Now an Acclaimed Restaurateur, He Long Concealed a Secret
The New York Times
Arjav Ezekiel rose through the restaurant ranks becoming a sommelier and opening Birdie’s in Austin, Texas. Few knew of his past as an undocumented immigrant.
From the outside, Arjav Ezekiel appears to be living the dream.
Mr. Ezekiel, 36, is a consummate restaurateur and sommelier. With his wife, the chef Tracy Malechek-Ezekiel, he owns Birdie’s in Austin, Texas, a counter-service natural wine bar that, since opening in 2021, has become one of the most acclaimed restaurants in the country.
He is smart, funny and personable, a new father who is an ideal restaurant host and a joy to discuss wine with. He also happened to spend much of his professional life as an undocumented immigrant, having come to the United States on a tourist visa with his family when he was 12.
“People forget that everything they eat is likely to have been touched by somebody who didn’t have papers,” Mr. Ezekiel said. “Whether restaurants, grocery stores or an incredible wine tasting in Napa Valley, the harvesting, the pruning — somewhere along the way it’s hard for me to imagine some undocumented immigrant didn’t play a role in that.”
Precise numbers for unauthorized immigrants in the United States are understandably hard to come by, and in an election season, highly political. But the Pew Research Center, which calls itself a “nonpartisan fact tank,” estimates that they make up roughly 3.4 percent to 4.4 percent of the American work force, including nearly 12 percent of all food service workers and 25 percent of farm workers.
I first met Mr. Ezekiel last year at a wine bar in Midtown Manhattan, where at the end of an hourlong conversation, I asked him which wine regions he enjoyed the most. He replied that he’d never been to a wine region outside the United States.
