'Namesake of the award sets the bar so high:' Phoenix chef wins 2022 MLK Jr. service award
Tirion Morris
As part of their annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration, Arizona State University has selected members of the community to honor in the leader's name and legacy. Two students and two faculty members have been named awardees, along with one of Arizona's top chefs.
Chef Silvana Salcido Esparza, known for her celebrated 16th Street restaurant Barrio Cafe, has won the 2022 ASU Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Servant-Leadership award.
This year’s theme is “inclusion starts with us" and ASU chose to honor the chef only because of her cooking, but for the way she has and continues to impact the community through food, art and activism.
“Just the namesake of the award sets the bar so high that one could only dream of achieving anything as close to what Dr. King himself achieved,” Esparza told ASU. “I am one of those marginalized people.”
Who is Chef Silvana Salcido Esparza?
Esparza opened Barrio Cafe in 2002 and started serving Mexican food made using recipes she learned growing up and during her travels through the country. Coming from a long line of bakers and chefs, she drew on her family heritage and cultural heritage to create refined dishes that drew national attention.
Esparza has been a semifinalist for the James Beard Awards for Best Chef Southwest eight times for her work at Barrio Cafe and at her other now closed concepts, Barrio Urbano and Barrio Cafe Gran Reserva.
More important to Esparza than the recognition, however, was the impact her food had the way people saw her culture and cuisine.
“I saw an opportunity to elevate popular perceptions of Mexican culture through my food,” she said in a news release. “For eight years at the Barrio Café, I was able to change perception merely with my cooking.”
Changing perceptions through art
In 2010, she was inspired to do more. SB 1070, Arizona's most harsh anti-illegal immigration measure passed into law, which made being in the country illegally a state crime among other strict restrictions.
As the community was struck by strict enforcement measures of the new law, Esparza founded "Calle 16: A Mural Project," to display and celebrate Mexican culture through murals around Phoenix. Artists and the community came together to use murals and art gallery displays to bring attention to the pride and also the struggles of being Mexican in the U.S.
“That law pretty much changed everything for everybody and I definitely was not going to sit idle for it,” Esparza said. “It was the tip of the iceberg for me.”
Esparza continued her political activism during the most recent presidential election. In 2020 she joined the Biden campaign's Latino leadership committee and appeared in two bilingual commercials. She also hosted now-President Joe Biden and his running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris, at Barrio Cafe, making The Arizona Republic's front page news.
ASU recognizes Esparza's work
In 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic hit, Esparza's beloved fine dining restaurant Barrio Cafe Gran Reserva on Grand Avenue closed.
The tiny size of the restaurant coupled with its high-end focus meant that with new pandemic restrictions, it really couldn't operate. So, Esparza shut it down.
Before she cleared out the kitchen, however, she decided to cook. Throughout the early days of the pandemic, she and her team prepared meals that they served to Phoenix's homeless population and essential workers all around the city. Even as her businesses struggled, she knew there were others in greater need, she said.
“We're talking about humanity,” Esparza said. “You know when you're in a car accident, you go, 'I'm OK. You OK? Everybody OK? Let's see who else is hurt and let’s go take care of them.' And this is exactly what happened here.”
Sharing her story:Why this chef took us along for her coronavirus test
“I was taught to be of service from my father, who was a preacher. He would go out to the farming communities and preach to them and then go back out to these communities and barter, sell bread out of his van," Esparza said in the release. "Looking at those fields, traveling all those country roads, that's what makes me who I am today; it’s my respect and my love for those folks, and it starts there and it doesn't end there. It continues to every aspect of what I know to be in my bloodline, and that's feeding people.”
Arizona State University describes the chef as "the definition of a servant leader." She will be recognized along with student-servant awardees Roicia Banks and Ivan Quintana and faculty and staff awardees Neal Lester and Marcelino Quiñonez at ASU's Martin Luther King Jr. celebration on January 20.
Reach the reporter at tirion.morris@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on Twitter at @tirionmorris, on Facebook at Tirion Rose and on Instagram at tirionrose.
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