Syrian refugees find a gateway to life in their new country through food
Entrepreneurial refugees bring home recipes to enrich city’s dining scene, Denise Ryan writes
At a long table in a West End Vancouver home, three Syrian women are dining Canadian style: A man is cooking for them.
Hasne Omer, Ragdha Hasan and Maha Alambarabar, Syrian refugees and cooks for the hottest meal ticket in town, Tayybeh, don’t often have someone else doting on them, but tonight is different. For the occasion, they have donned their best hijabs, a colourful array of peach, gold and white.
Their host, Lev Richards, a fellow Syrian and recent arrival to Canada, has also started a food business, Pistachio Catering, serving Syrian specialties through catered dinners in private homes. Cooking for the matriarchs of Tayybeh is high-stakes: He’s been prepping for days.
“Do you think we should go help him in the kitchen?” someone jokes in Arabic. The women erupt in laugher.
“This is an occasion,” explains Nihal Elwan, founder of Tayybeh: A Celebration of Syrian Cuisine, which hosts pop-up dinners and Syrian catering events. “They are not used to being guests.”
Richards and his guests are among a growing number of Syrian refugees in the Lower Mainland who have found a niche cooking for others with the flavours of the country and culture they left behind.
Since 2015, B.C. has welcomed 4,400 Syrian refugees. Many among them are finding that food and food businesses are a pathway to work, and settlement, when other doors are closed.
Food is inextricably bound up in cultural identity, and offers a gateway for understanding, acceptance and interaction — food is a language that can be exchanged and understood without words.
Tayybeh began in October 2016 when Elwan used a $500 Vancouver Foundation grant to create a pop-up dinner catered by recent Syrian refugees. Since that first dinner, Tayybeh has garnered national headlines, won Vancouver Magazine’s 2017 Foodies of the Year award, and changed the lives of the women who make the food.
“I had no idea what it would become, or that two and a half years later it would become my life,” says Elwan, who comes from Egypt, and worked on issues related to gender equality before founding Tayybeh.
She now runs the bustling operation from a commissary kitchen near Main Street, employing six female cooks, plus a raft of drivers, dishwashers and helpers of all genders. The enterprise, she says, has become a family. For the women that come to cook every day, success isn’t just measured in paycheques or public acclaim. It’s also been about finding a new commu- nity.
“We always had tears in our eyes for what we left behind. For our families. Since we started working, it’s nicer than before,” explains Omer, speaking in Arabic.
“Now we don’t have to think about all the things we left behind,” adds Hasan.
Their new careers have also meant changes in the family structure: Alambarabar’s husband is learning to cook. “He made a chicken!” she exclaims, to a chorus of laughter and disbelief. “He has to feed the children when I am not there.”
Immigrants are 30-per-cent more likely to start a business than Canadian-born citizens, and refugees report higher rates of self-employment than their immigrant and Canadian-born counterparts, recent research by Immigrant Services Society of B.C. shows. Food service is one area they are most likely to enter.
Figures provided by Jack Jedwab at the Association for Canadian Studies show that in 2016, 14.9 per cent of refugees in Canada were self-employed.
Mustafa Koc, a professor at Ryerson University in Toronto and a food sociologist, explains there is a long and rich history of refugee influence on the Canadian food landscape.
“Each refugee wave, when they come in, most of them do not speak the language or have the skill set to enter into the labour market within the first year or two.
“Entering the work market through food, they find some space there.”
When refugees enter the food business out of necessity, they also introduce their culture to Canada through the food, says Koc.
“Syrian refugees who can’t speak the language find a way of showing their appreciation and gratitude to their host society through food, which is a very important step in integration,” says Koc.
“When people accept your food, it is an interaction, a welcoming, and for us, a way of showing them that they are welcomed. Food is a language, and we can speak it with each other.”
Food is a cultural gateway. “We are afraid of new foods, but excited and curious about them.”
Refugee food traditions tend to be homey and affordable, says Koc, mentioning the emergence of Hungarian and Vietnamese cuisine during previous refugee arrivals. “Most are mom and pop operations,” says Koc.
“It’s not expensive to try and our curiosity finds its match there.”
Syrian cuisine in Vancouver is new enough that it has not yet been gentrified, commercialized or removed from its communities: It’s something you have to seek out. The high cost of overhead means new enterprises are often homebased, and emerge in settlement areas.
This can provide a boost to local communities when goods and services are purchased within community networks, according to the VanCity report From Crisis to Community: Syrian refugees and the B.C. Economy.
The discovery of a new cuisine can be a form of cultural capital, says Koc. “You say, hey, you know what, I know a fabulous Syrian restaurant. You achieve a new status because you know where to find these new food tastes in the city.”
Vancouver writer Chris Cheung engaged in a recent quest to find Vancouver’s elusive “Baklava Man,” who sets up on random street corners selling the pistachio and honey pastries. Baklava man doesn’t advertise, and sightings are shared by his fans through social media.
Cheung tracked down Mohamed-Mamon Alhomsi, and discovered the Syrian refugee is a former parliamentarian who fled the Assad regime in 2010. He makes a mean baklava and sells it Syrian-style: by hawking it to passersby.
“That’s very Syrian. In Aleppo, there is always someone yelling at you on the street,” laughs Richards, who says he has tried Al Homsi’s desserts and enjoyed them.
According to food historian Claudia Roden, Syrian women “measure their art and make their reputation” on the craft and finesse they bring to one dish in particular: their kibbeh.
Kibbeh is meat, usually lamb, shaped into a croquette, coated in bulgur wheat and fried.
In a sunny East Van apartment, Sana Malahaji sets down a bag stuffed full of Syrian goodies, including her famous kibbeh. According to her niece, Roha Muslem, 16, also a recent Syrian refugee, Malahaji’s recipe is a wellkept family secret.
For Malahaji, bringing home-cooked food to her sponsorship families was a way of expressing her gratitude after her family of five arrived in the Lower Mainland during Operation Syrian refugee at the end of 2015.
Gerard MacDonald, a Vancouver management consultant and part of Malahaji’s sponsorship group, says that soon after Malahaji and her family were settled, they began to cook for their sponsors. The food was spectacular.
“This was a way of her family showing their gratitude, making food to show thanks was part of her culture.”
There was an added benefit: “We shared food, and the relationship changed. We became friends,” says Macdonald.
With the encouragement of her sponsorship group and DIVERSEcity, a Surrey-based settlement service, Malahaji got her FoodSafe certification from Fraser Health, and set up a small business.
Sana’s Catering has provided food for events of up to 100. “She does everything by bus, all the shopping, too,” explains Muslem.
Malahaji doesn’t have a website, but she takes orders by phone — something that is helping her improve her English, and most clients pick the food up from her front door in New Westminster.
MacDonald says that after his partner gave birth to their first daughter, Malahaji brought over food.
When their second daughter arrived, the busy couple hired Malahaji to provide regular meals.
“We were looking into various food preparation services just to help with the day to day since we have no extended family here. Knowing how nutritious and delicious Sana’s food was, we set up a weekly delivery.”
As Malahaji holds MacDonald’s three-month old, his 21-month-old runs to the table, asking for baklava.
Carmen Dakhllalah and her mother, Hayat Shabo, have also found a niche in food service since arriving as Syrian refugees in 2016. Together they teach Syrian cuisine at Brittania community centre, cater and host their own pop-up dinners and manage the whole thing through Facebook.
Shabo used to cook traditional food for tourists in the old city of Damascus. Now her daughter is helping her bring that expertise to Vancouver.
“This is her skill and her passion,” says Dakhllalah. A small grant from the Vancouver Foundation gave them seed money to do a cooking class for their neighbours in the Commercial Drive area, and that led to their catering business, Taste of Damascus.
For her mother, cooking for others has been a lifesaver. “It’s provided an income, and she doesn’t feels like her life has stopped. She can keep going. This is the thing that makes my mom feel like herself again.”
Sharing their food has not only helped her find refuge, it has helped her make friends and find a place in a new community, said Dakhllalah.
In his West End apartment, Richards serves the women of Tayybeh his version of the classic Syrian maklubah, which means “upside down,” a pyramid of spice-infused rice, eggplant and grilled meat served with a delicate saffron- and beet-infused yogurt,
Richards explains that he yearned for the meals his mother used to make after he fled Syria in 2011. Out of homesickness, he taught himself to cook.
After falling in love with a Canadian, Richards came to Vancouver in 2016. Now he’s offering catered in-home dinners, creating elevated versions of Syrian classics.
Syria’s cuisine is as diverse and deep as its history, with wide regional variety, Persian, Turkish, Ottoman and Levantine influences.
Richards’s next course is a deconstructed shawarma served alongside tabbouleh, hummus, smokey eggplant and pomegranate and toum, a “garlic cloud” that looks like aioli, but has only three ingredients: garlic, lemon and olive oil.
Among the women the mood is high: Tayybeh has just launched a food cart at Robson Square and it’s been a huge success. The evening feels like a celebration.
When Richards sets down his beautifully deconstructed shawarma; there is a chorus of appreciation.
Then laughter rises again. There has been much debate — in Arabic, with Elwan translating into English — about whether Alambarabar’s husband actually cooked the chicken for his family’s dinner. He grilled it, which might not count.
“Maybe we should get Lev to show him how to cook!” someone cracks, before the laughter subsides and the only sound is cutlery clinking against the plates.