Meet Ana Velasquez of Neighbors Kitchen in Central

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ana Velasquez.

Ana, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
We got started with our love of food and always wanting to try new places to eat and we’d look at social media and saw a lot of the same big names tossed around and felt like we had tried all of that. So in trying every mom and pop shop we could we began to find our niche and decided that this was something that we could be creative with and have fun with. So that was when we started the Instagram page and the Blog came when we felt some places deserved more than a caption, their story deserved to be told. And that was how Neighbors Kitchen as it is today came to be.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Nothing worth doing is easy. It was difficult to be taken seriously as bloggers firstly because we’re very new to the industry and sometimes we would get brushed off to the side or not seen as people worth inviting to events, so we had to work to get noticed and almost forced our way into the foodie community.

Please tell us about your business.
We specialize in highlighting local eateries and great cuisine. In highlighting the people and the stories that make Phoenix the beautiful melting pot that it is. We also never post something we don’t love, and we can’t be paid to post. We love being independent and built from the ground up because we can always produce quality content that we are proud of.

Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
My favorite childhood memory was from when I was in the 6th grade and our class had an international potluck. So mom’s of ALL backgrounds gathered to feed us and told us the story of their food and where they came from and many of them cooked in front of us so we saw first had how to make their favorite dishes. That, to me, was so special because I got to see a side of my friends that I never knew before and learning that Nigerian, Jamaican, Japanese, Mexican, Guatemalan, and Peruvian food can all be so similar yet so different was truly incredible. Plus we got TONS of food.

Contact Info:

• Website: Neighbors.Kitchen
• Email: neighborskitchenofficial@gmail.com
• Instagram: NeighborsKitchen
• Facebook: Neighbors Kitchen -AZ

Image Credit:
Dedric Hendricks

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