From Refugee Chefs, a Taste of Home

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/06/dining/refugees-chefs-paris.html

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PARIS — The guests at this Left Bank bistro squinted at the unexpected dishes on the menu on a recent evening: purée of orange lentils, kebbeh and spinach; mackerel marinated with sweet peppers and tahini; quail served with freekeh, a grain found in the eastern Mediterranean.

It was far from the usual fare at L’Ami Jean, a traditional French bistro, whose effusive chef and owner, Stéphane Jégo, is known for his interpretation of Basque cuisine.

But on that night, if the guests had looked into the kitchen, they would have seen two chefs tending to each dish: Mr. Jégo and Mohammad El Khaldy, a Syrian who worked for 20 years as a cook in his native Damascus until he was forced to flee the bombing.

“Cooking is my work, it’s my life,” Mr. Khaldy said.

He looked almost euphoric as he checked on his and Mr. Jégo’s pots of sauces bubbling on the restaurant stove and lined up the metal containers filled with neat piles of washed, trimmed parsley and cilantro ready to be deployed as garnishes.

“We are making a taste that is from Syria, but in the French style,” he said as Mr. Jégo nodded approvingly.

The restaurant is one of nine venues that offered to showcase a refugee chef for the first Refugee Food Festival in Paris. Mr. Khaldy participated along with eight other refugee chefs, most drawn from an organization that worked with the food festival: Les Cuistots Migrateurs or the Migratory Cooks.

Les Cuistots Migrateurs is a bold new venture created by two intrepid French entrepreneurs who are trying to change the way Parisians view immigrants by introducing the French to the best of the newcomers’ home cuisines. The entrepreneurs, Louis Jacquot and Sébastien Prunier, both 29, tracked down trained chefs who were among the thousands who recently obtained asylum in France; they then gathered a small group to form a catering company specializing in lesser-known cuisines.

With three Syrians, a Chechen, an Iranian, an Indian, an Ethiopian and a Sri Lankan (an Afghan and a Tibetan are auditioning in the next few days), the organizers have already put on 20 events since February, including lunches, dinners and buffets.

In a country where the dominant narrative is that refugees live off the state and are a burden on the society, and where French cuisine dominates the food scene, the project offers a small but striking counternarrative, showing that refugees can bring skills and are more than willing to work.

“Immigrants here are seen in a negative light, as pulling the country down, as having nothing to offer, but in fact they offer a chance to exchange cultures, to bring something positive: The cuisine of a place gives pleasure,” said Mr. Prunier, who is originally from Montreuil, a suburb east of Paris. “This is part of immigration, too.”

The catering venture started in a shared kitchen in a government-subsidized space dedicated to fostering fledgling companies; it graduated for the summer to a kitchen that is part of a floating concert site on the Seine near the National Library of France.

The place is named Le Petit Bain and it features world music, so its owners were receptive to taking in the Migratory Cooks, believing that their focus on world cuisine would be a good match.

The cooks gather there to make dishes for the events they are catering and the Syrian mezzes (hors d’oeuvres) that are featured nightly at an outdoor bar on the concert hall’s roof.

Moaaoya Hamoud, 26, another Syrian refugee and a onetime journalist who also has restaurant cooking experience, makes the mezzes. He fled Syria in 2014, after he and his family were targeted.

On a recent morning, he was blending an eggplant dish. A couple of feet away, Fariza Isakova, 32, a refugee from Grozny, Chechnya, who fled first in 2004 but arrived in France more recently, was rolling neat circles of dough for pirachkichs, which she was stuffing with a mixture of finely chopped cabbage, carrots, dill, parsley and onion. She learned to cook in her mother’s restaurant in Grozny, the Chechen capital.

Neither of the Parisian entrepreneurs had a background in cooking or in the food business before their foray into catering. They are graduates of a business school in the northern city of Rouen, where they met but did not know each other well. Each worked for several years in different businesses, including Ernst & Young for Mr. Prunier and a digital communications firm for Mr. Jacquot.

“But we felt something was missing,” Mr. Prunier said. Mr. Jacquot said the two “wanted to do something closer to the heart.”

They discovered they had a shared interest in bringing to France the food they had experienced on the road.

Mr. Jacquot spent six months traveling through Lebanon, India, Nepal, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, as well as Peru, Mexico and Brazil. He subsisted on street food and the fare at hole-in-the-wall backstreet restaurants as a way to understand the home cooking of each country, because food carts and small restaurants tend to be run by families, he said.

Mr. Prunier lived in Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai and took every opportunity to eat in people’s homes because he tasted dishes there he had never encountered in restaurants.

Last fall, they went to a party at a nonprofit organization that works with refugees where the migrants each brought a dish. “There were 15 or so cuisines,” Mr. Jacquot said. “They were so colorful, so flavorful, so astonishing.”

The two began to brainstorm: Why not look among the many refugees who had been granted asylum in France (about 19,500 received refugee status in 2015, according to the Interior Ministry) and find those who were trained chefs?

They had three goals, Mr. Prunier and Mr. Jacquot said. They wanted to expose native French people to the cuisines and cultures of those who were arriving on their shores, but whose food had yet to penetrate the Paris food scene. They wanted to create jobs. And perhaps most of all, they wanted to begin to change the way immigrants are viewed in France, Mr. Prunier said.

A part of the catering idea is that the refugee cooks will be on hand when their food is served and will be able to talk with people if they have questions, making the food a means of cultural exchange.

“It’s important to show that this comes from a person and it was a long road for him to bring it here: that the cuisine comes from a place and a tradition,” Mr. Prunier said.

Despite rising anti-immigrant feeling in some parts of France, Mr. Jacquot and Mr. Prunier believe their venture could be coming at a good time because more French young people travel widely and develop a taste for the foods of remote places.

Over all, that may be true, but there will always be exceptions, as the Syrian chef Mr. Khaldy learned on his evening at L’Ami Jean.

The waiter came back with one table’s order, saying, “The lady said: no almonds, no pistachios, no walnuts, no sesame.”

Mr. Khaldy looked crushed. There were nuts in several dishes including sesame in his meticulously blended tahini sauce for the fish; there were pistachios in his homemade ice cream for dessert.

“Pistachios, almonds, sesame: That is our Syrian kitchen,” he said sadly.

Mr. Jégo patted his arm comfortingly, accustomed to the demands of his clientele. “We can do it,” he said.