A Place at the Table THE CRUCIAL ROLES RESTAURANTS AND MARKETS PLAY FOR LIFE AS A NEW AMERICAN by Troy Johnson
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are—Gihon, Applebee’s, all of them—for newAmericans as they try to build a new life amid the vertigo of Western culture shock.“Especially for those who don’t speak the language, restaurants are the main source of employment,” says Rahmo Abdi, a community organizer with Partnership for the Advancement of NewAmericans.“As long as you can cook food fromyour own culture, you can findworkwhile you go to school, learn English, and get assimilated into American culture.” The most universal language may be math, but cooking is a close second. By the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ last count (May 2020), nearly one in three restaurant workers is foreign-born.Makonnen explains that, over the years, Gihon has acted both as safe harbor and social incubator for Ethiopian immigrants. “Around 2000, most of my aunts and uncles got to come to America, so my mom had a full staff,” she says. “They learned the language. The Alliance [for African Assistance] would call us and ask if we could find people work.We would hire people fresh off the plane. Ethiopians have a really strong sense of community.We need to be around each other. Plus, my godmother helped my mom find jobs when she first came here, so my mom always tries to give back.”
bout 9,000 miles east of San Diego, an Ethiopian family picks through their local market for bird’s-eye peppers, green cardamom, and black cumin. They will sun-dry them, grind them, blend themwith other spices (careful not to touch the mix with their bare hands, which shortens its shelf life),
then ship the Cheeto-colored powder across the world to El Cajon Boulevard. The blend is called berbere, a cornerstone of Ethiopian cuisine and, in this family’s case, a recurring love letter to their sister, Meskerem “Messi”Bekele. At Gihon Ethiopian Kitchen,Messi and her daughter Lela Makonnenwill liberally sprinkle berbere into sautéed onions with cubes of rib eye or lamb or whatever you like, and simmer it for their signature dish, tibs. They’ll serve it on injera (thin, tangy, crepe-like flatbread),which they ferment in-house for two days. For 23 years Gihon has been an emissary of Ethiopian food in North Park, even before the neighborhoodwas ready for it. “This place used to be a cafe called Granger’s, and when my grandmother and mom bought it in 1998, the owners said,‘You can serve Ethiopian food, but also please keep serving burgers; our customers don’t have anywhere else to go,’”Makonnen says with a laugh.“My grandmother didn’t speak a lick of English and had no idea how to make a shake.” So for about two years in the late ’90s, you could get a prototypical American combo meal as well as the national dish of Ethiopia—dorowot, a spicy chicken stew—at Granger’s Ethiopian. The first iteration of Messi’s dream restaurant in the US may have been a bit of a compromise, but it was an important evolutionary step in San Diego’s food culture at the time. Anthony Bourdain hadn’t yet become the TV James Dean of planetary foodstuff and sent us all on hunger quests, and Jonathan Goldwas writing his global food poetry one city too far north. The more important point is how crucial restaurants
OPPOSITE: Lela Makonnen and “Messi” Bekele of Gihon Ethiopian Kitchen. BELOW: Messi’s family in Ethiopia blends Gihon’s spices and ships them to San Diego.
27 SAN DI EGO MAGAZ INE
PHOTOS BY JAMES TRAN AND VALERIE DURHAM
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