“This was a huge mistake,” I said to myself as I pulled into an empty residential lot in Beltsville, Maryland. It was the first of three stops where I planned to try food from Facebook Marketplace — an adventure I thrust upon myself despite my editors' warnings.
My first order, a Dominican stewed pork dish, was waiting for me but my trepidation about buying food from a stranger on the internet was hard to shake. I unearthed a stray bottle of Tums from my back seat. If I was going to do this, the least I could do was be prepared.
Facebook Marketplace is known as a platform where you can get anything, including food. Since the pandemic, it’s become a sort of entrepreneurial haven for home cooks wanting to sell their food. A quick local search shows dozens of postings for everything from Dominican breakfast plates and homemade Libyan food to bowls of sago sago and tamales sold by the dozen. The prices are surprisingly cheap (I’m talking $2 a tamale) and the sellers range from weekend hobbyists to full-time home chefs trying to break into the restaurant industry.
Recently, videos of people trying food from Facebook have gone viral. I first saw the trend when Florida-based food influencer Gabriel Rivera came across my feed. I watched in disbelief (along with 33 million other people) as he picked up a $160 seafood boil from a stranger’s house and ate it in his car.
Rivera said he’s gained more than 700,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok since starting his Facebook food haul videos. And he’s not the only one: food reviewers like Ivan Delos Reyes and even lifestyle creators like Dzung Lewis are getting in on it. Personally, it’s been blowing up my feed for months.
Rivera thinks people love his videos because they like seeing him support small businesses. But personally, I watch them to satisfy a sense of sick curiosity. So, I decided to spend a whole weekend buying and trying food on Facebook Marketplace to answer what had become a burning question: Was the best food in D.C. coming out of home kitchens rather than restaurants?
This was my dream now. I couldn’t be talked out of it.
Carne de Cerdo Guisada from Sabor de Casa. (Kaela Cote-Stemmermann/City Cast DC)
The first stop
I exit my car and stand on Eva’s patio, shifting awkwardly as I wait for her to fry my guava empanadas. Her eight-year-old daughter circles around me in a pair of bright pink roller skates. I only just met her but now we’re best friends.
Eva Peguero has been selling Dominican food on Facebook Marketplace as Sabor de Casa for eight years. She first became known for her empanadas at her daughter's school where parents and neighbors insisted she start selling them.
Over the last year, Peguero has turned selling food into her full-time job. She takes up to 60 orders a week, waking up at 4:30 a.m. to prep Wednesday through Sunday.
Most of Peguero’s orders come from Facebook, like myself, or through word of mouth. She also often takes on catering gigs around the neighborhood and at her daughter’s school, where she is the head of the Parent Teacher Association. Long term, she hopes to open her own restaurant.
When Peguero brings out my food, she also brings out an extra plate for the geese roaming the patio.
“Everything started because I'm that friend where everybody comes to my house to eat. If you tell me you're having a bad day, I will show up with food.”
Watching the geese, I believe her.
Selling food on Facebook Marketplace has also helped Peguero build a relationship with her daughter, Daniella. The menu, which she posts in the morning, is determined by whatever Daniella feels like eating that day. Today, that is Carne de Cerdo Guisada — stewed pork and rice — with a side of freshly fried plantains. Other dishes in the rotation include empanadas, oxtail, and Dominican breakfast plates.
Like many of the Facebook listings I came across, Peguero specializes in ethnic dishes that can be hard to find in the DMV outside of a home kitchen. Many postings are in Spanish, Tagalog, or Amharic, advertising home-made cultural dishes I had never seen on a restaurant menu.
“I try to keep the authentic Dominican flavor,” she said, explaining that she was never satisfied with the nearby Dominican restaurants which she says have a more “Americanized” flavor.
I ask how much I owe and Eva looks to Daniella, who I have quickly come to realize is both her business accountant and social media manager.
“That will be $25,” says Daniella, thinking for a second before adding, “and 4 cents.”
“4 cents?” I inquire. Something tells me she made that last part up.
“Tax,” she explains.
Of course, tax, how could I be so foolish. I Cash-app her the full $25.04.
The food is absolutely delicious.
Where are my tamales?
The thing I have come to understand about Facebook Marketplace food is that it’s essentially a game of roulette. For every good food posting, there are a dozen old, unappetizing, or straight-up outlandish ones.
I avoided the vendors selling old meat out of their freezer and one hawking an abhorrently red “secret ramen” that I can only assume involved Cheetos. (“Delishus” was the description.) But, even more frustrating was that many of the people I contacted were already sold out for the week. One, offering viral Ilocos empanadas, was sold out until next month.
So, despite my best intentions, not every purchase I made was a winner. As was the case with my next stop. I had ordered a dozen tamales earlier in the week for pickup, but hadn’t heard from the seller that day. Could the tamale lady be…ghosting me?
My suspicions were confirmed when I showed up to a house in Shaw with blacked-out windows and not a soul in sight. The self-doubt flooded in. I had turned what should have been a fun fact into a multi-day saga without even a tamale to show for it.
I send a rare Sunday Slack message. “Tamales a bust.”
A mixed 12-pack of alfajoes from @madebymarydc. (Kaela Cote-Stemmermann/City Cast DC)
Alfajores are my passion
The only thing getting me to my last stop was that it was just blocks away from my bed in Mt. Pleasant. Mary Luz invites me in and I’m immediately in awe of her operation. She is pumping out dozens of empanadas and alfajores in a rowhouse kitchen she shares with four roommates. The day’s orders are neatly organized on a large dining table in the living area. And, judging by the toasty scent, quite fresh.
As someone who barely remembers to run their dishwasher, it’s a feat I can only begin to imagine.
Luz has been selling food on Facebook Marketplace since January. Unlike Eva, she has a full-time job and only prepares orders every other weekend. She can often have up to 20 orders each time.
I ask if she had thought about selling at the farmer’s market around the corner.
“I thought about it, but I would need a bunch of registrations, and I would need to do it every weekend,” Luz said. “I do this for fun.”
She started partly because she loves cooking, and partly because she saw a gap in the market for good Argentinian food in D.C.
“I'm from Argentina,” Luz said. “Whenever I want to buy something like this, nobody sells it … I think there is like one Argentinian restaurant, but it’s in Rockville.”
She hands me my order. A mixed dozen alfajores, which come with six traditional and six chocolate and pistachio flavors of her own creation. “Make sure you keep them in the fridge,” she says, an order I quickly forget and then regret.
By the time I'm eating them, the chocolate is but a puddle of mud. It’s still ridiculously good. “Made with love & lots of dulce de leche!” I read on her card. Despite the melting chocolate I think both those things still stand. I feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth.
Wheeling and dealing in the Meta-verse
These home cooks exist in a regulatory grey area in D.C. The city’s cottage food law allows cooks to sell non-perishable food products, like baked goods, from residential kitchens. However, cooks still can’t sell anything perishable, like meat or cut fruit. Other home kitchen licenses, such as a catering license, can cost up to $5,000 a year, often taking several weeks or months to obtain.
“We don’t have a license that technically fits, there are ways to get around it, but I know you should not be operating,” said Kelechi Ukwuoma, a program manager at D.C.’s Department of Licensing and Consumer Protection, which handles food permits and business activity in D.C. Buying food online, he said, is "at your own risk."
For now, the Facebook Marketplace food scene is alive and well here in the DMV, and I, for one, am happy about it. Forty-eight hours after my purchases, I haven’t taken a single Tum, I’ve eaten incredible homemade food, and I have a new eight-year-old best friend. I can confidently say my quest has been a success.
In fact, I already have an order for those Ilocos empanadas set for next month.
