Everybody Eats on Tuesday
Cooking dinner every Tuesday at Albergue San Vicente
Ensenada, Baja California. Migrants, deportees, and anyone else who needs a hot meal that night.
Every Tuesday evening, my team drives down to Ensenada and we cook dinner for the residents of Albergue San Vicente. We call it Everybody Eats on Tuesday. We’ve been doing it since 2024.
Our stats since we started tracking (June 2026)
Weekly updates
Every week I post what we made, how many people we fed, and what we spent out of pocket.
Week of April 22: Arroz con Pollo and 68 Meals
A full kitchen, a good crew, and 68 people fed. Some weeks just work.
Week of April 15: Pozole Rojo and a Full House
Pozole for 40 inside, 15 outside, and lunches the next morning. The shelter was at capacity.
What Albergue San Vicente is
Albergue San Vicente is a shelter in Ensenada, Baja California, run as a partnership between the Catholic church and the City of Ensenada social services. It primarily serves single men — people deported from the United States, internally displaced from other parts of Mexico, migrant workers trying to build something new in Ensenada, and anyone else who ended up far from home without a clear way forward.
The shelter helps residents find work, get documents, and get back on their feet. Most people don’t stay forever. Some do. The ones who are there on Tuesday get a real meal.
We also feed people who don’t qualify to stay inside — local residents who need a meal, or migrants with substance use issues the shelter can’t house. They eat outside. They still eat well.
The morning after dinner, about half the residents get a boxed lunch to take to work. Most weeks, we provide between 50 and 100 meals total.
How it started
Everybody Eats on Tuesday was founded nearly 20 years ago by Emily Adams, who built it from nothing into a program that ran like clockwork every week. She moved back to the United States in 2025 when her husband needed access to American medical care, and she passed the baton to me and my then-husband Manu Lazar.
Manu had to step back in early 2026. So now it’s mine.
Our team right now is Michael Jarrett — who brought me into this in 2024 and is our anchor and our institutional memory — plus Jon Cordero, Rob Hernandez, Armida Gomez, Debbie Brant (my mom), and Wendy Gonzalez. Other people fill in when we need them. It takes a village to cook for 40 people in a shelter kitchen.
How we work
The shelter receives food donations from grocery stores, restaurants, and community members. We cook from whatever is there, and we fill in the gaps ourselves — out of our own pockets, every week.
There is no budget line for this. There is no nonprofit. There is no grant. There is just a group of people who show up every Tuesday and cook.
If you want to help
The most direct way is to come cook with us. The second most direct way is to chip in for ingredients. Get in touch →
What this looks like every week
We've been doing this since 2024 but only started tracking meal-by-meal in June 2026. Here's our best estimate of the typical week.