Flavors From Afar: Where refugees cook up new lives

On the menu recently at the Los Angeles restaurant Flavors From Afar: Maria Esther Galban’s favorite recipes, inspired by her native Venezuela.

“My heart felt very, very happy,” she says of working with the eatery where refugees and asylum-seekers like her get to keep a connection to their homelands and improve their lives in the United States – one plate at a time. 

Ms. Galban never thought she’d be starting over at the age of 60. She had already found her paradise on earth – working in her art studio in Venezuela making pottery, jewelry, and natural soaps, and spending time with family and friends. Her large property by the Caribbean Sea held animals, a garden, and a home where she indulged a passion for cooking. 

Outside the paradise though, life was becoming unlivable. Soaring poverty, violent crime, and political persecution made Venezuela one of the most dangerous countries in the world. Six years ago, a neighbor’s death prompted Ms. Galban to join her daughter – who had been pleading for her mother to leave Venezuela permanently – in Pasadena, California. She left behind her beloved property and other family members. 

“The first challenge was that you feel like you have no roots,” says Ms. Galban, who now lives in Florida. 

What she did have was resilience and determination to live a productive, dignified life again. As she navigated the formalities of settling in, learning the language, and finding a new purpose, Ms. Galban was also building a new community and introducing others – including Flavors From Afar diners – to the tastes of Venezuelan cooking. The unique restaurant in Los Angeles’ Little Ethiopia district offers refugee chefs a chance to share their recipes, earn a portion of the profits, gain experience to propel their careers, and be around people who can relate to what they’re going through. The Los Angeles Times named it one of the city’s best restaurants.

“It was like therapy because I was feeling useful,” said Ms. Galban.

“Stories, traditions, and fullest humanity”

Meymuna Hussein-Cattan and her business partner, Christian Davis, opened the restaurant in 2020 after a stint in catering to support the work of her Tiyya Foundation. Each year, the nonprofit organization, founded in 2010, helps about 250 families of refugees and asylum-seekers with economic advancement through a variety of programs, from peer support to life skills and job training. It also provides a space for refugees to connect with each other and feel understood. 

“All of us want to be acknowledged and celebrated for what we can contribute, and organizations like Tiyya play a vital role in ensuring that people who have been forcibly displaced are not only meeting basic needs, but sharing and exchanging their stories, traditions, and fullest humanity,” said Rachel Perić, executive director of the nonprofit Welcoming America who comes from a refugee family herself. 

Ms. Hussein-Cattan knows plenty about the refugee experience. Born in an Ethiopian refugee camp in Somalia, she came to the U.S. in 1984 as a 3-year-old with her parents. For years, she watched them struggle to find themselves in a new country. 

Many of the refugees she works with are forced to take a step back in their careers as foreign degrees or professional certifications don’t transfer to America. Many start over with any jobs they can find to pay the bills, setting aside passions and professional aspirations. Flavors From Afar aims to bring some of that hope back.  

“We just want to give people a sense of relief,” said Ms. Hussein-Cattan, who was named a CNN Hero for her work. “We want to highlight them and their talents.”

Re-creating favorite flavors

Refugees working with the restaurant are mostly home cooks who teach the head chef and staff how to re-create dishes the immigrant cooks grew up with in their native countries. In addition to money, the new chefs get a marketing package with headshots, food photos, and a professional résumé that they can use if they choose to work in the restaurant industry. Nineteen people have been featured so far, and most of the staff are refugees or asylum-seekers themselves. 

Chef Sonia Ortiz escaped economic scarcity and an alcoholic father in Guatemala and found asylum in the United States in the late ’70s. Prior to Flavors From Afar, she worked as a waitress at another restaurant where she says she often felt discriminated against. 

“They gave me the opportunity to cook here and discover ‘Oh wow, this is my dream. Cooking,’” says Ms. Ortiz, who now creates Guatemalan dishes and re-creates recipes from other chefs. 

Head Chef Kenna Copes says cooking at Flavors From Afar takes on a deeper meaning as she carefully follows the recipes to respect the refugees’ willingness to share their food as well as their stories. The training sessions can get emotional when certain dishes bring up powerful memories. It’s something she often thinks about while working in the kitchen. 

“It’s just like their voices are still in my head,” Ms. Copes says. 

“I’ll never give up”

The most memorable voice is Malia Hamza’s. Flavors From Afar’s first official refugee chef brought her take on Somali dishes that were so successful they became a part of the restaurant’s permanent menu.

Ms. Hamza escaped Somalia’s civil war when she was just 7. Her mother, who stayed behind, sent the young girl with her sister to a refugee camp in Kenya. After two years of dire living conditions, the girls made their way to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1997. There, she faced a new set of challenges: learning English from cartoons and other TV shows, being married at age 12, and having six children, whom she raised largely on her own. Through it all, she found the strength to keep going, her resilience driven in large part by wanting her kids to have a better life. Eventually she moved to Southern California where she connected with Tiyya Foundation.

The organization helped her get a high school degree and provided donations, tutoring, and youth programs for her children. The support meant she could use the culinary skills she learned at the refugee camp to help with Tiyya’s catering. It was a chance to move on from warehouse and waitressing jobs to something that nourished her soul as much as her body and propelled her career ambitions. 

“When someone takes that bite, and they love your food, it just makes you feel better, like you did something,” Ms. Hamza said. “It was making me forget a lot of things.”

As she learned more about the restaurant business, Ms. Hamza moved her family from California to Minneapolis to open her own place, Malia’s Kitchen, in a local mall. She says her food was a success and she often ran out before closing time, but she couldn’t keep up with the high cost of operations and closed after a few months. Still, she’s determined to do it again. 

“I still fight for my dreams and my hopes,” says Ms. Hamza. “I’ll never give up.”