interviews
EAT OFFBEAT
by Manal Kahi
June 15, 2019
This interview with Manal Kahi, co-founder and CEO of EAT OFFBEAT, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
EAT OFFBEAT is a New York City based catering company that works exclusively with refugees.
How did you get started on this work? I know the crux of the business is in hiring refugees, are there particular guidelines about who qualifies as a refugee?
Manal: We're a catering company. We deliver authentic meals that are entirely conceived, prepared, and delivered by refugees here in New York City. Basically the model is we hire talented refugees who are looking to be in the food industry.
They happen to be with the UNHCR, they happen to be refugees by status – but they are chefs by nature.
We train them, for those who haven't had a professional culinary training or haven't had experience working in profession kitchens – we train them so they become profession chefs, we help them scale their recipes and then we deliver their dishes. It's the way they make it at home but they prepare it at our commercial kitchen and we deliver that to mostly offices and private parties or events all over New York City.
image via EAT OFFBEAT
Does hiring a refugee have any complications or benefits?
Manal: Complications? Not necessarily. They are usually referred to us by the IRC, the International Rescue Committee, and maybe that's a good place to answer your question of how we decide they're refugees.
We have a partnership with the IRC, which is one of nine resettlement agencies in the U.S. They help refugees. They help them even before coming here, they provide assistance to refugees filing for refugee status back home.
And once someone is approved they go through the very lengthy security process. They get to the U.S. and the IRC is mandated by the government to assist them in the settlement process. That includes picking them up at the airport, finding accommodations. Part of the assistance they provide is also finding jobs or employment and this is where we come in. Whenever we're hiring they send us candidates who are looking for a job who are recently resettled or who simply just want to be in the food industry. And that's how we hire.
So to answer your question on definition of who is a refugee for us, it's really whoever gets referred to us by the IRC.
Are you hiring full-time or part-time?
Manal: There's a good mix of both. It's a blend. Anyone who's a chef, who has items on the menu, who is contributing to the menu, that's a full-time position, because we need that chef to be at the kitchen whenever we get an order. We have a few positions that are more part-time.
How many people are you working with at the moment?
Manal: We're close to thirty people day to day.
Wow.
Manal: And that includes every function. That's chefs, sous chefs, delivery operators, customer service, everything all together. And it's a mix of refugees but also a couple of Americans. Especially on administrative functions.
Are you looking to expand beyond New York City?
Manal: Not necessarily and definitely not right now. We would never say "Never", that might happen an some point but for now our focus is really on New York City alone.
Are you set up as a for-profit business or a 501c3?
Manal: We are a for-profit business.
Do you feel like you're mission driven?
Manal: We are definitely mission driven. Definitely heavily mission driven. It's what guides us, it's what defines us, and it's part of who we are. At the same time we see ourselves as a food company first, we are definitely food centric, we're people centric, and the mission is very heavy. But it's very important that we are making money because that's the only way we can actually achieve our mission and keep hiring people and keep paying them decent wages.
Business is super important but for us it doesn't makes sense unless there is the social mission part attached.
Can you tell me a little bit about your own background?
Manal: I'm originally from Lebanon. I came here as a graduate student in 2013. My background was in environmental management. My goal was to go a bit more into international climate affairs. I was working on climate affairs in the Middle East and I wanted to go international. That's part of why I chose to come to New York, to be close to the U.N., multi-national institutions or organizations. And then when I came here, I was a bit disappointed with hummus in grocery stores –
I heard.
Manal: So that's really what sparked the idea initially. I started making my own. I got my grandmothers recipe and when that became successful here we thought why not commercialize it.
The first step was the hummus, the next step was...
Manal: Exactly the first step was the hummus and clearly the idea was not just make hummus and sell it, it was initially to have it made by refugees here who were being resettled here in New York City who wanted to share their hummus recipes with the rest of New York and commercialize that. That was really the idea early on. Then after that we went to studying the market, looking at the idea and we thought it was much better to go global. We though why not open it to any refugees coming from all over the world and discover these recipes that, just like hummus, are so much better when their homemade or made by someone who knows how it should taste.
We hire based on talent and passion for food regardless of where people come from, but so far it's been very diverse.
Do you think that it's hard for refugees to find work placement?
Manal: From what I see, my own personal opinion, it's different when you're an immigrant versus when you're a refugee. The only difference is, mainly when you're an immigrant you made the choice yourself, so very often you would have taken English classes, you made the choice as to where to go and when to go and why to go. But when you're here as a refugee very often you actually had to.
And why that makes it a bit harder is because when you come as an immigrant, when it's you're own choice, you may have come as a student, you have a bit more leeway and a bit more time to give it more consideration and decide whether you're going to go and what you're going to do exactly. Whereas if you come as refugee very often you just have to flee and you have to make it work with whatever.
I wouldn't say it's extremely hard to find a job. Jobs are available. It's similar to anyone who's looking for a job. It is definitely much harder to find a job that is a decent wage and a good job that makes you proud and that brings your dignity back – because very often you don't have transferable skills, you probably don't speak the language, so if you had training as an accountant before coming here it's much much harder to find a job as an accountant than to find a job at something else you're not necessarily passionate about.
Is there anything you've learned in the process of working with refugees about the refugee process?
Manal: One thing we've learned is that simply by providing a work environment and an atmosphere where people form a community, and they help each other even indirectly by being part of that kitchen and part of that community, people start to integrate and adjust and get adapted to their new lives much easier than when they're isolated and do not have a supportive community around them.
I see it happening in our kitchen.
I see a very high level of resilience that I think is notable and particular. All of our chefs, you can just see it, they're ready to do whatever it takes to succeed and they're very committed to the work they are doing. They are also very adaptable. Whenever we have a problem, something going wrong, everyone is very involved in the work and passionate about it and finds a solution. I think there's that added characteristic that is very common among everyone who's on our team.
What are your goals moving forward?
Manal: We have three goals. The first is to provide quality jobs to talented refugees who want to be in the food industry. The second is more about New Yorkers – it's about introducing New Yorkers to this menu and off the beaten path cuisines and somehow connect them, build bridges, between them eating our food at their homes or offices and us cooking in the kitchen. And the third ultimately is about changing the narrative around refugees, showcasing a different and more positive story.
What do you think the current narrative is around refugees?
Manal: That's a good question. Very often the narrative is around a more negative rhetoric, "they are stealing our jobs, not contributing to the economy, taking resources away." Or if it's positive it's all about how vulnerable the community is and how they always need charity, they always need help. Those are two concepts we are trying to change or at least provide one example where it's not necessarily the case, and we really push our customers to shift perspectives a bit, change perspectives a bit. Because in our case we refugees, we immigrants, are actually helping New Yorkers discover something new. It's all about shifting the table on that.
We're a 'for profit' we're not a 'non-profit'. Part of that is to show our chefs are contributing to the economy. They are contributing to making a richer food scene here in New York. They're active contributors to the economy. They're adding value. They're bringing value. And that's the other thing we want to highlight. They're not relying on charity, they're not taking they are contributing, they're paying their taxes.
The narrative becomes less about pity and charity and more about contribution and resilience.
Manal: Exactly!
Seeing people for who they are and what they have to bring rather than the status they came with.
image via EAT OFFBEAT
interviews
In Conversation with LANDING STUDIO, Part 2
by LANDING STUDIO
May 12, 2018
This interview with Marie Law Adams and Dan Adams, the founding principals of LANDING STUDIO, was conducted and condensed by frank news. This is part two of an ongoing conversation between frank and LANDING STUDIO.
I heard you guys just won an award at APA.
MARIE: Yes, that’s our first recognition by a planning group.
You’re in the planning department at MIT, Dan directs the architecture department at Northeastern, your firm is winning planning awards. What does the tension mean to you? What does it mean to be in the middle of it?
MARIE: It's exactly what has defined our practice. Everything we're working on is at a moment of disconnect between something happening on the ground and something in policy.
We appreciate the pressures of environmental policy on infrastructure to push new ways of thinking about how these sites work.
I think that failure happens when the policy appears as a hurdle to industries. They hold off on improvements for as long as possible.
What the moment of departure for you in architecture school? When did you realize that your interest was beyond buildings?
MARIE: We both come from architecture programs that discouraged us from making buildings. It was more of a design-focused education. I think we took that to heart and never really invested in thinking much about buildings. Rather, what are bigger pictures that can be solved or addressed through design in some way.
DAN: I think it was revelatory to start our practice with this Salt Pile. To see a landscape that operates at one scale. But then witness this constant state of kinetics to realize that the landscape is overtly connected to the rest of the world.
Who is designing those urban relationships? What are the mediums through which to do it?
DAN: We always run into this scenario. We talk about our work and people reference projects like the High Line that New York. It's a very post-industrial. I think often that's where people see the role of designers: how to literally convert former industrial operations into a domesticated program for the city, for recreation. Rather than thinking about situating their work within the design of industrial operations themselves.
MARIE: A highway or bridge is filled with design constraints. They have different types of opportunities around them. Our design evolved as soon as we talked to the bridge inspectors. We understood how to support what they do but also allow public access to the community.
How do you define the community?
DAN: the definition of community is a difficult question on a lot of these sites. I think a lot of times there is some default conception that the community is the people who live within a specific proximity.
MARIE: Which it is…
DAN: It certainly is. But more and more we're coming to understand that these things are part of a broader, regional, and in fact global community, particularly when you're talking at the scale of infrastructure and industrial systems.
When you put it at the scale of the environment, a decision made in Boston must keep in mind the people in perhaps Yemen, where the natural gas is actually produced before it gets here.
MARIE: I think that comes into play through policy. The question becomes, how does that process work out on the ground? The communities that we do have access to are super local. But the policy advocates for the more regional impacts of these spaces. We try to negotiate those interests in the project.
How did the light installation change attention to the area from the community?
MARIE: We wanted the installation to start a conversation, and then see what happens. It led to some strange —
DAN: Observations…
MARIE: Mainly through newspaper articles. Local newspaper articles would poke fun at the project. And criticize the industry for trying to communicate back to the community.
DAN: But it also unveiled certain things. They interviewed people in the city. Different people had different responses, they would say things like “Oh I think this is great because I don't care about the lighting in this salt pile, but it brings more light onto the street. The street’s normally creepy and dark and it kind of helps address that issue.”
MARIE: Or “oh can we propose here?”
DAN: That's the weird irony. People used it as a platform to criticize the industry. And yet in the same article someone asked if they could propose on the salt pile. It immediately shows the conflicted nature of these things. Why people feel the way they feel.
This question of being part of a community, one way to do that is to hold meetings where people come and talk.
MARIE: And we do that.
DAN: Another type is to to actually work with people who are changing the light fixtures on the highway. We have spent nights talking with them about their job and what they do, and by getting to know them we learn about issues in the area.
MARIE: That's how we started our work with the MASS DOT [Department of Transportation]. They asked us to do a two week, temporary light installation under the Southeast Expressway in Boston. We ended up doing it for two years. Every two weeks to a month we'd go out there at night for six hours or so, changing the lights. We got to be intimately familiar with the light and the nightlife of the space. We saw it change dramatically in the few years that we were there.
DAN: That's a funny thing in the design world. How removed people are from the things they design. Our approach is to try and be engaged with the communities we're designing for.
MARIE: It’s challenging. It does take a lot of time to do that. The Charlesgate project is the first that was initiated from a community group. It feels like a different context for us because they've already got their own organizational structure around the place. They're doing tours and trying to bring people into the site. In some ways there is less burden on us to stir up activity, as we did in other projects. The more abandoned, industrial or infrastructural ones.
Can you talk about the dinosaurs?
MARIE: The dinosaurs are part of the Underground at Ink Block Project. The highway changes form—
DAN: We call one side the Fray. Like a fraying rope. All the strands of the highway spread apart. Water and light get down under the highway, and the area has no surface roads. It’s important to point out. People look at a highway and just call it a highway. But there are radically different architectures. The other side is what we call the Bundle, where all of the ramps compress into a really tight strand, about 15 lanes wide. It’s a 200-foot wide viaduct. There is no water or light. It has surface roads, so huge amounts of sound get trapped. Whereas in in the Fray, no sound traps. It emanates into the atmosphere.
Via Landing Studio. Boston, MA | 2016
The dinosaurs are an effort to make the experience of passing through that cave more pleasant. Essentially through lighting and art installation. But it is not a space to encourage people to spend time in. It's not really a pleasant environment.
But it is a route.
DAN: It's a route that's heavily travelled. The dinosaurs are meant to make passage less threatening. The other parts of the landscape address ecosystem performance and recreation. They encourage people to spend time. The design differences come from physical differences in the infrastructure itself.
Via Landing Studio. Boston, MA | 2016
Olmsted was trying to mask these ecosystem operations. Maybe now we’re more open to seeing how things work. How do you deal with people who call it ugly?
MARIE: We've been doing a lot of work with the Emerald Necklace Conservancy. The president, who's a planner, is frustrated by the fact that many Bostonians don't know that the Emerald Necklace is an infrastructural system. It was designed to manage floodwater and urbanization at a time when Boston grew really quickly. It's an entirely constructed landscape but it appears to be natural and pastoral. That English, picturesque imagery. It appears as if it was always there. Whereas other, more infrastructural environments like the highways are so clearly built by humans.
Image via LANDING STUDIO. Charlesgate. Boston, MA | 2017-Present
I think it became pretty obvious early on working with salt piles. You can't try to compete with that scale, or make things go away, or mitigate their impact. You have to just work with what's there.
DAN: Over the last 10 years it has become a weird kind of marketing. Typical condominium developments now embrace an edgy, industrial aesthetic. It makes people more apt to accept actual infrastructure and industrial systems in their city. It is challenging. On a lot of our park projects, for example, we want to use habitat-rich, native plants. But people say oh it looks weedy and demand that it gets mowed down, which eliminates the habitat. You realize so much of it is about perception of things.
MARIE: I find in the communities we work with that the perception of natural-looking landscapes is more controversial than the industrial relics themselves.
DAN: Joan Iverson Nassauer wrote a great piece called Messy Ecosystems, Orderly Frames. It is about how in cities, we try to hide from ourselves the things we don't like about ourselves. That operates on so many scales. It means that the oil refinery goes far away. Sewage goes down into pipes where you can't see it. We mow the plants so that they seem controlled and orderly. We sterilize things with toxic chemicals. All so that we don't have to confront the parts of ourselves we don't like. Some of it is probably a strange fiction we've inherited over time, through market and aesthetic regimes that we think are preferable now.
We now know how much of those are premised on really bad environmental concepts, global inequity and injustice. Even toxic chemicals to make things sterilized or to make neon-green lawns. It’s the same way we have to work against 100 years of problematic infrastructure development.
MARIE: I think the communication of intent is really important in a landscape that doesn't appear manicured.
Use your design education to change the narrative so that people think this is what they want.
DAN: At I-93 for example, we diverted the highway’s train leaders into the landscape. At the end of the train leaders there are rocky deposits that catch all of the cigarette butts, styrofoam, leaves, grit, and everything else nasty that flows off of highways. So you now have to see all of those things when you go there. But it also makes maintenance very easy. You just rake it out and put in a trash bag. It used to just go into the ocean, and that was great, right? Because the tide comes in every six hours and takes that stuff away. You can pretend it no longer exists because it's just gone.
MARIE: There does have to be a shift in what you want to see in public, open space in order to do this.
There's clearly a design intention to collecting all this junk in one place. Is it also intentional to have people see it?
MARIE: I don't think that our design team knew that that was going to happen, and we didn't really know either. It was something that we started observing once the project was under construction. All of a sudden we were like, ok this is actually interesting, that it becomes legible in the landscape.
DAN: Planning is flawed with concepts of isolation. This is where planning sort of undermines the value of design. As designers we believe you can design solutions to complicated things.
MARIE: That friction is really important though.
DAN: Planning aims to separate frictions. Like, oh it's a problem to have a refinery next to a community or an elementary school.
And the truth is, yes, it is. Either you eliminate that friction or redesign it. But the idea that those frictions somehow go away, just by keeping those places physically isolated, is a problematic environmental philosophy.
MARIE: You're starting this issue with Thomas Campanella’s essay and the fear of big projects. think today we're dealing with the legacy of those big projects, but can only do small projects to react to them.
In Boston, stormwater that comes into the city goes through a whole network of green infrastructure projects. You have to just operate in the margins.
DAN: There’s no one thing that could fix it all. Which is funny with something like the LA River. It’s a bit of a sick irony that in a city that is deprived of water, the fundamental principle managing water is to get it out of the city. And in that process, contaminate and kill any habitat that could be provided by the water. That's one of the strange philosophies of the last 100 years.
This is not totally surprisingly in the petroleum era: the idea that nature and cities are antithetical. We became enemies with natural systems and the goal was to flush them from the city, put them in the ocean. Yet for thousands of years natural processes are what fueled cities. This is what I mean by a radically wrong philosophy.
The industrial revolution and the era of petroleum was fundamentally about that. A source of energy more powerful than gravity, more powerful than the wind, that could let us do things no longer contingent on natural processes. And then that became the philosophy of cities. That we don’t have to work with these systems— we could actually work in spite of them. We are seeing the consequences of that now.