‘People are suffering.’ What this Miami chef saw at Ukraine’s border brought her to tears
Karla Hoyos had spent another exhausting night on the Polish side of the Ukrainian border, handing out cups of warm chicken noodle soup to women and children who had been walking for two days in 30-degree weather, fleeing the Russian invasion. When she came into the volunteer offices the next morning, she collapsed into tears.
“I might have come into the office and cried for two hours,” Hoyos said on a video call from Przemysl, Poland, on the April 14 episode of the weekly Miami Herald food podcast, La Ventanita.
Hoyos, the former head chef at South Beach restaurant Bazaar, has spent the last six weeks in the Polish border town, cooking more than 12,000 meals a day for Ukrainian war evacuees with chef Jose Andres’ nonprofit World Central Kitchen. Hers is one of 43 WCK sites in four border countries and inside Ukraine, cranking out more than 250,000 meals a day.
A catering chef for most of her career, Hoyos adapted quickly over the last five years to cooking for the masses when World Central Kitchen dives into areas struck suddenly with natural disasters — an earthquake in Haiti, a hurricane in Puerto Rico, flooding in the Bahamas. It was in Puerto Rico, after Hurricane Maria, where Hoyos met Andrés, and together, they helped cook more than 75,000 meals a day as the island struggled.
“Immediately I knew she was an incredible food fighter, embracing the WCK spirit of doing everything possible to feed those in need. Her focus, passion, and persistence are unmistakable,” Andrés wrote the Miami Herald in an email.
But none of that prepared her for the realities of families thunderstruck by war.
Glassy-eyed children and mothers with unexplained bruises, bundled against the cold, cross the border in darkness between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m., averting their eyes. Hoyos and other volunteers meet them with cups of soup or hot chocolate, something they can carry along with their remaining belongings, something that will warm their hands and their bodies.
Hoyos, born in Mexico, doesn’t speak the language. But when one child sobbed uncontrollably as she offered a cup — “I could only say ‘cocoa’ ” — Hoyos knelt and hugged her until the child stopped crying. Hoyos swallowed her own sobs. The girl took the cocoa and warmed herself.
“I wanted to give her comfort, to tell her everything was going to be all right, and I couldn’t,” Hoyos said.
Six weeks is enough time to see the situation in this town of 60,000 reflect the larger truth of a country decimated by a Russian invasion.
Hoyos and her team deliver warm meals to woozy children — “You see their looks. You see their eyes” — sleeping shoulder to shoulder in cots in a one-story shopping mall with no showers. In the early days, there were reports of children kidnapped for sex trafficking.
“The first two weeks, there were a lot of children missing,” Hoyos said. “No children should go through that.”
They’ve started making baby food for mothers who arrived with newborns who “don’t have food for their babies,” she said. “You see the only food they’re getting is what we’re providing.”
Cooking is the easy part.
Hoyos and her team of five chefs and 30 volunteers, most of them from the United States, cook in shifts, 24 hours a day in unimaginable quantities as more evacuees pour in: 12,000 hot meals, 8,000 sandwiches, 10,000 loaves of banana bread, cold beet or potato salads, vats of hot chocolate. A time-lapse of the team making sandwiches on her Instagram account, @chefkarlahoyos, resembles sped-up film of a Model T assembly line.
They bought out all of the ham, turkey and cheese in the small town and have food flown in daily.
“She is the heart of the kitchen, bringing order to chaotic situations with endless empathy for the work we do,” Andrés wrote.
Hoyos knows World Central Kitchen prides itself on not just making food, but cooking comfort dishes that reflect the communities they are serving. So she researched Ukrainian cuisine on the transatlantic flight, puddle-jumpers and car rides in the 5,000 miles from Miami to Poland — learning the basics of borscht, and other familiar dishes with plenty of potatoes and beets and dill and parsley and mayonnaise for added calories.
It’s no wonder Hoyos had to take a break. After six weeks, she was expected to fly back to Miami the weekend of April 15. She has plans there.
Hoyos is opening her first restaurant, Tacotomía, in downtown Miami, where she hopes to make dishes that honor the southern part of Mexico. She’ll be cooking the dishes she learned from one of her grandmothers: molletes, like a Mexican pan con tomate; Mexican bombas (deep-fried mashed potato balls similar to Cuban papas rellenas) and of course tacos with the southern region’s sazón. She’s also planning for a second restaurant in Little Haiti that will be more of a Mexican brunch spot.
“I intend to showcase the food I grew up eating, honoring my grandmother,” Hoyos said.
But she’s far from done with Ukraine.
Hoyos designed a food truck for World Central Kitchen — a mobile kitchen, really, with four ovens and a pressure cooker with 640 pounds of capacity — that can serve 30,000 meals a day.
She and Andrés plan to drive it into Ukraine this summer, cooking in the hardest hit areas without infrastructure. After what she has witnessed, she can’t look away.
“When you see children that are cold and hungry…” she said, trailing off. “War is real. And it’s happening. And there’s a lot of people suffering.”
This story was originally published April 15, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
