Chef stirring up business with vegan soul food

SAN ANTONIO – It’s not conscionable the coconut beverage that Tia Rodriguez pours into her cookware of curry that makes it sing. It’s the soul.

“I americium a major, large foodie,” she said. “My grandmother, actually, she was a chef, and I conscionable travel from a household of cooking women.”

Cooking is Rodriguez’s business. She whips up her family’s southern-style staples, crab cakes, fried chicken, and mac and cheese, but with a tweak. Every down-home crockery is plant-based.

“You don’t miss the flavors astatine all,” Rodriquez said. “Everything is according to the archetypal recipe. We conscionable made immoderate substitutions.”

Vegan, cultural, comfortableness foods are connected the paper astatine Rodriguez’s eatery, Urban Soul Market. She cooks retired of a shade kitchen, an abandoned edifice connected Pat Booker Road, and serves it up arsenic curbside cuisine. For now, her hours are not traditional, but neither is her concern model. Customers tin spot their orders online and prime up astatine the designated clip and day.

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As for the customers’ reviews, Rodriguez often hears, “I can’t judge it’s vegan.”

Her concern task each began arsenic a idiosyncratic journey. Rodriguez turned to vegan eating for her ain health.

“What I recovered was determination were not capable places that were serving this benignant of food,” she said.

So, Rodriguez started cooking retired of her house. Word spread, and concern boiled over.

“We supply that consciousness of comfortableness that you are missing arsenic a vegan,” she said.

The travel has had its challenges. What the young entrepreneur decided she needed was an other pinch oregon 2 of concern know-how. She’s present 1 of 10 tiny concern owners participating successful Maestro Entrepreneur Center’s aviator program that teaches and supports.

“Last twelvemonth was COVID. Next twelvemonth could beryllium thing else,” said Mari Zavala, Maestro’s enforcement director. “We privation them to beryllium resilient and we privation them to beryllium prepared to instrumentality connected immoderate challenges beingness mightiness bring to them.”

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Rodriguez is grateful. And, she’s hungry. She hopes to yet unfastened much locations.

“These are foods that we have, you know, that we turn up on,” she said. “It’s precise important to person that enactment successful our community.”

One bid astatine a time, she’s feeding her community’s soul.

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