10-23-2022 W2W - Flipbook - Page 24
PHOTO BY LLOYD FOX
Rosalyn Vera
owner, Cocina Luchadoras
Rosalyn Vera wants diners at her Mexican restaurant in Upper Fells Point to feel like they’re coming
home. Every culture has its comfort foods, and for
Vera, it’s the taco.
The item on Cocina Luchadoras’ menu evokes
memories of childhood for Vera, who was born
in New York but grew up in Mexico City with her
grandmother.
“I want to make sure that you get the best Mexican
food... with the best ingredients, that is made with
lots of love,” Vera said.
She became an unlikely restaurant owner in 2018,
when she took over the eatery less than a year after
her parents started it. Her father had cooked in
restaurants and ran his own in New York. But they
had misgivings about the Baltimore venture and
turned to their daughter.
24 | 2022 | WOMEN TO WATCH
An airline customer service employee at the time,
she had no restaurant experience. But she stepped
in, recreating a small restaurant in Mexico serving
dishes her grandmother and mother had prepared.
Though she took on the restaurant out of a sense
of duty, “it turns out that she actually had all of this
passion for food inside her the whole time,” said
Christopher Vaeth, a longtime customer and friend
who works as a private chef. “She paired that with
her natural tenacity and then her experience working in the corporate world.”
Besides becoming a stabilizing force in Upper
Fells Point, attracting tourists and neighborhood
regulars alike, the restaurant gives Vera a platform
for community involvement.
She has donated tamales to local schools and
taught students taco making. In a city health depart-
ment campaign, she encouraged others in the
Latino community to get vaccinated for COVID-19.
And while operating a Mexican ice cream shop in
Highlandtown, she offered her perspective to the
Highlandtown Immigration and Food Project, a
University of Maryland, Baltimore County student
initiative to document Latino politics, history and
food culture in Highlandtown in the 1980s and
1990s.
Vera is working with Vaeth to write a cookbook
and offer cultural supper club events highlighting
Mexican cuisine.
“She’s kind of all about food as an expression of
love and also as an articulation of culture and as a
way of honoring those that came before us,” Vaeth
said.
— Lorraine Mirabella