You Can Barter for Thanksgiving Dinner at This South Philly Restaurant
Got a used lamp? Come and eat!
Turkey is, of course, one of the menu items at Jennifer Zavala’s Juana Tamale, the South Philadelphia restaurant that lets you barter for Thanksgiving dinner. (Stock photo/Getty Images)
We’ve told you where to go if you want to drop lots of money on a sit-down Thanksgiving dinner inside a restaurant. And we’ve told you where you can get a whole deep-fried bird to go or spend $250 on a takeout package that replaces a turkey with a rotisserie chicken. (The horror!) But now we have a new one for you: a South Philly restaurant that lets you barter for Thanksgiving dinner.
The restaurant in question is Juana Tamale, culinary home of storied chef Jennifer Zavala. (See: vegan meatball controversy; illegal tamale truck; rescuer of Dollar Dog Night; and an interview a lot of people had thoughts about. Like we said, storied.)
On Thursday, November 28th, a.k.a. Thanksgiving, Juana Tamale is hosting a Thanksgiving party complete with free beer (while supplies last), the NFL games on the TV, and $15-per-plate platters that, yes, you can barter for.
“A lot of people are broke,” Zavala observes. “A lot of people would just be sitting alone in their apartments on Thanksgiving. I want them all to come out and chill with us.”
Zavala says she’s been interested in the bartering economy since the early days of COVID, when she saw a woman make a post in a neighborhood social media group. The woman desperately needed to print an important document but had no printer. What she did have? “She said she makes really good cakes,” Zavala recalls. And so, the woman found a cake-loving person who not only offered to print the document for her. Zavala says the person actually gave her a spare printer in exchange for the cake. And Zavala soon started bartering her acclaimed tamales in exchange for this and that. N-95 masks. Ammo. (Yes, ammo.) You name it.
Juana Tamale owner Jennifer Zavala in South Philadelphia
You have two options at Juana Tamale on Thanksgiving. The first, she’s calling the Mayflower Platter, which includes the things you’d expect it to include. And then there’s the Plato du Juarez, a heaping plate of beans, rice, tamales, macaroni salad, salsa, and tortillas.
Zavala says she’ll accept trades of equal value to the $15 and seems fairly open-minded about what you might offer her to barter.
“Can I give you this cool old lamp I have in my basement?” I asked her.
“I actually love lamps,” she told me.
“What if my son cooks you a bunch of pizzelles using his great-grandmother’s recipe?” I offered.
“Absolutely,” she insisted.
