Refugee chefs take over US kitchens to offer a taste of home

The Refugee Food Festival, which started in Paris in 2016, has now made its way to the United States, starting with San Francisco

Muna Anaee, prepares a ball of khobz orouk, a flatbread she would eat frequently in her native Iraq, at the Tawla restaurant kitchen in San Francisco during the inaugural Refugee Food Festival. AP 

At San Francisco's Tawla restaurant, Muna Anaee powders her hands with flour and gently breaks a piece of golden dough to prepare bread eaten in Iraq, the country she fled with her family.

Anaee is preparing more than 100 loaves for diners on Wednesday night as part of a programme that lets refugees aspiring to be chefs work in professional kitchens.

The Refugee Food Festival – a joint initiative of the United Nations Refugee Agency and a French non-profit, Food Sweet Food – started in Paris in 2016, and is being held in the United States for the first time this year, with restaurants in New York participating as well. The establishments' owners turn over their kitchens to refugee chefs for an evening, allowing them to prepare sampling platters of their country's cuisine and share a taste of their home. Restaurants in 12 cities outside the US are also taking part in the programme this month. "It's been a big dream to open a restaurant," says Anaee, 45, who now has a Green Card. She was among five refugees chosen to showcase their food in San Francisco – each at a different restaurant and on a different night, from Tuesday through to Saturday. Organisers say the goal is to help the refugees succeed as chefs, and raise awareness about the plight of refugees worldwide.

It's important to "really get to know them and their personal stories," says Sara Shah, who brought the event to California after seeing it take place in Belgium. Anaee, her husband and their two children left Baghdad in 2013 over concerns about terrorism and violence. She worked as a kindergarten teacher in Iraq, not a chef, but was urged to pursue cooking as a career by peers in an ­English class she took in California after they tasted her food.

Azhar Hashem, Tawla’s owner, said hosting Anaee was part of the restaurant’s ­mission to broaden diners’ understanding of the Middle East – a region that inspires some of its dishes on the restaurant’s menu.

"Food is the best – and most humanising – catalyst for having harder conversations," she says.

The four other aspiring chefs serving up dishes in San Francisco are from Myanmar, Bhutan, Syria and Senegal.

Karen Ferguson, ­executive ­director of the ­Northern ­California offices of the ­International Rescue ­Committee, says San ­Francisco is a good city for the food festival. "We have so much diversity, and we see the evidence of that in the culinary expertise in the area," she explains.

The Bay Area has a high ­concentration of refugees from countries such as Afghanistan, Honduras, ­Guatemala, El Salvador, ­Eritrea and Burma, though exact ­numbers are unclear, ­according to the rescue committee. Its Oakland office ­settled more than 400 refugees in the Bay Area last year, but the number of refugees settling in the region has fallen dramatically since the Trump administration this year placed a cap on arrivals, Ferguson reveals.

Pa Wah, a 41-year-old refugee from Myanmar, presented dishes at San Francisco's Hog Island Oyster Co on Tuesday. She says she didn't really consider a career in cooking until she moved to California in 2011 and got her Green Card.

Cooking was a means of ­survival at the Thailand refugee camp where she lived after escaping civil conflict in ­Myanmar as a child. ­Participating in the food festival showed her the challenges of running a restaurant, but also helped her realise she was capable of opening her own, she says.

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