Falafel, dips and mansaf: the Palestinian chef serving dishes ‘made with love’ in Melbourne | Australian food and drink | The Guardian

Oct 17, 2024

Five years in the making, Aheda Amro’s food truck drew lines around the block on open day – but she says her cooking is ‘not just food’

It’s an overcast afternoon in September and a crowd is gathering in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick. The draw card: an unassuming food trailer parked in a loading bay on Hope Street, just off the suburb’s main drag.

Brunswick is already famed for its vibrant Middle Eastern eateries and Aheda Amro, the woman behind this latest addition to the scene, knew it would be the perfect location to launch the project she has been working towards for the past five years.

Originally from Halhul, a small city in Palestine’s West Bank, since arriving as an asylum seeker in 2018 Amro has been on a mission to bring the flavours of her homeland to Melbourne.

The launch of her food van Aheda’s Kitchen is the result of years of determination and hard work; and not just Amro’s but that of the vast network of volunteers she has galvanised to help make her dream a reality.

Amro has been cooking her “whole life”, she says, learning first from her mother and grandmother. She went on to take it up professionally and, before leaving the Middle East, worked as chef and ran her own catering business.

Even though she had decades of experience, once in Melbourne Amro retrained in commercial cookery at Tafe. At the time, she says her English “was just coming” – despite the language barrier she completed her course six months early. She aced all of her assessments and she says her teachers wondered out loud what such an experienced cook was doing in their midst.

“I already knew how to cook, of course,” Amro says, but getting accreditation to show she knew “how Australian kitchens worked” was a priority. A string of casual jobs in restaurants followed before the Covid pandemic ground much of the hospitality industry to halt in 2020.

It was around this time that Amro’s instinctive entrepreneurialism refocused on the nostalgic dishes of her childhood. She began a side hustle on social media, selling traditional Palestinian meals to people within her 5km lockdown radius.

The home cooking was a hit and her dream to create her own enterprise gained pace. Without capital or a secure visa status, Amro knew a bricks and mortar venue was out of the question. A crowdfunding campaign, set up in mid-2022, has raised more than $20,000. It gave Amro the start she needed to buy a rundown trailer from Facebook Marketplace, and – with the help of her community – get it into shape.

More than two years later, it’s launch day in Brunswick. In the kitchen of Super Human Foods – a local shop whose facilities Amro rents as a food preparation kitchen – volunteers are working furiously to ensure a successful service. Many of them have responded to a word-of-mouth callout for helping hands and are meeting Amro for the first time. The Aheda’s Kitchen food truck is parked nearby and, on this cool spring afternoon, the line to sample the long promised offerings begins to snake around the block. The menu is a simple collection of traditional Palestinian dishes: falafel, dips and mansaf, a Bedouin dish of spiced lamb, rice and yoghurt “all made by hand and made with love”, Amro says.

As the crowd swells to more than 100 a stream of cheery young women are distributing complimentary samples of baklava to the masses.

Palestinian activist Ihab Abu Ibrahim is there to offer his help and support. “I’ve known Aheda for a long time,” he says. “She’s a great person and a great Palestinian.” Ibrahim says the support Amro has received from her community to get her project off the ground is a reflection of her own generosity. “Even when she has no money for herself, she will cook and share her food with others for free.” Ibrahim says ventures such as Amro’s are an important way to offer people an insight into Palestinian culture beyond the headlines.

Daniel Wiki, from Camberwell, heard about the event on social media and was meeting friends from across the city to support the venture. “We’re all from different suburbs and different backgrounds: Māori, Maltese, Vietnamese, even Canadian.” Wiki said the food itself was his main reason for showing up, but that gathering with like-minded people in support of a common cause added significance to his lunch date. Fifty per cent of opening day’s profits from Aheda’s Kitchen are to be distributed, through community networks, to refugees arriving from Gaza.

Aheda’s Kitchen operates on Saturdays between 11am and 4pm from their Hope Street location. But for Amro there’s more to her food truck than just filling people’s bellies. “Food is not just food: it’s culture, it’s art, it holds ideas,” she says. “I put the whole of my culture into this project and this food. It isn’t a job to me, to share this with people.”