Refugee chefs bring recipes to NY food company

Associated Press

NEW YORK

The kitchen hums with activity. Rachana Rimal is at one table, making momos, the traditional dumplings from her native Nepal. Next to her, Iraqi immigrant Dhuha Jasif mixes some pureed eggplant for baba ghanouj. Containers of adas, a lentil stew from the East African nation of Eritrea, sit on a counter.

The unusual mix of cuisines is how it works at Eat Offbeat, a Queens-based food-delivery service. All seven employees are refugees or asylum seekers who fled their home countries.

None had any professional cooking experience before coming to work for the startup, which launched in November.

The company has committed to hiring refugees and teaching them culinary skills, partly for altruistic reasons and partly as a business strategy. In a city filled with good ethnic food, it is a way for the cuisine to stand out.

“We are really focusing on these new and off-the-beaten- path cuisines,” said Manal Kahi, who founded the company with her brother, Wissam Kahi. “Refugees are coming from countries that have cuisines we don’t really know. ... It’s not cuisines that you find at every corner.”

A Lebanese immigrant who came to New York for graduate school, Manal Kahi started thinking about a food business in 2014 after getting rave reviews from friends for the hummus she made from her grandmother’s recipe.

At the time, refugees also were on her mind, since many Syrians had started fleeing their war-torn home for next-door Lebanon.

“I was feeling very hopeless about it,” Kahi said. “When I got this idea of making hummus, I thought maybe Syrian refugees could be making” it.

As the idea for the scope of the company grew, the thought of employing refugees stuck.

“We thought they were more in need than any other immigrants,” she said.