The Refugee-Led Kitchen Turning Recipes Into New Careers

Flavors From Afar, a Tiyya Foundation program

Photo courtesy of The Tiyya Foundation (tiyya.org)

Meymuna Hussein-Cattan came to the U.S. as an East African refugee in the 1980s. Decades later, she and her mother founded The Tiyya Foundation in 2010 to help newly arrived refugees and immigrants build stable lives — and in 2018, that mission took the shape of a kitchen.

Flavors From Afar is a free, eight-week culinary workshop in the Los Angeles area that trains refugee and immigrant home cooks in professional kitchen skills: food-handler certification, business basics like permits and insurance, and how to source ingredients at scale. More than 23 chefs from 21 countries — Afghanistan, Tunisia, Algeria, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe among them — have gone through the program. Graduates earn a share of the program’s catering revenue while they work toward paid kitchen jobs of their own.

For people who arrived with little more than the recipes they carried from home, the program turns those recipes into something else: a foothold, a paycheck, and a first step toward building a life in a new country.