All-refugee cooking company shares culture and home through love of food
Eat Offbeat is one of many catering businesses that had to re-invent itself when COVID-19 struck 18 months ago.
But its employees had a little experience with sudden, difficult change: They all came to the country as refugees. And they say reinventing their business model overnight came naturally.
The New York-based company, founded by Lebanese siblings Manal and Wissam Kahi, was inspired nearly six years ago by Manal Kahi’s dual realizations: that she couldn’t find hummus “like her grandmother’s” in New York, and that the perfect people to cook food from their home countries were the refugees coming to the U.S. from around the globe.
She partnered with the International Refugee Committee to find cooks and launch a unique business. Now, the group has also released its first cookbook, “Kitchens Without Borders.”
In Queens, New York, the group cooks in a large, shared warehouse space — a sort of We-Work for chefs — called Commissary Kitchens. The smells of cooking waft up from giant pans and pots sizzling and bubbling on industrial-sized cook-tops. At noon, Eat Offbeat’s large meal boxes are piled high on a trolley and then head out for delivery around the greater New York area.
Alassane, an Ivory Coast native and delivery man, explains that each box reflects the food from a different country. The day’s fare includes specialties from Afghanistan, Senegal and Venezuela.
Deeper into the kitchen, a group of women are hard at work chopping and stirring. Among them is Chef Shanthini, who is Sri Lankan. Today, she’s preparing a spicy yellow potato and onion mixture for her signature samosas, which also include a generous amount of green chili and cilantro.
Relying on her son
