ONE AFTERNOON SOME 25 years ago, Rawia Bishara gathered her dearest girlfriends at her home in Brooklyn for a meal that would shift the course of her life. It was like any other Friday: She filled her table with stacks of red snapper she’d fried in vegetable oil, a salad of chopped tomatoes that she’d freckled with jalapeño, fries she’d cut by hand. These dishes appeared often in her Palestinian Arab family’s rotation in her hometown of Nazareth, where they would treat “Fish Fridays,” as she called them, with ritualistic devotion. She continued to observe this practice once a month in Bay Ridge, a neighborhood on the southwestern tip of Brooklyn, where she’d moved as a young bride more than two decades earlier.
During that meal, one friend voiced an idea that had been lingering in the back of Rawia’s mind: Why don’t you open a restaurant, a place that puts your Palestinian cooking on a wider stage? Rawia sat with it.
She had known a woman with similar dreams—her late mother, Monira, who had died some 15 years before, when she was 59 and Rawia was 30. Before darting off to her work as a schoolteacher in Nazareth, Monira, a devoted cook, would set the table for Rawia and her four siblings with sunny jams made from apricots grown on trees in their backyard and strained from goat’s milk. Cooking wasn’t drudgery; it was creative expression. Monira took such pleasure in the art that she wanted to open a restaurant of her own. But people around her actively dissuaded her from doing so. Rawia would later, in adulthood, recall a common refrain her mother heard: Women don’t open restaurants.
