US restaurants offer refugee chefs cooking chance
Print Edition
At San Francisco鈥檚 Tawla restaurant, Muna Anaee powdered her hands with flour and gently broke off a piece of golden dough to prepare bread eaten in Iraq, the country she fled with her family.
Anaee was preparing more than 100 loaves for diners as part of a program that lets refugees aspiring to be chefs work in professional kitchens.
The Refugee Food Festival 鈥 a joint initiative of the United Nations Refugee Agency and a French nonprofit Food Sweet Food 鈥 started in Paris in 2016 and came to the US for the first time this year. The establishments鈥 owners turn over their kitchens to refugee chefs for an evening, allowing them to prepare sampling platters of their country鈥檚 cuisine and share a taste of their home.
Restaurants in 12 cities outside the US are taking part in the program.
鈥淚t鈥檚 been a big dream to open a restaurant,鈥 said Anaee, 45, who now has a green card.
Anaee was among five refugees chosen to showcase their food in San Francisco 鈥 each at a different restaurant and on a different night, from Tuesday through Saturday. Organizers say the goal is to help the refugees succeed as chefs and raise awareness about the plight of refugees worldwide.
It鈥檚 important to 鈥渞eally get to know these refugees and their stories,鈥 said Sara Shah, who brought the event to California after seeing it in Belgium.
Anaee, her husband and 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 some of her food. Azhar Hashem, Tawla鈥檚 owner, said hosting Anaee was part of the restaurant鈥檚 mission to broaden diners鈥 understanding of the Middle East 鈥 a region that inspires some of its dishes.
鈥淔ood is the best 鈥 and most humanizing 鈥 catalyst for having harder conversations,鈥 she said.
The four other aspiring chefs serving food in San Francisco are from Myanmar, Bhutan, Syria and Senegal.
Karen Ferguson, executive director of the Northern California offices of the International Rescue Committee, said: 鈥淲e have so much diversity and we see the evidence of that in the culinary expertise in the area.鈥
The Bay Area has refugees from Afghanistan, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Eritrea and Myanmar, though exact numbers are unclear. 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 this year since the Trump placed a cap on arrivals.
Pa Wah, a 41-year-old refugee from Myanmar, presented dishes at San Francisco鈥檚 Hog Island Oyster Co on Tuesday. She said she didn鈥檛 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 made her realize she was capable of running her own restaurant.
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