NIHAL ELWAN

Founder, Tayybeh

Very little in Nihal Elwan’s life prepared her to start and operate a food business before she came to Canada in 2014. An international development professional originally from Egypt who had worked for the World Bank, United Nations Volunteers program and UNICEF, she arrived in Vancouver from Washington, D.C., after her husband got a job at Simon Fraser University. Within two years, however, an opportunity to help Syrian refugees settle in a new country turned into a soon-tobe thriving company centred around the one thing Syrian women certainly knew how to do: cook. What began as a one-off pop-up dinner is now a full-service catering company called Tayybeh (meaning kind and delicious in Arabic) that also has a summer food truck in Robson Square and a tent at UBC Farm Farmers’ Market. We caught up with Elwan after a She’s Next, Empowered by Visa event in Toronto.

In my past life, before I moved to Vancouver and started Tayybeh, I was an international development professional, so I worked on loads of projects and research projects on gender and women’s issues in the Middle East.

The rights and empowerment of women from the region has always been my passion, always been what I loved to work at. I moved around the region: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Jordan... it’s been a long journey in that field.

The move to Canada was quite fortunate and wonderful for us, but when I moved I had no dreams or ambitions of starting a business or launching a social enterprise.

I don’t go to the trouble of cooking often so people find it funny that I’m in the food industry and I spend a lot of time in the kitchen tasting stuff, because I never bothered in the past. Life is funny that way: you never know where you’re going to go.

If you’re from the Middle East, the moment you say Syrian food, you immediately associate it with absolutely delicious food. For centuries, Syria has been the culinary capital of the region, but I think this is a littleknown fact outside the region.

It was very easy to see how difficult it was for the Syrian refugees. All these families had five or more children. Very little English, if any, was spoken.

At the time, my ambitions were very limited: Let’s invite some Syrian women to my building and get them to cook for my neighbours, meet some Canadians, have people taste some Syrian food and see where it goes. It was meant to be a one-time thing and that was that.

We had women who really wanted to work, and they had incredible skill to cook this really delicious, healthy food, we had people who were curious about this new cuisine and people who were interested in coming to these events and supporting the newcomers. We realized we had a really good recipe here. I’m an anthropologist by training and I’m an international developer so there’s a lot for me to see and observe. And, oh my goodness, oh my goodness, it’s been incredible observing this. All of these women used to be housewives back home so they’ve never held a job in their lives. You can imagine the situation where a women is a mum and a housewife and only cooks for her families, nuclear or extended, and then becomes an income generator, someone who earns money. I’ll never forget one of the ladies telling me about the feelings she had when her kids started asking her for money instead of asking the dad, and she could open her wallet and say, ‘Here, go buy what you want.’ It’s not about the need for money, it’s about the feeling of empowerment, “Suddenly, I’m on equal footing with your dad,” and in some cases they know they are doing better because they are better paid than their husbands.

Food is such a massive and integral part of Syrian culture, and so there is a huge range of things that they can do, from catering to restaurants to bakeries to cafes. They just need time to acquire the necessary skills, specifically language, the way a business is run here, things that we have also had to learn along the way.

My learning curve has been really incredible. I’ve learned the tangible things like how to start a business, how to work in the food industry, and, of course, I’m still learning since I’m a newcomer to the business, how to run a business in Canada, in Vancouver, because each city has its own flair, its own flavour for the types of messaging and the types of consumers.