These five restaurateurs survived war, genocide, and long journeys to bring their native cuisine to the Twin Cities.

Profiles by Mary Stucky
All photos by JoAnn Verburg

Minnesota has a reputation as the land of lefse and tuna casserole. But today you’re just as likely to find tamales and curries, pad Thai and baklava. It’s a culinary landscape we take for granted – but the people making these exotic foods do not. As these five profiles reveal, their lives are veritable movie plots, complete with tragedy, heroism, resiliency, compassion, cruelty, and improbable luck.

Rodwan Nakshabandi
Babani’s

Dried limes are dark brown, intense, and musky, typically steeped in boiling water to make Kurdish tea. Rodwan Nakshabandi loves these shrunken, misshapen limes, and he likes dreaming up ways to cook with them. They are the surprising ingredient in Chicken Tawa, for example, a house specialty at Babani’s in downtown St. Paul, said to be the first Kurdish restaurant in the United States.

Owner Nakshabandi is a Kurd, the world’s largest ethnic group without its own country. Born 50 years ago in a mountain village in northern Iraq, Nakshabandi earned a college degree and was planning for his future when he was conscripted, sent to the front line in Saddam Hussein’s war against Iran. For Nakshabandi it was, quite simply, a nightmare.

“I was this skinny guy driving a Russian tank,” he says. “We were shaking and under constant bombing.” It didn’t take long for him to make a decision: “It was either escape or die.”

While on leave, he went into hiding at his sister’s house in the mountains, an ordeal that stretched on for four years. Meanwhile, Saddam launched an attack on the Kurds, who had opposed his regime and were demanding autonomy. In what is now considered an act of genocide, Saddam used chemical weapons to slaughter tens of thousands of Kurds. In 1990, after a failed rebellion, Nakshabandi and half a million other Kurds ran for their lives. The refugees amassed on the border with Turkey, Nakshabandi among them.

“The conditions were terrible,” he says. “The entire river, everything got polluted. You could not even drink the water.” Finally, Nakshabandi and the other Kurdish refugees were allowed into a United Nations camp in Turkey.

There, Nakshabandi became famous for his cooking – things like fragrant rice with vegetables and chickpeas, and a spectacular chicken with potatoes. His food attracted the attention of aid work Tanya Fuad, a Minnesotan of Iraqi decent, who helped Nakshabandi immigrate to Minnesota in 1992. He found work in a restaurant at Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport, making $7 an hour. He sent most of his earnings back to his family in Iraq, “the help them survive.”

What he didn’t send back, he saved. With help from Fuad and her family, Nakshabandi opened Babani’s in 1997, serving Kurdish delicacies he’d perfected in the Turkish refugee camp. His Minnesota customers have become his dearest friends, and the restaurant has provided him with the first financial security he has ever known. But the most important thing about life in America isn’t money, he says. It’s freedom.

Nakshabandi’s quest for freedom officially came to an end 11 years ago when he became an American citizen. “Honestly,” he says, “freedom is the best thing a human being can have. If I have freedom, I don’t want anything else.”

Kunrath Lam
Cheng Heng

Kunrath Lam’s Cambodian cuisine is a sophisticated blend of flavors and textures – meat and seafood in delicate sauces flavored with mint, coconut, and lime. You can taste Cambodia’s nearness to Thailand and Laos in dishes like plear, a salad of sliced beef and vegetables in a subtle sauce. At Lam’s St. Paul restaurant Cheng Heng, plear is a signature dish.

Cheng is the middle name of Lam’s husband, Kevin Cheng Lam, heng means lucky. It’s a fitting name for her restaurant, because Kunrath Lam is very lucky indeed. When she was just a child, she survived one of the most brutal regimes the world has ever known.

Lam’s nightmare began in April 1975, when soldiers told her family to leave their home in Phnom Penh. “They said to take whatever is necessary for three days and then you’ll be back,” says Lam, 37.

Three days turned into four years. During that time, Pol Pot and his Communist-influenced Khmer Rouge soldiers killed an estimated 2 million Cambodians, almost a fourth of the country’s population and much of its educated elite.

Lam and her family were sent to the jungle, where they endured long, hot days of physical labor with never enough food. Her father was put in charge of more than a hundred buffalo: Lam remembers him counting them again and again because he’d be killed if he lost even one. Lam, age 5, was assigned to the rice fields, though she was must too young for the backbreaking work. Her legs still have deep scars from being beaten for being slow at her job.

Lam’s parents were in continual danger because they had university degrees and the Khmer Rouge targeted people with an education. “It’s lucky my mom and dad didn’t wear glasses, because anyone who wore glasses would be killed,” she explains. “When they asked my father to read something, he would read upside down.”

It isn’t clear how Lam’s family was spared when almost everyone around them was being killed. Lam thinks they were protected by a Khmer Rouge official, a man her mother had befriended in Phnom Penh. “He looked ugly and everyone made fun of him,” says Lam, “but my mom always gave him money to buy food and then [under the Khmer Rouge] he became very powerful. He found my mom and protected her.”

When the Vietnamese drove the Khmer Rouge out and occupied Cambodia in 1979, Lam’s family fled. Traveling separately to avoid attracting attention, Lam and her little sister went with a smuggler to the Thai border. Luckily, they were reunited with their parents and ended up in a Thai refugee camp. Then, more luck: A church in St. Paul offered to sponsor the family. They arrived on a snowy November day in 1983. Lam was almost 11, a child without a childhood, but with hope for a new life.

“I take nothing for granted,” says Lam, who introduced Twin Citians to Cambodian cuisine when she opened Cheng Heng in 1997. And, like so many immigrants, she wants to share what she has. Over the years she has saved her tip money and used it to build two schools in Cambodia – one just for girls.

Majdi Wadi
Holy Land

The sheer variety of food at Holy Land Restaurant, Grocery and Deli in Northeast Minneapolis is overwhelming: gyros, falafel, kebobs, spinach pie, grape leaves, chicken in special sauce, Middle Eastern breads and pastries, and much more. But it’s the hummus that takes center stage – mashed garbanzo beans mixed with sesame paste, lemon juice, garlic, and olive oil.

Majdi Wadi is the proud owner of Holy Land, which now includes Minnesota’s first hummus factory. He’s a successful businessman and community leader. But for much of his life, Wadi, a Palestinian born in Kuwait, was a man without a country. He spent his 20s living in Jordan, a rising star at a Jordanian investment company. Then his world came undone. Top management discovered he was not a Jordanian.

“All of a sudden they found me in a position that, you know, ‘Who’s this guy that’s sitting there in the company? He’s nobody, not a real Jordanian,’” Wadi says. “As a Palestinian, I’m from nowhere.”

Years earlier his entire family – mother, father, and brothers – had immigrated to Minneapolis, where they were struggling to run a small grocery store. Now Wadi decided to join them. “It wasn’t easy what happened to me,” says Wadi, 44. “In one week I resigned and sold everything I had in Jordan.”

When he arrived in Minneapolis in 1994, the business was hundreds of dollars in debt. He worked hard and got the company in the black, even adding a location in the Midtown Global Market in 2006. “I started having trust that America is the place where you can work hard and achieve your dreams,” he says. “All of a sudden, you know what? My dreams came true.”

But those dreams didn’t come easy. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Wadi received a phone call: “They said, ‘We’re going to bomb Holy Land. Go back to your country.’”

But Wadi, who had lived for so long without a country, wasn’t about to walk away from the home he had found. “I had a meeting with my employees and I said, ‘You have the right not to show up to work. But I’m going to go. I’m taking my kids, I’m taking my wife, I’m taking my mom. I’m opening my business because if we don’t we are defeated, and the people that did September 11, they achieved their goal,’” he says.

When Wadi and his family arrived at Holy Land on the morning of September 14, they found hundreds of flowers and messages of support left by customers, neighbors, and well-wishes who’d heard about the threats against him. “This is the first time that my wife saw me crying,” says Wadi, emotional at the memory. “This is the day, to be honest with you, that I really decided in my heart that I will never quit this country. This is the country I’m honored to call home.”

Jamal Hashi
Safari Express

On weekends, Safari Express in Minneapolis’s Midtown Global Market adds a traditional Somali delicacy to the menu: roasted goat cutlet. “Cooked right, no shortcuts,” says owner-chef Jamal Hashi, 28. It’s a delicious cross between lamb and beef, served with basmati rice seasoned with cinnamon, cardamom, cumin, and curry. As a child, Hashi spent his summers hunting and herding animals – including goats – with his family’s tribe. It was what Hashi calls “a beautiful life.”

That life changed forever on a clear January day in 1991, a day that started like any other. As usual, 9-year-old Hashi waited outside the gate of his family’s estate in Mogadishu for the family chauffeur to drive him to school.

He remembers wearing his blue and white school uniform in class. “Then all of a sudden, like thunder, you could hear something happening,” he says. Within minutes, the sky turned dark and a foul smell filled the air. Thousands would die in the violence that overthrew Somalia’s long-ruling president, but at the time no one seemed to know what was going on. Hashi joined the exodus of fleeing teachers and students.

“People were running with wheelbarrows. Bullets were flying and hitting random people. There were dead corpses on the street,” he says. “No one knew where to run to.”

Hashi spotted his 11-year-old brother, Sade, and the boys ended up on a truck heading south. They made their way to Kismayu, a coastal city where the Hashis owned an office building. To their great relief, the boys found their family there, alive and well. But it didn’t take long for the fighting to reach Kismayu. In the chaos, Hashi and his brother scrambled aboard a ship bound for Kenya.

In Kenya, they were sent to a refugee camp, where, amazingly, the boys found their family once again. This time, Hashi’s father, a retired Somali government official who suffered from high blood pressure and other ailments, lay dying.

“It taught me to accept that some things are out of your control,” Hashi says of life in the camp. “Everybody was brought to the same level, and class separations were over. I learned that deep inside we’re all humans, regardless of what we’ve achieved.”

After two years, a grown half-brother living in the United States found the family and brought them to America in 1993. Hashi bought his first necktie for the flight. “I still have that necktie,” he says. “And I have a picture when we first got here. There’s a big grin on my face.”

That same smile charms customers into trying his Chicken Fantastic and Beef Solan at Safari Express, a name Hashi chose because “safari” means journey. He says he feels deep sorrow for the suffering of the people of Somalia. But he’s an American citizen now. For him, the journey has finally come to an end.

Noelia Garcia
La Loma

Noelia Garcia grew up helping her mother make and sell tamales – those golden packages of cornmeal and spices steamed in cornhusks and tied like little presents. In Mexico tamales are always fresh, but Garcia thought Americans would like tamales they could prepare in the microwave. And that is her gift to Minnesota cuisine – frozen tamales with the authentic taste of Mexico. Oaxaqueno tamales with spicy red sauce inside; tamales with a mole sauce of chilies, nuts, and chocolate; chicken tamales with green sauce; and, for dessert, pineapple and raisin tamales. All are the flavors of Garcia’s childhood.

It’s a childhood that Garcia remembers lovingly, even though it’s been 13 years since she last saw Quebrantadero, the village she grew up buying gorditas in the plaza, preparing for fiestas, and sleeping in her family’s dirt-floor adobe house.

“We slept three or four kids in one bed, everybody in the same house, seven brothers and sisters, my mom, my dad, my grandma and grandpa,” says Garcia, 35. She and her friends loved to play on a little hill, la loma in Spanish, the name she would give her tamale business in Minneapolis.

Quebrantadero was Garcia’s entire world until, at age 16, she met Enrique Garcia and fell in love. What they did next seems to surprise even Noelia. “We got married on Friday and we came to the United States on Sunday,” she says. “In a small village, there is nothing else to do.”

Enrique had heard that a bakery in Minneapolis needed workers. It was 30 below zero on the day they arrived. Neither spoke English, but they got jobs and worked long hours. Noelia started cooking tamales in the evenings to sell at a Mexican restaurant. Those tamales, based on her mother’s recipes, caused a sensation. The Garcias opened a tiny restaurant in the Mercado Central on Lake Street in Minneapolis in July 1999. that was followed by a spot at the Midtown Global Market and a wholesale business selling frozen La Loma tamales to grocery stores throughout the Twin Cities.

It took a year to get the license for the tamale factory. “That’s because the health inspector didn’t know what a tamale is,” Noelia says.

Noelia loved math as a child, but her parents didn’t have the money for her to go beyond eighth grade. Once La Loma was established, Noelia got her GED and enrolled in college to study business. Now she’s planning a scholarship fund so her employees’ children can go to college, too. For Noelia, La Loma is not just a business – it’s a community of family and friends who take care of one another, much like the Mexican village of her childhood.