Photo courtesy Levant (not) Pizza

When Samer Alghosain first immigrated to the U.S. with his family in 1999, a tradition was born that paved his way to becoming a restaurateur. Every Friday, he and his family would pile dishes on the table that smelled, tasted, and felt like home, crafted with love from recipes that were handed down generation after generation. Samer’s falafel and home-made hummus became family favourites—so much so that he now runs the beloved Yaffa Cafe in Abbotsford, B.C. with his daughter Nada Samer Alghosain.

It just opened a few years ago, but Yaffa Cafe was named People’s Choice of Abby at Abbotsford’s Food & Farm Awards in 2024. Although there are few Palestinians in the city, visitors come from Vancouver and across the border to try Yaffa Cafe’s specialties and to show their solidarity. “It’s actually really cute,” Nada says. “People will come by with their keffiyehs and let us know they’re in support.”

Samer’s parents fled Yaffa, a port city in the south of Palestine, on foot during the Nakba of 1948 when native Palestinians were first driven from their land. For Palestinians in the diaspora, food is more than just a means to fill the stomach. It is a ritual to keep traditions alive, to recall and reclaim narratives, and is simultaneously a means to resist. With Israeli settler colonialism uprooting historically significant olive groves and wrongly co-opting Arab delicacies, selling them for profit under Israeli brand names, food continues to be irrevocably tied to the Palestinian cultural revolution.

Like many Palestinian businesses, the call for liberation is at the forefront of Yaffa Cafe’s identity. They display posters each week about relevant protests happening in Abbotsford. They stay in touch with local organizers, especially with the Fraser Valley branch of Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR), and host protesters for meals.

Across the country in Toronto’s west end is Levant (not) Pizza, a restaurant that infuses Italian flavours into Palestinian and Lebanese classics. Owned by Nader Qawasmi, whose parents hail from Nablus and Hebron in the West Bank, the restaurant opened three years ago and has been a hotspot ever since.

“It’s always rich flavours, a lot of stews and spices, that resonate with me when it comes to Palestinian foods—things like mulukhiya, bamia that I grew up eating,” Qawasmi says. “My dad owned a restaurant, so I took after him.”

With its goal to amplify and highlight the diversity of their cuisine, Levant (not) Pizza is advocating for and supporting Palestinian justice initiatives through food. They’ve hosted two charity dinners, the second of which raised $12,000, with funds going to Islamic Relief Canada, Defense for Children International – Palestine, and locals’ efforts to bring their family from Gaza to Canada. They’ve also donated to student encampments. When Uber Eats wrongly listed Palestinian restaurants as “Israeli” cuisine in December 2023, Levant was one of the foremost establishments to call for a boycott of the delivery provider.

For both families, words are also a crucial part of reclaiming Palestinian identity. The “not” in Levant Pizza signifies its departure from a conventional understanding of pizza, and challenges assumptions about both Levantine and Italian cuisine. And for the owners of Yaffa Cafe, invoking the name of their historic homeland is a means of bringing it alive several continents over in Canada.

“I think that’s the boldest move we could’ve done, is to represent where we come from,” Nada says. “I wanted to let people know we were Palestinian, one way or another.”