Opinion | This Palestinian bakery is an ode to family and roots (2024)

The immigrant experience in America is intimately tied to food. Having moved here from all parts of the world, newcomers cook their native dishes. Soon enough, restaurants open, first drawing the owners’ fellow immigrants and then the wider community.

As the son of an immigrant father and a first-generation American mother, I have experienced this process. Like so many of the newly arrived, my dad found his first jobs in restaurants. In the 1980s, he opened his own Iranian restaurant in our hometown, San Rafael, Calif. It had white tablecloths, a guy who played the violin on weekends — and the best koobideh kebab around.

It was a wonderful place, the food was extraordinary, but the business failed miserably. This is the risk that immigrant restaurateurs take. Their lives are precarious, and they try to find stability by making dishes that will help them feel connected to their homeland and that Americans will also learn to love.

These restaurants demonstrate the creative energy that is unleashed when immigrants adapt to their new surroundings. Unfortunately, this phenomenon often gets ignored in political fights over immigration. And this has created a paradoxical situation in America today: There has never been a more difficult time than now to immigrate here, and yet, thanks to immigrants, there has also never been a better time to eat here.

Over the past few months, I have dined at a series of immigrant restaurants in the greater D.C. area and interviewed their owners. The nation’s capital is culturally diverse: Close to 26 percent of the area’s residents were born outside the United States — almost double the nationwide average. Clearly, the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well among the newly arrived, and it lives alongside a dogged determination to succeed. No matter how “authentic” their dishes, the new American chefs are adapting to their new environment and adjusting their recipes to suit it. Whether it’s making do without certain ingredients or refining dishes for a broader and more diverse clientele, they are transforming foreign traditions into only-in-America cuisines.

Dubbaneh’s grandfather and uncle had also opened a restaurant when they came to America — a sandwich and fried chicken shop, but with falafel and hummus smuggled onto the menu. That venture closed in 2010. Then, in 2018, Dubbaneh and his brother Johnny started selling manoushe like their grandmother used to make — with a few of their own twists — at farmers markets around the area. Encouraged by the response, they opened a brick-and-mortar operation in 2021 — in the same storefront where their grandfather’s restaurant had been.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Jason Rezaian: What are the challenges of being an immigrant restaurant owner?

Danny Dubbaneh: The big one is introducing a new cuisine to a customer that might not be familiar with it. So there’s that arm of consumer education, and we did a lot of that on the ground through the farmers markets.

But we were also very fortunate that media has been covering food more. People are much more diverse in their palettes. They have traveled; they have been exposed to stuff.

You also don’t have access to the same resources in terms of not only knowledge but finances. We have had to really scrape by. We are completely bootstrapped to this day, just figuring it out on our own. You don’t know how to solve a problem until you encounter it, and that’s what we have been doing.

Is there a food from home that you can’t get here?

I’ll never forget the musakhan we had when we were in Palestine, that my aunt made for us when we first got to Ramallah. You can make it anywhere, but having it there is different. It’s braised chicken with sumac and onions, served on top of bread. It takes all day to make. And it’s just so good.

Is there an aroma that takes you back home?

The smell for us obviously has to be za’atar. When you go through the souks or markets [back home] and the spices are piled really high, it’s what you smell.

What are the ingredients you need to make your dish that aren’t readily available here? And are there ingredients that you have discovered here that have changed and reshaped your cooking?

My grandma was a gardener, so she got us the seeds [for the required herbs and spices]. It’s not exactly the same as the za’atar you’d find back home because the soil and climate are different here. But it’s the closest you’ll find. For a long time, people brought these spices in suitcases. Anytime someone goes back home, they’re bringing back bulk bags. So when we started the business, we said you don’t have to wait for the suitcase. We’ve got it here.

Do you remember your first manoushe?

Maybe not the first, because when we were kids, my grandma was always baking them for us on the weekends. Trying to help my mom out, my grandma would mass-produce them.

We would be sleeping and would smell the za’atar coming out of the oven. You walk in the kitchen knowing that it’s going to be the start of the best breakfast in the world. You’ve got manoushes with za’atar, labneh, hummus, baba ghanouj, all these other dips, pickled vegetables, laid out on the communal table. Slow eating, just dipping away. That’s my memory of growing up as a child: slow mornings, tucking into all those delicious bites.

How do these two worlds — your old world and the new world — come together in a dish?

We try and honor traditions and ingredients. We are using ingredients that are common to our traditions, and we are applying them in new ways. We are still using cheeses that we grew up eating. Instead of pepperoni, we use sujuk, which is a spiced beef sausage popular in the region. And instead of hot honey, which is a craze in the pizza world, we are using honey infused with an Aleppo pepper, which is from Syria and has this amazing, beautiful flavor. To me, that’s a really great representation of how we’re toeing the line between both worlds: honoring the traditions and all these flavors, while also pushing things forward.

Middle eastern restaurants in DC

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