FROM FEBRUARY/MARCH 2024 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX

For Leila Adde, the restaurant she runs with her husband, Abdullahi Kassim, is like an extension of her own kitchen.

“The food is the same. It’s exactly what we eat at home,” she says, her voice as warm as her smile. “If I were to describe a typical Somali meal, I would say try the goat meat and rice. It’s a very traditional Somali dish, like pasta for Italians.”

Xawaash (pronounced HA-wahsh), the restaurant’s name, refers to a Somali spice blend, explains Kassim, “like masala for Indians. Like the Ethiopians have berbere, or the Lebanese have seven spice.”

Located in a plaza near Rexdale Boulevard and Hwy 27, part of a wide lot that includes a daycare, the Ramses Shriners headquarters and the view of a Comfort Hotel, Xawaash feels like an oasis in a mostly industrial landscape. The interior is contemporary and neat: silver subway tile, black barstools, a row of booths set under a series of old photographs of Mogadishu. But when a server brings our food to the table – small pieces of chicken cooked in a stew called suqaar, plus shawarma and mbogga, a vegetable stew, alongside leavened muufo, rice and salad – an old-school feast is spread before us.

The restaurant is an extension of a food blog the couple started in 2011 as a way to preserve traditional dishes they couldn’t find in Toronto. They had moved to Canada in 1996, after spending a decade in the Middle East, where Kassim worked as an architect. Prior to their move, the couple lived in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where their two sons were born. Like many immigrants, Kassim and Adde moved primarily to provide a future for their children.

“There was a civil war in Somalia, political instability,” says Kassim, who has a degree in architecture and urban planning from UCLA. But Jeddah posed problems of its own. “Our two sons did not have Saudi Arabian citizenship. And Leila could not work because that’s how it was for women at that time.”

Confronting a conundrum faced by many new immigrants to Canada, Kassim and Adde, who was a chef by training, couldn’t find jobs in their respective fields. Kassim first assisted in an administrative role at his brother’s computer consultancy business. Kassim and Adde then ran a clothing business for 10 years in Kitchener, selling second-hand clothes from Canada to countries in Africa and parts of Asia. At one time, they owned a 30,000-square-foot warehouse and had 100 employees.

However, when the Canadian dollar went above parity with the American dollar in 2011, their export business took a hit. They got out of that business in 2012, and tried another export venture that failed.

“That’s what we learned, when we came to Canada – you have to pivot all the time,” says Kassim, with a laugh that peppers our conversation. “Something doesn’t work, you go and do something else.”

While running their clothing export business, the couple started a food blog in their spare time. They missed the dishes cooked regularly at home in Mogadishu, the city they grew up in. They tried out some of the Somali restaurants in Toronto, but were unable to find dishes they remembered from their own youth, like the muufo, a corn flatbread cooked in a tinaar (a clay oven like the South Asian tandoor), or kalamudo, a dish of handmade noodles cooked with meat in a broth.

Whenever their parents came to stay at the couple’s home in Kitchener, they got practice, and some guidance, in cooking Somali-style meals for large family gatherings.

“We easily had up to 60 people on some weekends,” says Kassim.

With the civil war ongoing, and an older generation passing away, there was a fear of losing traditional recipes, especially in the diaspora. The recipes were thought of as a family legacy, to be passed down to their children as they started to help around the kitchen. Besides their parents’ input, Kassim and Adde also called up relatives around the globe, capturing background stories that accompanied their instructions.

“But you know how it is with our people. It’s a handful of this and a pinch of that. We had to measure and convert it into grams or cups or teaspoons,” says Adde.

One of the first cooking blogs to document and showcase Somali cuisine in English, it became popular. When Kassim and Adde found it difficult to explain the process in words, they started making 20-second video clips and uploaded them to YouTube, adding Somali and Arabic captions later on.

“Then we changed our [written] recipes to video recipes. When we opened the restaurant in 2015, we had close to 180,000 subscribers on YouTube,” says Kassim. “If we continued doing it, we would have more than a million subscribers. I’m sure of it. But we had to stop. We could not manage doing the videos and running the restaurant at the same time.”

The popularity of the blog helped when they opened Xawaash, says Adde. Their readers became customers, coming in from the United States or parts of Europe.

“Sometimes they would drive in straight from the U.S. to our restaurant. It was gratifying to know we were in the top three on their list of their places to visit,” says Kassim.

In Somalia, there wasn’t much of a restaurant-going tradition, he explains. Even in Toronto, Somali restaurants would often become segregated spaces in the way they functioned. Xawaash was deliberately designed to encourage families to come in and enjoy a meal outside the house.

“It makes me feel very happy to see the ladies gather at the restaurant,” says Adde. “They will have all sorts of parties. Welcoming parties, going away parties. They come dressed up. One time, a woman called me to ask if we could deliver her order to the car. I told her to come inside. And she said, ‘Oh no, I don’t have makeup on. I’m not dressed well enough.’ I had a good laugh at that.”

For Kassim, it’s especially heart-warming to see a younger generation frequenting the restaurant. The menu, which also has Middle Eastern and Italian influences, is a reflection of how cosmopolitan Mogadishu was. The black-and-white photographs of old-world Mogadishu that hang over the booth are also meant to highlight that sense of history and refinement, and combat stereotypes of Somalia as a war-ravaged country or a haven for pirates.

“A group of young kids came recently, and they said it was their first time. And how proud they were that there’s a Somali restaurant they can bring their friends to,” Kassim says. “It makes us feel very happy, you know. That this has become a gathering place. Because for us, this isn’t just a business. It’s more like family.”

Bariis Maraq Fudud

(Easy Rice Pilaf)

This rice goes well with many meat dishes such as shish taouk, beef kebabs, braised lamb, cubed chicken, fried fish, roasted chicken drumsticks, chicken stew, roasted lamb, chicken steak, thin-sliced beef steak or suqaar.

Sometimes, we don’t bother with any of those. Serve with a simple green salad, peel a banana, and dig in. And if you used a good stock, it’ll taste like you’ve been labouring in the kitchen for hours.

Ingredients

1⁄4 cup vegetable oil
1 medium onion, sliced 1 cinnamon stick
4 cloves
1⁄4 tsp cardamom, ground 3 garlic cloves, minced
1 medium tomato, sliced 2 cups Sella basmati rice (parboiled)
2 tbsp Hawaij bouillon powder or Xawaash Bouillon Powder (see xawaash.com for the recipe)
4 cups water, boiling

Directions

1. Soak the rice for 30 minutes.

2. Using medium heat, fry the sliced onion in the oil for 3 minutes, then add the cinnamon stick and cloves. Stir well after each addition. Add the ground cardamom and minced garlic.

3. Add the sliced tomato and cook for three minutes.

4. Add the rice and fry for 5 minutes.

5. Mix the Xawaash bouillon powder with the boiling water and stir well. Add the stock to the rice and stir well.

6. Lower the heat. Cover and cook for 15 minutes.

Serve with a meat dish or green salad.

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