If all the city's immigrants walk off the job in a nationwide protest called for Monday against proposals to crack down on illegal immigration, many New Yorkers will go hungry, or at least be forced to eat at home for a change.

Anthony Bourdain, author of "Kitchen Confidential" and executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles, said immigrant workers are an often invisible presence in New York restaurants.

"I really think there's a resistance to having a mestizo-looking guy walking around the dining room in a French restaurant," said Bourdain, whose own chef de cuisine, is a naturalized Mexican.

"Every time you read a restaurant review they always say 'The chef has a sure hand with the spices.' If the chef's name is widely known, the chances are it's really some Mexican guy who has a sure hand with the spices," Bourdain said.

Sean Meade, assistant manager of Colors, an upscale Manhattan restaurant cooperatively-owned by a group of immigrant workers whose colleagues were killed in a top floor restaurant in the attack on the World Trade Center, said immigrants frequently climb the ladder from dishwasher to busboy to cook.

"They do a lot of the work that many American citizens do not want to do because they think it's beneath them, they fill that void," said Meade.