Immigrants make a city’s food scene, or so history tells us.
Polish and Eastern European Jewish refugees brought the bagel to New York in the late 1800s, just before Southern Italians gave the city its famed style of pizza. Tacos, now a ubiquitous dish with countless trendy, $7-a-pop variants, arrived via Mexican immigrants in Southern California and the Southwest United States during the early 1900s. Even in landlocked Indianapolis, historical records suggest Hoosiers can thank Huntington’s Freienstein family, German immigrants, for frying the first wienerschnitzel-inspired pork tenderloin sandwiches now iconic to the state’s culinary tradition.
Today, immigrants, both documented and undocumented, remain a cornerstone of Indianapolis’ dining scene. While many of the restaurant industry’s undocumented immigrants work low-paying back-of-house jobs, some operate their own restaurants and have become staples of their communities.
Faced with a lack of skilled-labor jobs, immigrants in the restaurant industry who are in the United States without work visas face an uphill climb to legal permanent residence. But some in Indianapolis have managed to do so while navigating language barriers, financial hardships and cultural prejudices as they help shape the city’s dining landscape.
One of them is Youssef Boudarine, pastry chef at Bluebeard and co-owner of pastry pop-up J’Adore. While Boudarine holds a high-profile position as the pastry chef of a James Beard-nominated restaurant and the co-owner of his own business, he said many more immigrants work in the kitchens of Indianapolis’ most renowned restaurants, where they often receive less pay and recognition than their American-born colleagues.
“They hire an immigrant, they pay him 60% salary,” Boudarine said. “They give them 200% work, because they are hard workers.”
Boudarine’s climb through Indianapolis’ restaurant industry as an immigrant is rare but not completely unique. Like him, other people born outside the United States have come to Indianapolis and become executive chefs, restaurant owners and community leaders. These are some of their stories.
How a Filipino family became one of the biggest names at the Indy 500
Filipino food fuels arguably the biggest day in Indiana, even if most of the 250,000-plus attendees at the Indianapolis 500 don’t realize it.
Since 2014, Arnold and Gladys Patiag have helmed Ardys Concession at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway through the month of May. Their Filipino barbecue kabobs are among the 500’s most popular snacks, with seven Ardys outposts around the oval grilling thousands of sticky-sweet pork and chicken skewers.
Decades before the name appeared on signs throughout the world’s largest sporting venue, “Ardys” was simply a portmanteau of two Filipino high school sweethearts: Arnold and Gladys, who have been together for nearly 40 years.
“It was love at first sight,” Gladys said. “When I saw him, (I thought) ‘Oh, man, he’s cute.’”
Arnold and Gladys’ relationship would withstand roughly 8,5000 miles and seven years apart. In 1992, Gladys followed her father and younger sister to West Virginia for better career and education opportunities while pregnant with the couple’s second son, AJ.
Arnold joined his wife and son in West Virginia for a few months in 2000 before the Patiags moved to Central Indiana, where they got jobs at an automotive plant in Franklin. Whenever one of their sons had a birthday, Arnold would cook for all their Filipino friends. Eventually one guest asked Arnold to make food for one of his parties.
The Patiags weren’t strangers to the grind of the food industry. Arnold briefly worked as a dishwasher in West Virginia, while Gladys was just 9 years old when she and her 6-year-old sister walked the Bataan streets helping their mother sell bilo-bilo and carioca (sticky rice desserts).
That first party led to the Patiags catering events and working county fairs as they put AJ through college at Indiana State. Gladys said it took a while to get the hang of things — on their first windy day of business at the Rush County Fair in 2011, operating out of an E-Z Up tent that Arnold had to clutch to keep from blowing away, Ardys made $69.
Slowly but surely, Ardys’ kabobs started to catch on. Arnold said that as he prepped his station other vendors and fairgoers gave him curious glances. But once the meat hit the grill grates, those looks of curiosity turned into expressions of hunger.
“Once I grill it, they smell it —” Arnold said.
“— and they become best friends,” Gladys laughed.
Their first Indy 500 was 2014; the Patiags purchased concession spaces from another Filipino food vendor who retired. Gladys estimated she and Arnold slept 30 minutes the night before the race. When the day ended, she had second thoughts — the multiple locations to manage and tens of thousands of mouths to feed were almost too much.
“I was crying, (thinking) ‘I think I don’t want to do this anymore,’” Gladys said.
Arnold told her she didn’t have to work the 500 again, but his mind was made up.
“I’m not gonna quit,” he said.
Eleven years later, Ardys is a 500 fixture. One location sits in the plaza just outside the IMS’ iconic Pagoda.
In January, Arnold and Gladys opened a full-service restaurant in the south side’s Philippine Cultural Community Center. There guests can sample a panoply of Filipino flavors like the peppery off-cuts of pork called sisig or the deeply savory, ebony-black dinaguan, a velvety stew made with pork blood.
Running the restaurant and track concessions is a source of pride for the Patiags. But knowing his family largely taught themselves how to run a profitable business while becoming naturalized citizens in a foreign country, Arnold is proud simply because they’re still here.
“I am, because we survived,” Arnold said. “A lot of tests in my life — in our life — but we still survive.”
Fidelmar Garcia-Garcia: busboy, head chef, Hoosier
Seventeen years ago, Fidelmar Garcia-Garcia was a busboy at the since-closed Barcelona Tapas on Mass Ave, the first rung in his long climb to become a head chef at Parkside Public House in Garfield Park. One day, Garcia petitioned Barcelona’s head chef to let him work the salad station. The reply was, “Get the hell out of my kitchen.”
In fairness, Garcia lacked experience. Growing up in Ciudad Hidalgo, Michoacán in Central Mexico, the closest he came to formal culinary education was a high school cooking class. At age 15 Garcia immigrated 2,000 miles to Chicago to reunite with one of his sisters and find better work opportunities. After seven months of digging basements and planting trees, Garcia moved to Indianapolis where his brother lived and began the lengthy process to secure a green card.
At his brother’s suggestion, Garcia, now 34, looked for work at restaurants, eventually landing at Barcelona Tapas. There he cobbled together an understanding of English by speaking with coworkers, eventually enrolling in English classes at George Washington High School so he could learn the language “like a child.”
And while the Barcelona Tapas chef soundly rebuffed his first request to work in the kitchen, Garcia eventually got a chance to read off order tickets to the cooks when the person normally tasked with that job missed work one night. When the dishwasher quit, Garcia washed dishes. Then came the fryer, the grill and the sauté station. Any time a job opened up, Garcia took it.
“I want to work,” he said.
When Garcia was five, he and his six siblings helped their mother build furniture early in the mornings before school. Their reward: over-easy eggs and homemade corn tortillas arranged like smiles. Other homemade meals included red beans with nopales (cactus) and ancho chiles, instilling in him a love of good food.
In 2014 Garcia helped open Union 50 just off Mass Ave as a prep cook. Then he helped open fine-dining spot Vida a few blocks south in 2016.
After a stint at the Skyline Club, Garcia last year signed on as the head chef at Parkside Public House, teaming up with former Bluebeard executive chef and five-time James Beard nominee Abbi Merriss to craft an upscale Americana menu with influences from around the globe, including Mexico.
Read more: Part arthouse, part restaurant, Parkside Public House is south side’s new dining destination
Ciudad Hidalgo isn’t quite the same place Garcia left nearly 20 years ago. He said when he returns home, he sometimes sees cartel members roaming the streets, which tend to clear out by 9 or 10 p.m. But he also sees sights from his childhood: people cooking in food stalls, sharing with their neighbors, and children playing soccer up and down the pavement. And for just 22 pesos (about $1) he can still enjoy a bottle of pulque, a thick alcoholic beverage made from fermented agave sap seldom found in the U.S.
In Indiana, those comforts are little more than sweet memories. But now, married to his wife, Gloria, with two daughters ages 4 and 6, Garcia is happy where he is.
“Now I can call it home,” he said. “I am a Hoosier.”
Youssef Boudarine didn’t have community when he came to Indy. Now, he’s building it for other immigrants
Youssef Boudarine gets around.
He’s lived in five cities in his home country of Morocco, where he studied pastry at a school in Meknes. He’s worked at bakeries in Casablanca, Barcelona and Paris. Since 2016 he’s been at celebrated restaurants across Indianapolis, from Carmel’s Cake Bake Shop to now at Bluebeard. If you’ve eaten dessert at a fine dining or high-end brunch spot in the last eight years, there’s a not-insignificant chance Boudarine crafted the recipe.
After years of globetrotting, Boudarine wants to create community here. In October Boudarine launched Epicurean, a food festival and dinner series to highlight immigrant chefs and help Indianapolis residents better understand the role immigrants play in the city’s food scene.
“When I created Epicurean, I found out that everyone has the same problems,” he said of his fellow immigrant chefs. “So we all come up together to push our culture.”
Despite its reputation for “Hoosier hospitality,” Indiana hasn’t always been kind to Boudarine, who came to the U.S. in 2016 on a work visa and is now a naturalized citizen. He said he quit his job at one popular Indy-area restaurant after a coworker made racist comments, and at times he’s felt people treated him disrespectfully because of his accent.
Boudarine grew up with nine siblings on a farm in a Berber community near Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. He described his childhood as poor but “so happy” — new shoes came every three or four years, schoolbooks were purchased used if at all and the family’s “fridge” was a nearby river into which they would submerge bags of food.
When Boudarine was 11 years old his father died, after which he and his siblings took over much of the farmwork. He also helped his mother in the kitchen, peeling carrots and potatoes, kneading bread and making couscous. His favorite dishes growing up included onion-stuffed msemmen flatbread, earthenware tagines full of prawns, almonds and honey and desserts bright with apples and oranges. Today he occasionally infuses the food he cooks with those flavors.
“Everything I do is based in where I came from,” he said.
Boudarine said Indianapolis still has a ways to go in embracing immigrants and their culture. The lack of ethnic neighborhoods and some people’s lack of open-mindedness don’t help, he said. Still, he hopes to show fellow immigrants that they can still carve out a fulfilling life in Indianapolis.
“I wasn’t feeling (at) home, but I make it home,” he said. “Because I want to — because I choose it to be my home.”
Contact dining reporter Bradley Hohulin at bhohulin@indystar.com. You can follow him on Twitter/X @BradleyHohulin. Stay up to date with IndyStar’s food and dining newsletter, Indylicious.
