Spice Happenings - Spice Kitchen Incubator Receives Blue Plate Award
2021 Blue Plate Awards: Spice-To-Go
Keeping the Spice Flowing
Salt Lake Magazine
By Jeremy Pugh
February 17, 2021
Saadiyah Hassan, Chef of Spice Kitchen Incubator’s Ashikat Kitchen
Spice Kitchen Incubator helps refugees turn their cooking skills into a viable, sustainable enterprise by offering affordable kitchen space, training, access to financing, and advice about business practices and marketing. Founded by Natalie El-Deiry and the International Rescue Committee in partnership with Salt Lake County, the kitchen has nurtured the seeds of many Salt Lake food trucks, farmers market stands and restaurants. Its box meal service, Spice-to-Go, offers an ever-changing menu of exotic meals cooked by incubator kitchen’s refugee chefs. Sign up for the weekly menu, order on Tuesday, pick up on Thursday and liven up the “what’s for dinner?” question with surprise! It’s African-Caribbean fusion night.
This year the organization, already an essential resource for refugees, became, well, even more essential. When coming to this country, refugees often have nothing but a few clothes and their cooking skills; Spice helps these displaced people find their financial feet again by sharing their culture and food. With COVID restrictions limiting dine-in service and the incubator’s event catering program, Spice-to-Go became the focus, allowing the kitchen to keep sharing international food experiences serving Utah’s vulnerable refugee community.
Each year, Salt Lake Magazine editors honor growers, food evangelists, grocers, servers, bakers, chefs, bartenders and restaurateurs with the Blue Plate Awards. A Blue Plate Award is given to an establishment or an individual who has done more than put good food on the table. They’ve created culture, made acts of kindness and education and are paragons of service that goes beyond.
2021 Blue Plate Awards
Salt Lake Magazine
February 17, 2021
Each Year, Salt Lake Magazine hosts the Blue Plate Awards, honoring the growers, food evangelists, grocers, servers, bakers, chefs, bartenders, restaurateurs—basically anyone who has a hand in the essential act of feeding us and does so with grace, style, creativity and care. This past year, well, was “just awful,” as our dearly departed Executive Editor Mary Brown Malouf said often. It was especially hard on the hospitality sector. In many ways, as Mary and I discussed before her passing, this year’s awards are given for merely surviving. The 2021 Blue Plate Awards are the first-ever without our Mary bringing them across the finish line.
Mary Brown Malouf, Salt Lake’s executive editor from 2007 to 2020, xoxomm
As Mary conceived, a Blue Plate is given to an establishment or an individual who has done more than put good food on the table. They’ve created culture, made acts of kindness and education and are paragons of service that goes beyond.
Mary spoke the language of the kitchen, the lingo of servers, the banter of the bar—the Esperanto of anyone who has ever waited on a table, slung a drink, cleaned a grease trap or prepped on the line. But she also knew the language of dining, being served and what a diner should expect. She was critical on both sides of that divide. Cajoling, teasing the best from the back of the house and lecturing Utah diners on not just where to eat but how to eat and to dare their palates and pocketbooks on local food.
She loved the classic Borscht Belt joke: “‘How’s the food?’ ‘Terrible but the portions are amazing!” She used it often as the punch line to what she saw wrong with the chain-heavy culinary experience in Utah. A doting aunt who urged us to sit up straight and at least try the foie gras. Mary preached constantly that food is about more than a price point—it is fun, friends, conversation. It was about living and, also, a living for the people who deserve recognition and love. “Eat this. DON’T EAT THAT, throw off the chains that bind you,” she’d say with her typical smirk.
These are Mary’s awards, the last that she’ll preside over. They were unearthed from a morass of scrawled notes, emails and random laptop files labeled “BLU PLAT.” And we dedicate them to her, our town’s biggest food fan, critic and champion, xoxomm.
—Jeremy Pugh, Editor
