San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
From Damascus to Berkeley
When a family left everything behind, they found a community through food.
Little in Rawaa Kasedah and Mohammed Aref Rawas’ first four decades of life could have predicted that they’d find themselves manning their own food stand in the UC Berkeley Student Union at lunchtime on a Monday, Kasedah rolling chicken shawarma in paper-thin flatbread, her husband dashing from the kitchen to slide a hot lamb kabob into a takeout container filled with smoked rice.
This isn’t one of those tidy American stories of passions unleashed and true selves found. No, the story of Kasedah and Rawas’ Old Damascus Fare, which may be the Bay Area’s only dedicated Syrian restaurant, is an older American tale: how coming to this country means making do. And how the making do remakes us.
Kasedah and Rawas, who opened their Student Union stand last fall alongside four other businesses in La Cocina’s kitchen incubator program, prefer Arabic to English, so they let their third business partner, their 20year-old daughter Batool Rawoas, speak to journalists for them.
Batool Rawoas (thanks to a government transliteration error, her last name is spelled differently) remembers the day when her family became refugees. It wasn’t when the explosions closed in on their once-safe, middleclass neighborhood in Damascus, forcing her father to shut down his clothing factory and decamp to a series of relatives’ houses as war snarled and prowled around their city.
Nor was it when her parents and all four children drove to Amman, Jordan, to rent an apartment for a few months — just until the conflict cleared up, they assumed. No, it was after hundreds of thousands of fellow expats crowded into Jordan’s capital city, and then the border closed. Syrians were forbidden from working legally, profiteers jacked up rents for immigrants and the Rawas family finally registered as refugees with the United Nations so Batool and her siblings could enroll in public school.
“We never thought we would get to the point where we would need someone, and people would talk about us in the news or take advantage of us just for being called refugees,” she says. “It was a very big shifting point.”
On the refugee application, the U.N. asked them a fateful question: Would they be willing to relocate to another country? Rawas agreed, though none of them thought it would ever be a possibility. “Who would really want to take Syrians in their country?” they wondered.
But the surreal twists of the refugee’s life redirected their lives again, when the entire family was called in for allday interviews and, at the end of their third year in Jordan, received a phone call telling them they were being resettled in Oakland, California.
The United States of America, which in 2015 accepted only 1,682 Syrian refugees out of the estimated 11 million Syrians displaced by the civil war, was letting them in.
That is how, in March 2015, the Rawas family landed in Oakland, a city where they knew no one and where they couldn’t speak enough of the language to learn where to buy groceries, let alone apply for a job. Now they had to make a life in a country they discovered wasn’t the wealthy, easy-living California of their imaginations but a place where people worked harder than anyone they knew in Syria just to cover the rent.
Life in Oakland seemed isolating as well, and not just because their family and neighbors were so far away. “If you wake up that early and spend all your day working or studying, you have very few hours left in the day to have a social life and meet with people,” Rawoas says. “Here you have to make an appointment a month in advance to meet someone.”
That fall Kasedah and Rawas all but pushed Rawoas, the second eldest, through the doors of Oakland International High School, a public school designated for newcomers to America. Despite the stress of having to study for a diploma in a new language, she fell in love with another side of California. “I’ve never seen this much diversity before,” she says. “That’s a beautiful thing. You forget we are all different.”
While the children enrolled in school and feverishly taught themselves English, Rawas took on minimum-wage factory work and shifts driving for Uber. He looked into opening another clothing factory, but discovered all the clothes here were made in Asia, and the capital needed to start manufacturing was too great. Kasedah had never worked outside the home.
At home, together, Rawas and Kasedah cooked. At first, they cooked because they could not find the food they loved, even pita bread. Then, as they met other families, they cooked out of friendship. A guest would ask Kasedah if she could make a certain dish again for their birthday, and she’d offer it to them as a gift, refusing to take money. “We never thought we would open a catering business because it’s not something we would consider in Syria,” her daughter says. They rarely ate out in Damascus. Few people they knew cooked for a living. The orders kept coming in, though: Immigrant families would request Syrian classics renowned in the Arabic-speaking world. Friends would ask if the Rawases could prepare a meal for a work gathering.
Rawoas says her parents eventually decided, “Why don’t we use this as a chance to connect with the community, but also support our family and see where this is going to go?” So in 2017, the 18-year-old first-year psychology student at Berkeley Community College began sifting through her new country’s bureaucracy to help her parents open a food business. It took a year for Rawoas to successfully apply to the La Cocina incubator program, but while waiting she registered the company’s name and secured enough licenses to operate as a caterer.
Meanwhile, her parents kept cooking. Syria’s famed kibbeh, of course, with its crisp bulgur exterior and spiced-meat interior. Syrian-style babaghanoush, mashed with walnut and red pepper. The sweet-tangy lentilnoodle dish known as horaa’ osba’o, cooked with onions and pomegranate molasses. And mandi, or smoked rice, which has become Old Damascus Fare’s best-known dish. Mandi originated in Yemen, where it is cooked in a charcoal-heated pit, but specialists in the rice dish can be found all over Damascus. Since the health department doesn’t generally smile on smoky underground ovens, Kasedah re-created the perfume and succulence in a commercial oven, spooning long-braised beef on top of the rice and tinting some grains a joyful green.
Not long after joining the incubator program, the Rawas family received another surprise phone call. Even though they hadn’t yet completed the incubator program, would they consider joining a new UC Berkeley partnership with La Cocina to open a fulltime stand?
From Monday through Friday, now, Kasedah and Rawas arrive early at their new communal kitchen to prep for four hours before they open the gates to their food stand. Old Damascus Fare’s menu intersperses Syrian favorites like mandi alongside dishes most students already know, such as falafel and gyro. The couple pour tastes of tamarind juice perfumed with rosewater to win new converts and shyly answer questions about warbat, a bookshaped pastry stuffed with green pistachios. Each tentative, curious customer keeps showing the Rawas family that this country, which they never expected to accept them, is making a place for them.
They have no idea whether their year-long contract will be extended, or what they’ll do during summer break. Restaurant work, too, demands far more than they expected. “If you have a catering order you just go to the kitchen,” Rawoas says. “Here you have to be physically in the kitchen all the time.” Rawoas, now 20, is also working at 1951 Coffee Co., which trains refugees and asylum seekers, and still studying psychology at Berkeley Community College. This business thing? It’s one more gig to juggle.
For all the acumen she displays, when asked what her parents think of this new life, she pauses, a child startled into remembering her parents are more than parents. “I think they love it,” she says. “It’s challenging because it’s a big commitment. They have to spend a lot of time here and work much harder than before. But they like that it’s a learning experience.”