FROM OCTOBER 2020 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX

“The kind of leader a young Somali kid needs“

That’s how a friend describes Asha Ahmed, whose restaurant, Wiff – the heart of Weston’s main strip – is facing eviction

Asha Ahmed never planned to open a restaurant in Canada. She’d already been running one in Somalia for 20 years, and when civil war hit, she thought that life in the kitchen was over.

She was 18 when she got her start in the business; she’d just finished high school in Mogadishu. “To go to university you have to do military service,” she explains to me the afternoon I meet her at Wiff Restaurant on Weston Road, just south of Lawrence. So she signed up, completed her military service and enrolled in economics at the University of Somalia. Four years after she graduated, she opened a restaurant with two friends.

“I was doing everything. When we hired a guy to cook I was shadowing him,” Asha tells me in the late-August heat, passing me a cup of tea spiced with ginger, cloves, cardamom and cinnamon. If her cook called in sick she could step in and keep the kitchen running. It was a busy place, a restaurant serving traditional Somali dishes and ice cream. “Mango was the most popular,” she says.

Then the civil war came and Asha decided to leave. “I didn’t agree with what was going on and I didn’t want to be part of it. I was one of the first that left Mogadishu. When you have money, you can flee.”

Along with her husband and daughters, she escaped to the United States, and when that visa ran out, to Canada. “We were able to come here and make a life,” she says.

After all that, she was done with restaurants. She wanted a break. Fluent in Italian, she began working in ad sales for the Corriere Canadese newspaper. Her new life in Canada was going fine, until one greasy samosa changed everything.

At the paper, on Wingold Avenue, in the Briar Hill neighbourhood, there was an office tradition: When there was good news to celebrate – a birthday or a big ad sale – they would send out for samosas. The first time Asha bit into one, it sprayed grease all over her clothes. “This is not a samosa,” she said.

Around the same time, stories of pirates in East Africa were all over the news. “If you say you are from Somalia, people would just say, ‘Oh, the pirates,’” she recounts. “No. We are better than this. We have a better culture. People didn’t know us.” Those misconceptions, and the lousy samosa, were the last straw.

Asha opened a restaurant – called Wiff, after her dad’s boyhood nickname – at 1804 Weston Rd., in a building with bars on the windows and garish pink walls inside. A friend introduced her to a community organization called Artists to Artists, run by Jackie Thomas. The organization was helping small businesses in the area.

Jackie, Asha and I are seated around a table in Wiff’s dining room. All the other tables have chairs stacked on top of them: a common sight these days. “When you have bars on the window it’s like saying, ‘I don’t trust you, don’t come in,’” Asha says, recalling what the place looked like when she first took over.

“People were already feeling disenfranchised,” says Jackie of the neighbourhood. “We removed the bars, we repainted, we framed some pictures that Asha had.” Then Wiff opened, Asha at the helm, ready to show everyone what her culture was all about.

But no one came. Not enough people, anyway, and Asha worried about her business. Jackie, who had quickly proved to be much more than someone who could take bars off windows and slap on a new coat of paint, had an idea. The Weston Farmers’ Market had just opened and Jackie suggested Asha bring her samosas there. Jackie, who had immigrated to Toronto from Trinidad, was already selling her own dhalpuri there. “There are a lot of West Indians in the neighbourhood and that draws the West Indians to the table, and then they would stop and have the samosas,” she says, explaining her plan. Jackie’s dhalpuri was the bait, and soon enough the samosas were working their own magic.

Even Asha was surprised by the reaction: “It was amazing. Soon everybody knew my samosas.” And they followed Asha and her samosas to the dining room at Wiff. “People at the farmers’ market are mostly upper middle class. These samosas served as a bridge between both sides of the community,” Jackie says.

For 10 years now, Wiff has been serving samosas, bagia – black-eyed pea and coriander fritters – and slow-roasted goat. But the restaurant has come to be about more than what’s on the menu. “It brings hope and a kind of leadership. Weston is so multicultural and diverse, with all the complexities you would expect. This place stabilizes the neighbourhood,” says Jackie.

“Without Jackie I don’t think I would be here for 10 years,” says Asha. “She was the one who pushed me.”

But now Asha is being evicted. The building Wiff occupies has been sold. The new owner sent a representative to tell Asha she’d have to vacate within 30 days.

Wiff has become the heart of Weston. But even for a community leader, a beloved restaurateur and a purveyor of the greaseless, crispiest, most delicious samosas this city has ever seen, uprooting is going to be a challenge.

“Wiff is a representation of the true elder principle,” Jackie says. “You can get your food, but you can get comfort, you can get wisdom. A Western business perspective would pass over a restaurant like Wiff without having the understanding of what it creates. Asha is someone in the community who can bring calm when situations get hot. She’s the kind of leader a young Somali kid needs. I think that gets lost in the minds of those who are just thinking about making money.”

Asha explains how she talks to the local kids: “I’m like their mom or their grandma. I have a relationship with these kids, it’s a kind of trust.” One night she had just delivered some samosas down the street and was coming back to Wiff. She saw a young boy tying up his shoelace. Asha noticed him. “You know this young generation, they have their pants falling down. I said to him, ‘Hey, pull up your pants.’ He pulled up his pants and said, ‘Thank you, mama.’” He went on his way and Asha went inside. The police came knocking not long after. “That same kid who was just talking to me had been shot. Dead.”

“There was a gang that used to terrorize the neighbourhood, but those young people have transformed,” says Jackie, “because of people like Asha and myself. With Black youth there’s a respect that they have for older Black women. That is one of the strengths that we bring to the community.”

Asha doesn’t have an answer for what the future holds. But earlier, when I first arrived, she mentioned that her AC broke down, so she was praying for help with that. Maybe that is why she’s still able to smile, despite everything: faith in a god who will listen, one who will even pay attention to someone getting evicted in the middle of the greatest crisis the restaurant industry has ever faced. She looks around the space and sighs. She’ll figure it out somehow.

“It’s okay. It’s part of life.”

In late September, Asha was still at Wiff. With the help of her MP, Ahmed Hussen, she was able to negotiate an extension to stay in the space until Oct. 15. She’ll continue to sell her samosas at the Weston and Scarborough Farmers’ Markets until they close at the end of the month.

“In the area there’s nothing I can rent. After 10 years...that’s the saddest thing. But things will change, inshallah. God will provide.”

⇒ Click here to read more Kitchens