaca, turning the business over to Bricia and her three siblings. Now running the much-loved institution, Lopez describes herself as "the byproduct of the bravery that my parents had," and said she sees the fear she once felt now reflected in her community.

She's also experiencing its effects at the restaurant. When she started as a hostess, she said parties of 25 to 30 would walk in on any given Sunday. Those gatherings rarely happen anymore — and some of her own staff have even returned to Oaxaca.

That's why on Tuesday, Feb. 3, Guelaguetza will host a tlayuda experience as part of the Anti-ICE Supper Club, a fundraising dinner series launched by Roads & Kingdoms, the Emmy- and James Beard Award-winning travel and media company that was the longtime publishing partner of Anthony Bourdain.

The series, which will expand to Minneapolis, Chicago, New York City and Washington, D.C., later this year, feels like a continuation of Bourdain's advocacy for immigrant restaurant workers, said Matt Goulding, co-founder of Roads & Kingdoms.

"Bourdain was a very outspoken proponent of the role that Latin American cooks play in the restaurant world in the United States," he said.

All net proceeds will benefit Al Otro Lado, a nonprofit based in San Ysidro that provides free legal support to refugees and immigrants on both sides of the border. Roads & Kingdoms has previously partnered with the organization, Goulding said.

A shared immigrant history

Meanwhile, at the other end of the price spectrum, is the $1,000 per person, 11-course tasting menu being offered on Saturday Jan. 31 by Daniel Patterson, the two-Michelin-star chef behind San Francisco's Coi and co-founder of community-focused fast-food venture LocoL, and his wife Sarah Lewitinn, a music industry veteran known professionally as Ultragrrrl.

The sold-out evening is a spin-off of their popular Jaca Social Club, which regularly seated 14 people at a private residence. By the end of the night, said Lewitinn, the other guests "were not your family when they entered the room, but they're your family when they leave."

Their immigration stories make the cause deeply personal: Patterson's mother's side were Russian Jews escaping pogroms in 1908, while his father's side were Irish potato farmers who immigrated in the early 1900s. Sarah's parents are religious refugees from Egypt, forced to leave in 1956 for being Jewish. Her mother was "brought to tears" watching current events, Sarah said, because "it reminds her a lot about what she experienced as a child."

A dish from chef Daniel Patterson's Jaca Social Club popup, which ran out of his home for four months in 2024. The Anti-ICE dinner will feature an 11-course tasting menu.

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Courtesy Daniel Patterson

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For Patterson, who's been working in restaurants since he was 14, supporting the immigrant workforce isn’t just part of the restaurant industry — it's central to it.

"Restaurants have always been a place where people who don't have a formal education or are new to the country, who need multiple jobs," he said.

Goulding echoed that.

"The movements of ICE disproportionately affect the food world," he said. "The individuals who grow our food, cook our food, serve our food form vital links in the food chain that is at the heart of the daily American diet. And to dismantle that chain is both a terribly inhumane thing and also an incredibly damaging one for our society."