In recent years, the authentic dishes served at Flavors from Afar have earned it a mention on any list of memorable places to eat in the city of Los Angeles.
In the kitchen of the tiny restaurant is a monthly rotation of chefs from around the world, each cooking traditional plates popular in their home country. Ouze from Lebanon, manti dumplings from Chechnya or Palestinian musakhan.
But Flavors from Afar is more than a culinary hotspot. The brainchild of 42-year-old Meymuna Hussein-Cattan, the restaurant is the most visible in a series of efforts by the Tiyya Foundation to support immigrants and refugees who have newly arrived in the United States, as well as Indigenous people who have been displaced.
Tiyya works with the “residual” of global crises, said Hussein-Cattan, helping people after they’ve made it through the often harrowing journey to the US but face the equally daunting challenge of rebuilding their lives. “We are doing the work when it’s not cool anymore. That’s why I have trouble on Instagram,” Hussein-Cattan laughs, sitting in Flavors from Afar’s Little Ethiopia dining room. “I can’t keep up with what’s happening right now because I’m still working with families from what happened five years ago.”
Hussein-Cattan started Tiyya with her mother, Owliya Dima, who immigrated to the US from East Africa in the 1980s, and for years helped other refugees arriving in southern California settle into their new lives – helping people get furniture for their homes and diapers for their kids, translating documents and checking in on them.
Tiyya was founded in 2010, with community-based programming like back-to-school drives and English-language learning opportunities. Slowly, its work expanded to employment programs.
The inspiration to start the restaurant came, like so much of Tiyya’s work, from the people the organization serves.
“It was a former asylum seeker who gave me the idea. He was from Egypt,” said Hussein-Cattan. “I thought of tea, and he was like, ‘That’s cute. But you know, there’s a ton of good food around you. There’s ghost kitchens. And there’s these apps called Uber and DoorDash. Maybe you could cater.’”
True to Tiyya’s mission, the experience for the rotating chefs is career-oriented: the cooks learn to operate a commercial kitchen, get headshots and professional bios done to develop their resumes and even have professional photos of their food taken.
Five percent of the restaurant’s proceeds go to the cooks directly and 40% to the foundation.
Finding a job is among the biggest challenges new immigrants experience, in particular a job that’s similar to the one they did at home, said Mira Tarabeine, the career placement specialist at Tiyya.
“Work experience and education is not honored if it was in a different country – at all,” said Tarabeine, who moved to the US from Syria in 2012.
Tarabeine recalled a client from Afghanistan, a doctor who ran a surgical unit back in his home country and was working towards a physician’s assistant degree in the US. When they submitted his paperwork to certify his academic qualifications, they received an automated email saying his degree could not be re-evaluated since the US doesn’t recognize Afghanistan’s Taliban government. Refugees from Afghanistan made up the largest group of arrivals in California in 2023, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
“In your country you were somebody. Then you come to the US. If you were a professor, you cannot be a professor again. You are a doctor, you cannot be a doctor here,” said Tarabeine’s colleague at Tiyya, housing specialist Beatrice Kihagi, of the experience of moving to the US.
Kihagi was a successful business owner in Kenya before emigrating. She said she and many others get through the challenges with humor. She has a friend who was a university lecturer in Afghanistan who now works as a security guard. “Sometimes we meet and we just laugh about things, you know, and just encourage each other. Yeah, and move on with life. Because I mean, what do you do? You have to be a very strong person to know that, yeah, you can lose it all. And you can always start again.”
Creating relationships with potential employers has allowed her to share the qualifications of her candidates, said Tarabeine. “Over 70% of the folks in career placement are at least college-level educated. And 60% of those have a postgraduate degree, whether that’s a doctor, a law degree, and medical degree, very successful folks.”
Kihagi does this with property managers and landlords, explaining that many of the people seeking housing have legal authorization to be in the US.
In 2022, Tiyya Foundation placed people in 49 jobs, with 87% of folks staying employed, the organization said. They supported four individuals with their own catering companies and succeeded in getting 15 re-certifications or upskilling opportunities.
It’s all part of reframing the narrative about refugees as a whole, Hussein-Cattan argued. “There used to be these really meek-looking images of people with bags over their shoulders, walking through deserts and little shadows of them marching … No, no. The refugee just got off the plane. Has their traveling visa that might expire because they’re looking for that lawyer. That refugee just was at the bank, you know? Balance was healthy.”
Hussein-Cattan said anybody can experience displacement, citing the families displaced by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, or the 1994 earthquake in Northridge, California. “It could be any one of us. We’re all just so vulnerable. If we keep othering the refugee narrative, then we’re in denial that it could take place here at home.”
In 2022, Tiyya served 218 households, according to the organization: 774 individuals and 507 children. Their clients came from Afghanistan, Chechnya, Egypt, El Salvador, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Guatemala, Honduras, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mexico, Palestine, Russia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia and Venezuela; and spoke 11 languages, including Afaan Oromo, Dari, Farsi and Spanish.
Despite starting the same month as the Covid-19 lockdown, the restaurant has been successful. Flavors From Afar received the Michelin Bib Gourmand in 2022, and was in the Los Angeles Times’s 101 best restaurants in Los Angeles two years in a row. It’s been such a hit that they’re expanding in a new location.