A visit with Eat Offbeat, a kitchen run by immigrant and refugee chefs

By Daniel Karel

Manal Kahi was disappointed with the hummus. It was 2013, and she had just emigrated from Lebanon to New York to begin a graduate program in environmental studies. The Big Apple, apparently, did not know how to properly prepare chickpeas. So she decided to make her own. The results, according to her friends and her brother, Wissam, were a revelation. But the epiphany went beyond the dish—the city was surely filled with other non-native cooks without a platform to present their regional recipes. Less than two years later, the siblings launched Eat Offbeat, a catering kitchen staffed by immigrant and refugee chefs specializing in “global home cooking.”

Since 2015, Eat Offbeat has worked with more than 40 home cooks—many of whom are discovered through the kitchen’s partnership with The International Rescue Committee, a Manhattan-based NGO. Once hired, the cooks are paired with Chef Juan Suarez de Lezo, a veteran of Michelin-starred kitchens, who teaches them how to scale up their recipes and create sumptuous, multi-course boxes, which can be ordered online for delivery.

The current seven-chef roster represents countries ranging from Sri Lanka to Senegal to Venezuela, and the four meal boxes currently on offer—the Intro Box ($86), The Vegan Box ($84), the Picnic Box ($84), and The Colombia X Antigua Box ($119)—contain sizable and customizable bounties.

Christopher Weathered of Bushwick, along with his mother, Claudia Sidoti, and her mother, Nelly Ruiz Arango, a Colombian immigrant known to the family (and beyond) as Baba, are the multigenerational team behind the latest offering,The Colombia X Antigua Box, available through August 6.

“There’s a lot of strong and talented women that were very influential to me,” says Weathered, an up-and-coming chef who recently hosted a pop-up event at Maison Yaki, a Japanese-French fusion restaurant in Prospect Heights, featuring his own menu. “Whether it was cooking with my mom at home, making dinner together and her showing me how to break down a chicken, or cooking with my Colombian grandmother and making arepas and tamales.”

Baba’s arepas (courtesy Eat Offbeat)

Baba’s signature tamales are one of two main courses in The Colombia X Antigua Box, along with a Caribbean jerk chicken infused with tamarind. They are accompanied by a hearty mac and cheese dashed with turmeric and spice, curried coleslaw, Colombian plantains with mozzarella and guava, a mound of rice and pigeon peas, pan-fried arepas stuffed with cheese, and veggie patties filled with mushrooms. Dessert consists of a rum raisin bread pudding, made from challah bread.

“Cooking these recipes makes me think of Sunday mornings in Bogota on the patio of my grandmother’s house,” says Baba. “I can smell the geraniums, roses, thyme and mint, and hear the sound of a tiple being played by my uncle while I ran around laughing with my cousins. While I can’t transport people to Bogota, I wanted to recreate the same flavors that I was so lucky to grow up with.”

Capturing that feeling—that the meal has been prepared specifically for you, from the kitchen of a family member—is what Kahi believes distinguishes Eat Offbeat meals from other takeout or delivery options.

“Take Chef Shanthini for example,” she says. “It’s her home cooking that we’re tasting, her own interpretation of a specific dish, and not necessarily the way it’s made all over Sri Lanka.”

When asked why she decided to cater instead of open a brick-and-mortar restaurant, Kahi says that the decision was originally economic. But over time, she and her team have come to value how the catering format allows them to reach beyond a single neighborhood.

“The vision for us,” she says, ”is really about making this type of cuisine accessible to everyone in New York City.”