, the acclaimed restaurant they opened together. The following is a lightly edited transcript from her presentation.
Maybe it was the fact that by the age of 13 I was reminded of my otherness, whether it was in school or in my community or in my neighborhood. That tactic of playing it safe, just doing whatever you could do to fit in, was the way to go. If I were to analogize my life to a baseball game, for instance, I was on a winning baseball team, but I was always in the dugout, always on deck, and luckily never had to step up to bat for fear of striking out.
2002 is the year that I gave up an expensive college education to stay alive, and to heal through food. I remember the night in Boston I decided that I was not going back to school. I wanted to tap out, to escape. This was on the backdrop of 9/11. My parents had just gotten a divorce. School was overwhelming. There was a lot going on, but I didn’t even know it. What I did know was that if I walked up to the steps of that school the following day, that I would not be alive.
I do things in dramatic fashion. I left my job. I left my home. I left a partnership of six years. But luckily, because of the privilege that I had, I had a chance to go back to the homeland with my father. We went to Syria and Lebanon and it was there in my grief, mourning my identity, which was so attached to being an organizer, that I realized the resilience of my people.
I didn’t realize this until graduating from that program, but La Cocina was really about the privilege of failure. It allowed me to discover what exactly I wanted Reem’s to be, the truest to my vision and values, and to make mistakes without feeling the economic brunt of starting a business.At some point I was doing my business and working five other jobs. I was not sleeping, I was grinding.
'We expect people with less means to get it right the first time, all the time.' I think this hangs over the heads of nearly every immigrant, POC or marginalized person trying to make it in America.