A food runner becomes the chef for a week at Mera Kitchen Collective

Vilma Molina fell in love with cooking through her El Salvadoran mother’s bistec encebollada, a thin, grilled ribeye dish with savory marinated onions and tomatoes. She will be making that, along with six other plates, at Mera Kitchen Collective on North Calvert Street starting Tuesday.

But Molina isn’t a chef at the restaurant. She’s a food runner.

The front-of-house employee is one of several at the Midtown-Belvedere eatery who will take over the menu for one week each month to add some of their favorite dishes as part of the “Story-Worthy Food Series” project.

The initiative by the restaurant, a worker-owned cooperative that focuses on chefs from around the world, is an effort to highlight the staff’s cultural diversity. It’s also an unusual break from the division of labor found across the food industry, where staff servicing customers are separate from the chefs and line cooks working in the back of the house.

“It is different, and that’s the point,” said Marcelle Afram, an industry professional with more than 20 years of experience who joined the restaurant last March and is helping workers develop their dishes.

Mera is pushing back on rigid rules dictating how a kitchen needs to be run and is trying to build a more inclusive ”one-house mentality" that takes the strengths and interests of each worker into account, Afram said. For the last few months, he’s worked with Molina on refining her food, including putting a dessert twist on the savory empanadas she’s often made for family. The new version features fried plantains, cinnamon sugar and coconut cream — a staple ingredient from Molina’s years as a teenager in Belize.

Mera cofounder Emily Lerman said that when Molina started as a food runner in June, she brought in pupusas for the staff that left everyone salivating. But Molina never saw herself as a cook.

“It was just sharing food with coworkers,” Molina said.

Since moving to Baltimore in 2008, Molina‘s made the pupusas with cheese and beans for her daughters and husband. They’re nothing compared to her mother’s, who never shared her recipes, Molina said. Cooking makes her feel like they’re back in the same kitchen. It sparks memories of their time in Belize and El Salvador, before crime and a lack of financial opportunity spurred her move to the United States.

Throughout Molina’s Mera menu, she shares brief anecdotes about her food. Under pastelito de papas, a fried corn masa pocket with potatoes and vegetables, she writes that the dish is “a taste of the street, for the walk between home and school, where they are sold in plastic bags on the go, and to share with your friend on the bus ride.” For her pupusas, which Afram revamped by adding lamb chorizo, she references a song by Espiritu Libre: “A Mi Me Gustan Las Pupusas” — or “I Like Pupusas” in English.

Molina’s menu will be served through Saturday, alongside a smaller menu of Mera Kitchen Collective’s usual items, including their plantain bowl, chicken wings and kofta burger. In April, a front-of-house worker from Nigeria will share a menu with some of the food they grew up eating there, followed by a staffer’s featured dishes from Mexico in May. Lerman said participation in the eatery’s project is optional, though they’re hoping the success of this series leads to a redefining of roles in the restaurant’s structure.

“Since the pandemic, we’ve learned the restaurant model does not work unless people are getting exploited,” said Lerman, who added that Molina will be eligible to be part of the worker-owned cooperative after working there two years. “So anything we do that we try to make a little bit better is hopefully progress.”