From the Albany Times-Union...
For many immigrants, restaurants are entryway to new life:
https://www.timesunion.com/tablehopp...ly%20headlines
"On a refrigerator door at Tara Kitchen is an instruction sheet for the restaurant’s dishes, printed in English. Above each word or abbreviation is an Arabic translation in pen, written by one immigrant employee to help another in his growth from a dishwasher with minimal English to a cook making food from a culture that was foreign to him, on a menu created by the restaurant’s owner, another immigrant.
The dishwasher-turned-cook is 5,500 miles from where he was born in Syria; the head cook, who speaks seven languages and translated the menu for his colleague, now lives 6,600 miles from his native Afghanistan. The owner’s restaurant portfolio has grown to five locations of Tara Kitchen in New York and New Jersey, and the sixth, being developed for a fall opening, is almost 8,000 miles away, in Hyderbad, India, where the owner grew up and left 30 years ago for the United States. When the Hyderbad Tara Kitchen debuts, according to the owner’s research, it will be the first authentic Moroccan restaurant in all of India.
Their work together at Tara, symbolized by the instruction sheet, is among the uncountable examples of the restaurant industry being an immigrant entryway into the U.S. job market and for some a launching pad for entrepreneurial success. The stories are legion from those newly arriving in America in the two centuries since a pair of Swiss-born brothers and their French-born chef founded the legendary Delmonico’s in New York City in 1827. The country’s first French restaurant, Antoine’s, was opened in New Orleans in 1840 by Antoine Alciatore, who was born in Italy and at age 12 was apprenticing in restaurants in France. By the 1880s, tamales hawked by Mexican immigrants were the most popular street food in San Francisco.
Local migrants uproar upsetting
Each of nine people interviewed for this story who arrived from another country, and an upstate native married to an immigrant for 46 years, has made the restaurant industry all or part of their lives. Each said, in their own way, how upsetting it has been to watch the unfolding drama since migrants and asylum-seekers began being bused to the Capital Region from New York City over Memorial Day weekend. With media access to the migrants blocked or sharply limited by the company contracted to supervise their local stay, the migrants are a largely nameless, faceless group — pawns for politicians, portrayed by some in the public as freeloading off tax dollars or, conversely, trying to take American jobs even though most are precluded from working legally for at least six months.
Fearing government action, multiple local restaurants understood to be providing work to some of the recent arrivals declined to confirm they were doing so, and none of the migrants contacted wanted to be interviewed, even anonymously, lest they jeopardize what they see as precious, and precarious, income.
“When I hear the way they’re being talked about, I get so angry. It’s so unfair,” said Aneesa Waheed, who owns Tara Kitchen. “People are always saying it’s a burden they’re here. Don’t you think it’s an even harder burden on them, (for) what they’ve been through and what they’re facing?”
After emigrating from Hyderbad with her family as a teen, Waheed studied fine art in college and had a career path that went through the tech sector and publishing in New York City before moving upstate. The Tara cooking brand began as a sideline to a Schenectady boutique owned by Waheed and her husband, the Pakistani-born Muntasim Shoaib, that opened in 2008 and sold Indian and Moroccan clothing, jewelry and home accessories.
As devotees of the culture of Morocco, where the couple had their wedding, they began making Moroccan food to sell at farmers markets. Its popularity led to the opening of the first Tara Kitchen, in Schenectady in 2012. Other locations now operate in Guilderland, Troy, the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan and Wildwood, N.J., with the one in India under development.
“When I first opened, it wasn’t a conscious effort (to hire immigrants), but I quickly saw it was important to me, to the culture of the company I was trying to build as a brown woman and a chef — both rare in this business,” said Waheed. Of the approximately 75 people employed by Tara Kitchens, almost a third are not native to the United States, Waheed said.
Coming to America
Among her staff choices was Zamaryalai Omarzai, the head cook for Tara in Troy. Working in his 20s in his native Afghanistan as a manager for a company that supplied food to American military bases, Omarzai was part of a two-truck delivery when the vehicle he was not in was blown up by a roadside explosive that killed eight of his colleagues, he said.
With his pathway to the U.S. soon made possible by a special visa, he consulted with a brother who lives in Broklyn and was told upstate would be better for a growing family. He, his wife and two young kids started out in an apartment in Watervliet in 2018, with Omarzai walking to work at Tara in Troy. Within six months, using money saved and a small loan from Waheed’s husband, he bought a car. Now the family owns an SUV, a home in Watervliet and has three more kids, with the brood ranging in age from 1 to 9. Tara Kitchen is the only job Omarzai has had in America.
“I was given help, so I try to help,” he said. That has meant assisting fellow immigrants navigate bureaucracy or simply acclimate to American life or, using the six languages he learned after his native Pashto, acting as a translator, whether between school officials and neighbors about their children or for his Tara colleague Subi Al Bakour, a Syrian immigrant for whom Omarzai wrote in Arabic on the instruction sheet on the wall.
“Our mission is more than just the restaurant. It’s to help and work with people from other countries,” said Jinah Anh, owner of Sunhee’s Farm & Kitchen in Troy. An affiliated building, called Sunhee’s Community Place, offers English-language classes and other services to immigrant and refugee communities. In May, Sunhee’s won the $60,000 grand prize in the third annual Small Business Big Wins contest, sponsored by Barclays US Consumer Bank and awarded in part for a business’s inspiration by, and impact on, its community.
Anh said about half of the restaurant’s employees were born in other countries, and the community center serves approximately 150 people from 25 countries annually.
For immigrants, “You can always get a job in a restaurant, in a hotel,” said Anh, who was 3 when her parents emigrated from their native South Korea. She said, “You could be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, but if you can’t practice here, you can start as a dishwasher. It’s (been) a path into the U.S. workforce for so many immigrants for so long.”
Food as cultural exchange
For Kelechi Nwagboso, who with her husband opened the Nigerian restaurant Keobi on Lark Street in Albany a month after the pandemic lockdown began three years ago, feeding people offered a more flexible schedule for the couple to care for their young kids, now ages 2 to 11, than her previous careers as flight attendant and nurse. (Her husband is a chemical engineer.) It also turned out to be a way to share their West African homeland in their adopted hometown.
At first, “We had many customers from around Africa and others — Asians, Caucasians — who wanted to try a new kind of food,” Nwagboso said. (Keobi was the first and remains the only restaurant in the immediate Capital Region devoted to African food; House of Seasoning, featuring the cuisine of Cote d’Ivoire and elsewhere in West Africa, opened in fall 2022 in Pittsfield., Mass.)
Over the past year, however, Keobi’s largest customer base has become Black Americans, many of whom tell Nwagboso that they sought out the restaurant, and keep returning for different dishes, as a way to explore heritage from longer ago than the American South of their enslaved ancestors, she said.
“They want something to identify with, to find their roots,” she said. “Food is a way to connect.” As the business and reputation of Keobi grows, the Nwagbosos are planning a second restaurant, Kelechi said.
Success stories
The industry was the pathway to the American dream for an Indonesian-born waiter on a cruise ship who in 1975 fell in love with a passenger from upstate New York, moved here and went on to become one of the Capital Region’s most acclaimed and famous chefs, with an appearance on the “Today” show and a three-page feature in Forbes Asia magazine.
Yono Purnomo started waiting and busing tables at Capital Region hotels, making connections that led to work in the late 1970s at Casa Verde, the first Albany restaurant of a young chef named Jim Rua, who would found, in 1982, what became one of the region’s most cherished restaurants, Cafe Capriccio. Prior to that, Rua and crew catered events at Tanglewood, the Berkshires summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where patrons included the conductors Seiji Ozawa and John Williams. Purnomo on occasion cooked Indonesian food that was so well-received that he and his wife, Donna, in 1983 took over 21 Restaurant, on Elk Street in Albany near the state Capitol, where he had been a waiter. The original location of Yono’s opened in 1986.
But to get there, “He worked so many jobs — sometimes three or four, doing 80 hours a week. If a hand was held out to him, he took it,” said Donna Purnomo. The current incarnation of Yono’s, with the sibling restaurant dp: An American Brasserie, celebrated their 17th anniversary in downtown Albany earlier this year. A year ago, Yono and Donna sold the business to their son, Dominick, who was a partner in running it since 2006 and also has two new-this-year restaurants of his own in Coxsackie. Officially retired, Donna and Yono are still a regular presence in the Albany restaurants, where their pride often shines on one of the most valued employees since 2012, Mohammed Rishan.
Rishan fled his native Sri Lanka, roiled by civil war for almost 30 years, in 1999, settling at first in New York City with refugee status. He worked as a hospital aide after coming to Albany, later at a daytime cafe and as a food runner at Yono’s at night. Now married, his bride still in Sri Lanka, Rishan again works day shifts at a hospital and speeds food to diners at night at Yono’s and dp.
“Rishan has become an indispensable asset in the restaurants,” said Dominick Purnomo. “When he’s not there, his lack of presence is felt by the entire staff.”
In a ceremony at a federal office in Albany on July 23, 2021, Rishan became a U.S. citizen after 22 years.
Past and future
As an example of full-circle symmetry, more than four decades after Rua’s food influenced Yono Purnomo and his career, a famed Rua dish is a favorite of another young man born abroad and working in a local restaurant. Faja Bah, from The Gambia in West Africa, is an MBA student spending the summer as a dishwasher and prep cook at Radici Kitchen & Bar in Glens Falls. Bah became an instant fan of what’s listed on the Radici menu as Fried Eggplant & 4 Cheeses. Over the decades, essentially identical appetizers have been on the menus of at least a dozen restaurants whose chefs or owners learned it directly or indirectly from Rua at Capriccio and chose to serve it as an homage of sorts (and because it sells well). Radici’s executive chef, Brian Bowden, was taught the dish at the former Allegro Cafe in Troy by Rua protege and Allegro chef-owner Andrew Plummer.
“I never had anything like that before I came here,” said Bah. “I am going to learn to make it for my friends at school.”
Like Rishan at Yono’s, Omarzai at Tara considers America his home, made possible in large part because of the restaurant industry. Omarzai’s wife, visiting Afghanistan for the first time since they left six years ago, is spending part of the summer there with the five kids. He’s at their house in Watervliet, or at Tara in Troy, or helping out at the New Jersey, Troy or Guilderland locations as needed.
“All (of) my life is here for me now,” he said. “When I come, I start from zero. Now I have everything.”
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