Syrian TV-chef opens restaurant in Berlin
berlin — Tucked away in a former fast-food kiosk in the German capital lies a new restaurant whose owner hopes will provide a taste of home for the thousands of new arrivals who have fled Syria’s war.
After fleeing her homeland, Malakeh Jazmati reinvented herself in Jordan as a TV chef and became known as the “queen of cooking” to fellow Syrian refugees. Now in Berlin, she’s starting over again, opening a restaurant she hopes can serve as “medicine against homesickness” for fellow Syrians, as well as an introduction to her country’s cuisine for others.
During her three years in Berlin, she has already cooked for movie stars at the Berlinale film festival and for Chancellor Angela Merkel at a government event, but the restaurant is her attempt to provide a reminder of Syria for the recent arrivals.
“I’m trying to make this restaurant not just a part of Syria but part of my home,” she said standing in the serving room of the restaurant after a long shift in the kitchen. “The food helps them remember their mothers and the dining tables in their homes, and the photos on the walls remind them of life back in the home country.”
Jazmati’s own culinary story is closely intertwined with the war in Syria and the mass of people seeking asylum in Germany in 2015.
The 31-year-old Damascus native fled her home soon after the war started. Her first stop was the Jordanian capital Amman, where she started hosting her Syrian
cooking show on Orient TV, a Dubai-based regional broadcaster.
Its name, Maliket Al Tabkh, or ‘Queen of Cooking’ was a play on her own first name Malakeh, meaning queen.
She had never worked professionally as a chef before, but her natural way of presenting the food and chatting with the presenters made the show popular among fellow Syrian refugees and others.
While she worked, her husband made his way to Germany through Turkey and Greece and she was allowed to join him in 2015 through a family reunification scheme. She was one of hundreds of thousands of Syrians that migrated to Germany that year.