Yassin’s Falafel House
And the Winner Is …
It was a few days before Christmas 2017, and a crowd had gathered in Market Square in Knoxville, Tennessee, for an annual holiday event called Welcome the Stranger. It’s a Christian ritual with Jewish roots, where neighbors greet neighbors, friends, and anyone else who passes by with warmth and compassion, celebrating the season. Only this year, not everyone was in
the spirit. As the speakers organized by local churches stood before the crowd to share their holiday thoughts, a man draped in an American flag began yelling that he was out of a job and immigrants were to blame. As it happened, a local restaurateur named Yassin Terou was on the stage preparing to speak.
Terou is well-known in Knoxville as the owner of Yassin’s Falafel House. He also emigrated to the United States from Syria in 2011. “I’m lucky to be here. It’s like a blessing,” he says of his adopted homeland. “The American dream to me is like a second chance of life.”
He responded to the man by inviting him onstage—terou wanted them to hold the flag together, immigrant and native-born American. When the man refused, Terou stepped down into the crowd. He approached the man, and they spoke for a few minutes. Come for dinner sometime, Terou offered. And then they shook hands. “When you break bread,” he later explained, “you break hate.”
That philosophy is at the heart of everything Terou has accomplished. After only seven years in the United States, he has turned his two restaurants into Knoxville fixtures by serving equal portions of chickpeas and compassion. “At any given lunch hour, you’ll see power business leaders and tourists who were wandering by; you’ll see Muslims and Christians and the breadth of our community sitting around tables and sharing a meal,”
says Tom Ogburn, former pastor of the First Baptist Church, just a few blocks away from the downtown restaurant.
In case that snapshot of inclusivity isn’t clear enough, Terou has put his philosophy on a sign right on the wall:
Welcome. All Sizes. All Colors. All Ages. All Sexes. All Cultures. All Religions. All Types. All Beliefs. All People. Safe Here at Yassin’s Falafel House.
Which is why Yassin’s Falafel House is Reader’s Digest’s Nicest Place in America.
Terou fell in love with Knoxville on his first day in town. It was a Saturday in the fall of 2011, and University of Tennessee football fans flooded the streets in their orange-and-white Volunteers jerseys. Everywhere Terou went, people smiled at him. It was partly because of the game, of course. But he knew that outsiders aren’t greeted with a smile everywhere. “The overall values of our community are that we’re welcoming,” Knoxville mayor Madeline Rogero told Reader’s Digest. “The expectation is that you treat people just like how you’d like to be treated.”
Life was still hard for Terou. He couldn’t find a job, even though he had all the legally required papers. Who would hire someone who couldn’t speak the language or drive a car? The small Muslim community in town offered him free food and clothing. But Terou wanted to work. He asked
whether he could sell sandwiches outside the mosque on Fridays after services. On the first Friday, he sold out. The next week, he made more, and again he sold every one. Even nonmuslims were buying them. That’s when a fellow worshipper, Nadeem Siddiqi, knew he was witnessing something special.
“I asked him why he didn’t open up a store,” Siddiqi says. “He said he didn’t have any money. I had a building downtown, an empty spot just sitting there, so I thought, Why don’t we give it a shot and see how it goes?” That first shop opened in 2014. A second followed in 2018, and Terou has plans for two more next year.
Terou would be the first to admit that, while his falafels are delicious, his secret recipe lies in the mind-set that had him leaping off the stage at the Welcome the Stranger event. “I’m not here just to make falafel and make money,” Terou says. “I’m here to build this community.”
His commitment doesn’t stop at his restaurants. When fires hit Gatlinburg, just an hour away, Terou rallied his customers to help, filling a van with their donated food and supplies and driving it to the fire zone. He often holds fund-raisers for the community. When Knoxville recognized him with a Rotary Club Peace Award, he donated the $1,000 prize to the Seeds of Abraham, a group that brings together youths from different faiths.
“Yassin has such a generous spirit and a generous heart,” Siddiqi says of his business partner. “Nobody has a negative feeling toward that.”
As it happens, Knoxville is a particularly fertile place to plant goodwill. The city has a history of compassion dating back to the strong abolitionist streak that ran through the area during the Civil War. Today you’ll have no trouble finding the usual southern hospitality. People readily wave and smile at strangers, and no car sits broken down on the highway shoulder for very long before passersby stop to help.
Sometimes residents even take their show of inclusivity on the road. In the spring of 2017, Jonathan Williams, a self-described political conservative, and Andre Block, a liberal, decided to bicycle across the country together to demonstrate that what unites Americans is stronger than what divides us. They talked to people along the way about what they call the gray area—the things in the middle that most people want. The duo ultimately pedaled 3,200 miles in 35 days, from Oceanside, California, to Washington, DC, arriving in time to see the July 4 fireworks over the Capitol. They called their program the Unity Ride, and this spring they did it again, biking the route of the Underground Railroad, all the way to Toronto.
“If you want to grow as a person, you need to be around people who are a little different than you,” Williams says. “We’re all in this together, and Yassin very much embodies that.”
In January 2017, a youth pastor at First Baptist asked Terou to talk to a group of kids at a church retreat. Terou and his family (wife Jamileh Al Saghir and daughters Judy, eight, and Shaam, two) cooked a huge meal. Terou took it to the church, where he told the students about his early life, which started much as life had for the kids in Knoxville.
Terou grew up in Damascus, Syria’s capital. As a boy he took judo lessons and learned to play the trombone. His father was a lawyer, and his mother stayed home with Terou and his four siblings. He went to college and worked in public relations for a Kia car dealership. But he spoke out against the government in a country where that’s not a freedom allowed to citizens, and in 2010 the secret police paid him a visit. They summoned him every day for the next month. Most days, the interrogators would ask him one question and then make him stand in a small room for hours.
Terou applied for asylum and landed in Knoxville in 2011. He thought he’d take English classes at the university
and move on, but he quickly realized he was home. “Home is not where you are born; home is where you stay, where you build a life,” he says, calling this decision “the best luck in my life.”
Many people Terou knew in Syria are now missing or dead. He told the church kids that he would love to go back to see his family, especially his father, who is very ill, but he can’t. “Maybe I’d get arrested. Maybe I’d get killed. I don’t know,” he says. “So the American dream gives me a second life to be safe and to be here around the American people and build this country together.”
The impact on the teenagers was immediate. “It revolutionized the way they think about their neighbors and refugees and what we should do as Americans, first of all, and as Christians, above all, to welcome all who need a place of refuge,” says the youth pastor, Ben Winder. “Some of our students and families prior to that weekend had thoughts that refugees were folks who were in some way dangerous. I don’t think that can stick if you meet Yassin or other refugees like him, because you come to know the people they are.”
Seven years after fleeing Syria, Terou is determined to help Americans who need a lifeline, just as America gave him one. He employs 30 people, many of them refugees like himself, people struggling with drug addiction, or women fleeing dangerous situations.
Tiffany Haun, 36, has lived at the YWCA a block from Terou’s downtown location since a drug relapse sent her looking for a fresh start. “To work in a positive place, it helps me in so many ways, as in not dreading coming to work,” she says. “And even when I do, Yassin is there to lift me up.”
Terou spends time at both of his restaurants every day but Sunday, when the doors are closed so he and his workers can spend time with their families. “It’s my job to help people,” he says. “That’s how we can keep being nice and transfer love to our kids and our grandkids. I don’t want to be the last one who has been helped.”