Refugee restaurant dishes up African fare to win Italian hearts

Italy has become the main arrival point in Europe for people fleeing persecution and poverty in Africa. The hope is the new restaurant will improve community relations, one of its founders says.

|
Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters
A general view shows Grand Canal (Canale Grande) in Venice Lagoon with the Campanile bell tower in Venice, Italy, June 18.

A refugee-run restaurant opening in Venice hopes to exploit Italians' renowned passion for food to improve community relations, one of its founders said last week, as the arrival of thousands of migrants stokes tensions around the country.

Italy has become the main arrival point in Europe for people fleeing persecution and poverty in Africa, most of them crossing the Mediterranean from lawless Libya in search of a better life.

Their stories inspired Hamed Ahmadi, an Afghan refugee living in Italy, to open Africa Experience, a restaurant managed and run exclusively by refugees.

The eatery, which was set to open its doors last Friday in the center of the picturesque lagoon city, will serve fusion dishes mixing the cuisine of various nations that sub-Saharan migrants crossed or left during their journey to Europe.

"Food is a pretext," Ahmadi told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, explaining he hoped the restaurant would help bring down barriers between migrants and locals.

"Getting to know each other is essential – and empty-bellied people pay special attention to you when you give them something to eat," he said in a phone interview.

Ahmadi, a movie director who said he fled Afghanistan in 2006 after a controversy stirred by one of his short films, founded the restaurant with three fellow refugees – two of them women – from Afghanistan, Egypt and Iran.

Africa Experience employs four staff and three chefs from Nigeria, Ethiopia and Guinea, who were selected in a cooking competition molded on hit television show MasterChef and run with the assistance of reception centers in the area, he said.

None of the cooks had any previous work experience behind the stove.

Mohammed Sow, 20, said he learned the craft preparing food for himself on the way to Italy, where he arrived on a migrant boat in 2014, after leaving his home in Guinea as a teenager.

"I never thought I could become a cook but it happened," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

"I'm lucky I have found a job," he added. "I hope the restaurant is a success."

Ahmadi said all the chefs underwent a period of training after being selected.

The new restaurant comes as Italy is struggling to house almost 172,000 asylum seekers, with some communities opposing government plans to redistribute them across the country.

Recently, residents of the small village of Gorino, about 100 km (62 miles) south of Venice, set up makeshift roadblocks to prevent a small group of migrant women and children being given accommodation in a local hostel.

"Initiatives that put asylum seekers in touch with local communities are the only way of fostering integration through knowledge and discussion," said Valeria Carlini, a spokeswoman for the Italian Council for Refugees, a charity helping asylum seekers.

Over the past three years, more than 470,000 migrants, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, have reached Italy by boat. Thousands have also died making the dangerous crossing, including at least 3,750 this year alone.

Reporting by Umberto Bacchi, editing by Megan Rowling. This story originally appeared on the website of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights, and climate change. Visit www.news.trust.org.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Refugee restaurant dishes up African fare to win Italian hearts
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Making-a-difference/Change-Agent/2016/1108/Refugee-restaurant-dishes-up-African-fare-to-win-Italian-hearts
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe