On the restaurant’s Instagram post, critics blasted the event at El Secreto de Rosita — which raised money for the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund and Women Wage Peace, an Israeli grassroots group — as being “inappropriate and tone-deaf” during a war in which Israel is accused. starving Palestinians in Gaza. Several pointed to the title itself, a mischievous reference to the “two-state solution,” the difficult, decades-long effort to establish an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.
“Seeing them raise money for an Israeli organization and a Palestinian organization, it’s really both sides,” Jinan Deena, a Palestinian activist and chef based in Washington, said in an Instagram story. For Deena, the situation in the Middle East is nothing like that: the Israelis, she says, don’t need help. It is those in Gaza who are clinging to life.
Deena urged her followers to take action, whether it was leaving a comment or organizing a boycott of the restaurant. “Now a lot of people are going to boycott you because of your stupid decision to have this dinner,” the activist leader said in an article. “So I hope you are happy with your decision.”
On Wednesday, just a day after the planned three-day pop-up began, Two Plate Solution organizers were scrambling to explain themselves, their motivations and even the name of their event. El Secreto deleted its Instagram post for hours while Nesrin Abaza, the restaurant’s Palestinian co-owner and one of the organizers of Two Plate, prepared a video in which she suggested: “We need to engage with all parties and be able to communicate. , to discuss our differences, to bring humanity back to the table.
The message did little to appease opponents, who suggested that organizers were doing little more than coddling their oppressors and normalizing their actions. More than 31,000 Palestinians have been killed and more than 72,000 injured since Israel declared war following the October 7 Hamas attacks, which left more than 1,200 Israelis dead.
This reaction highlighted, once again, the blowback that restaurants can face when venturing into the turbulent waters of the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Last fall, a small Seattle restaurant received threats and was accused of “sleeping with the enemy” for raising money for the same Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. (The owner had to hire security guards for fundraisers.) In December, Israeli-American chefs Michael Solomonov and Steve Cook were accused of supporting genocide in Gaza when their Philadelphia falafel shop collected more than $100,000 for United Hatzalah, an Israeli non-profit emergency medical response group. . A Palestinian restaurant in Brooklyn was accused late last year of being anti-Semitic when it renamed the seafood section of its menu “from the river to the sea,” a rallying cry that many Israelis consider as a threat to their existence.
Unlike many of his peers across the country, Abaza decided to embrace his critics and hear their anger. But in return, she wanted them to understand her story — and how it influenced her decision to partner with Abbie Rosner, a Jewish American writer, to host the Two Plate Solution dinners.
Abaza and Rosner responded to some of the criticism at their fundraising dinners. A Jordanian-Palestinian raised in Greece, Abaza explained how the name of the event derives from her experiences with a Jewish American friend while they both lived in Ecuador, the home country of Abaza’s husband, restaurateur Mauricio Fraga-Rosenfeld. Abaza and her friend cooked together and discussed the origins of hummus, falafel and other Middle Eastern dishes.
“One day he said to me, ‘Oh, you know, you and I should open a restaurant called Two Plate Solution, and we could compete on our cuisine and see who likes which,'” Abaza told the Washington Post when of an interview.
Rosner spoke to guests about his own formative experiences living in Israel for 29 years. During her time there, she often visited Palestinian and Bedouin villages to talk to farmers, shepherds, cooks, olive pickers and others about eating habits that have changed little since biblical times. . Rosner became friends with Balkees Abu Rabiya, a Palestinian cook from Nazareth, whom the writer called her culinary mentor. Rosner’s experiences became the basis for his 2012 book, “Breaking Bread in Galilee: A Culinary Journey to the Promised Land.”
“I was able to build these incredibly beautiful relationships with people who didn’t necessarily have any reason to have anything to do with me, and we ended up finding this really beautiful place of shared humanity,” she said. Rosner told the Post.
Abaza, 62, and Rosner, 65, are part of a baby boom generation that for decades was untethered to a smartphone and its power to convey thoughts and feelings without any human interaction . Women frequently talk about the importance of in-person conversations, often over a shared meal, to break down barriers, even when those conversations may take place with people who want to destroy your world.
“There is a lot of pain and I completely understand it,” Abaza said. “And with pain comes wrath, and with pain comes vengeance.” It’s unfortunate, but it’s reality. And we all felt it. And did I feel that way? Yes, I did, but sometimes you have to take that anger and channel it into something, otherwise it consumes your daily life. And I think putting that energy into making things happen, changing things, is therapeutic for me.
Women’s experiences have often been concrete, from Rosner’s wanderings in the Galilee to Abaza’s career-long activism. Abaza notably spent weeks in Greece in 2016, as an interpreter in a Syrian refugee camp. She is also used to having difficult conversations, right at home: Fraga-Rosenfeld, her partner, is part Jewish. His maternal grandfather, Alfredo Mauricio Rosenfeld, fled Poland at the start of the Holocaust to restart his life in Ecuador.
Like Abaza, Deena, 41, is an activist with a serious interest in food. As a child, she spent countless hours working in her parents’ Middle Eastern restaurant in Toledo. She moved to Washington, DC in 2017 and began working for nonprofit organizations, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Deena now hosts pop-ups under the name Bayti, which she describes as a “dining experience of Palestinian hospitality.” Its goal is not only to serve Palestinian food, but also to argue that Israeli cuisine is an appropriation of Arab and Palestinian lands.
Deena said part of her distaste for the Two Plate Solution dinners was the way the organizers presented the meal as a showcase of Palestinian and Israeli cuisines.
“It’s very deliberate when [Israelis] take this food and call it theirs. This is a direct erasure of an entire population, and Palestinian identity is linked to our land. Everything we make, eat and enjoy comes from the earth,” Deena told the Post. “So I take it very personally when I see something like that, and that’s kind of why my reaction was so strong.”
Rosner, the writer who studied the dietary habits of the Fertile Crescent, disagrees with the idea that one culture or another possesses certain foods. The land’s native plants – legumes, wheat, grapes, olives – have been the building blocks of the cuisines of countless cultures.
“They feed and sustain everyone who has lived on these lands for millennia,” Rosner said. “So whether it is the Canaanites, the Hebrews, the Philistines, the Ottomans or the Palestinians, the foods are indifferent. They don’t belong to anyone. There are a million different ways to prepare and use people.
The arguments between Deena and the Two Plate Solution organizers might have remained exclusively online without Abaza’s invitation: She asked Deena to meet Thursday afternoon at El Secreto. The women sat for 90 minutes. They talked about politics, cultural appropriation, food and much more. Abaza even gave Deena a bracelet — designed by Fraga-Rosenfeld — that connects the two cultures of the Abaza/Fraga-Rosenfeld house: the bracelet is made of huayruro seeds (native to the Amazon rainforest) and beads against evil eye, a symbol that plays a big role in Arab superstitions.
The women said they came away from the meeting with a better understanding of each other. Abaza understood how his commercialization of the event might have triggered Deena, and Deena gained insight into Abaza’s complicated family history. Deena declined an invitation to attend the Two Plate Solution finale dinner on Thursday, but only because, she said, she already had an engagement. Deena then posted a new Instagram Story in which she told her followers not to boycott the restaurant. “I think we can move forward now,” she said.
The women said they didn’t agree on everything, but they were okay with it. Their beliefs don’t have to align perfectly for them to find common ground.
“Conversation,” Deena said, “is one of the best ways, over a meal, to connect with people.”
