Founder of one of region’s oldest Middle Eastern restaurants
Mikhail “Mike” Khalil, a Syrian immigrant who rose from being a laborer and restaurant butcher to owner of several local Mediterranean restaurants that bore his last name, died Monday at age 84.
The remaining landmark restaurant, Khalil’s II, is at the Baum Boulevard location in Bloomfield where he started working in the 1960s when it was called Omar Khayyam.
Having opened their own successful restaurant on Semple Street in Oakland in 1972, Mr. Khalil and his late wife, Agnes, came back and bought the Bloomfield restaurant, too, in 1977. Their family was running it when it closed in 2015 and they remodeled and opened it earlier this year, with Mr. Khalil, having bounced back from several health issues, still visiting when he could.
He and his wife’s remarkable story was chronicled in 2017 by the Pittsburgh PostGazette’s Odysseys project about immigrants from all over the world.
Agnes Khalil had been born in Pittsburgh and was working as a supervisor at the former Nabisco bakery in East Liberty when in 1956 she traveled to her family’s home village of Miklos, Syria. She was unpleasantly surprised that her marriage had been arranged to a farmer there, her younger second cousin named Mikhail.
He eventually joined her in Oakland, but the marriage had its challenges, from language — he spoke no English — to two babies dying at birth, and the couple separated for a time. In 1964, when he was working at the restaurant, the couple had twins.
“She looked at the twins and said, ‘These two came from this man, he can’t be all bad. He doesn’t go out to drink, he doesn’t gamble. He’s working. He knows God and reads the Bible every day. He’s at church every Sunday,’” the couple’s youngest daughter, Dalel Khalil, told the Post-Gazette’s Steve Mellon.
Mr. Khalil ran Khalil’s kitchen and his wife ran the front of the house, with their daughters belly dancing. Their third restaurant was a short-lived cafeteria in Oakland. They closed two restaurants to focus on the Bloomfield one, which had a liquor license. The bigger Khalil clan owned as many as seven restaurants.
By 2000, Mr. Khalil had just Khalil’s II, which PostGazette dining critic Woodene Merriman that year praised as offering “authentic, old-fashioned Middle East food.”
Over the decades, other relatives from Syria joined them here, working in the restaurants and building American lives of their own.
Mr. Khalil acted as a sort of “godfather,” his youngest daughter explained, to immigrants of all sorts: “Muslim, Hindu, Egyptian, Tunisian, it didn’t matter to him.”
As the Post-Gazette wrote in 1993, Khalil’s II was “a contact point for any stranger wanting to connect with the Arab community.” Mr. Khalil passionately supported St. George Orthodox Cathedral in Oakland, which his forebears founded and where family,” as one of them put it, gathered for Sunday Mass and met afterward in the basement “for coffee hour and kisses — one on both cheeks for everybody.”
A chanter there for 50 years, he went to church several times a week, regardless of the weather, even though in recent years he was in a wheelchair. Dalel Khalil said her father loved the church and loved God and “served him every moment that he had breath,” including donating food to a homeless shelter and others in need.
She said her father’s accomplishments are “too numerous to count,” but include having founded the Pittsburgh Folk Festival’s Syrian exhibit. In 2016, Global Pittsburgh honored him with an Immigrant Entrepreneur Lifetime Achievement Award for “notable contribution to the city’s economic and cultural life.”
His wife died in September 2003, just weeks after their 47th wedding anniversary. Other family members help run the newly reopened and “revived” — according to the Post-Gazette’s Melissa McCart — restaurant, where Dalel Khalil of Schenley Farms is the manager in addition to being a writer and speaker.
The reopening “really resurrected him,” until he was again beset by serious health problems. She said Khalil’s II is temporarily closed because of her father’s death but, “We will carry on his amazing legacy in due time for certain.”
Mr. Khalil is also survived by four other children — Tami Mansour of Brookline, Zelfa Alizeray of McCandless, and twins Leila Khalil of Point Breeze and Michael of Schenley Farms; three brothers, Essa of Oakland, Khalil of North Oakland, and Dr. Karim of Greensburg; a sister, Hanna of Brookline; and four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Funeral arrangements are being handled by John A. Freyvogel Sons Inc., 4900 Centre Ave., Oakland. Friends will be received from 2 to 4 and 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday at St. George Antiochian Orthodox Cathedral in Oakland, where a Trisagion Service will be held at 7 p.m. each evening. Additional visitation will be held on Saturday one hour prior to an 11 a.m. funeral.
To view a brief video of Mr. Khalil and his daughter Dalel: https://newsinteractive.post-gazette.com/odysseys/#syria.