At the end of June 2016, chefs from Syria, Iran, Sri Lanka, and the Côte d’Ivoire entered restaurant kitchens across Paris to collaborate with chefs, infusing their home flavors with those of acclaimed French restaurants. The chefs participating in the Refugee Food Festival, where they worked side-by-side French chefs for an evening, were all professionally-trained chefs in their home country — and were also all refugees.
This event sparked a series of questions for me, and I found myself interested in uncovering food’s relation to cultural, national, and culinary identity, as well as how cuisine is effectively used as a form of communication between cultures facing a tumultuous battle in the political sphere. Walls may be built elsewhere to keep refugees out, but in these Parisian kitchens they are taken down.