Barbara Walters chats with Forward Syria
Swaying between art and seduction
Discussing monetary policy with the man in charge
Where the earth screams in horror
0 - Issue 40
Syrian mezze on Chinese tables
by Tom Spender, Beijing
When Farid Fakhour, a young Suweidan, launched a humble falafel stand in the Chinese capital in the mid-1990s, he had little idea that the business would grow to become the country's biggest chain of Arabic restaurants.
The doctor had returned to Beijing after graduating there as a cardiologist in the 1980s.
“He who drinks the water of this country will miss it forever” – that's what Fakhour told his family and friends.
After completing his studies, he returned to Suweida with his Chinese girlfriend, who took the Arabic name Abeer. The couple lived there for a few years during which the elder of their two daughters was born.
But, having “drunk the water,” they missed China and returned in the mid 1990s. More than a decade after former Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping instigated Communist China's “reform and Opening Up” policy in the 1979, foreigners were beginning to visit the country in greater numbers and they spied opportunity.
With little capital, they opened up a small stand selling falafel and other Arabic snacks in the Chinese capital. By last year, 14 years after they launched their business, they had become successful restaurateurs. Their five 1001 Nights restaurants are the most famous and recognizable Arabic brand in a country with an Arab community that remains small but growing rapidly.
The restaurant doors open into dining areas heavily tricked-out with Syrian and Arab design motifs. Long tables seat up to 250 people and the menu offers about 500 dishes, a full range of Levantine appetizers, kebabs and desserts.
Belly dancers from China's western provinces such as Ningxia and Xinjiang, which have large populations of ethnically Muslim Chinese and Uighurs, a Turkic people, perform each evening on a stage. Islam arrived in China along the former trade routes from the Middle East known as the Silk Road and at port cities on the country's eastern seaboard. China's total Muslim population of about 20 million is bigger than Syria's, according to a survey by the US-based Pew Forum carried out last October.
The 1001 Nights Company has two restaurants in Beijing, catering mainly to Arab diplomats and students as well as a growing international and local Chinese clientele, and a further branch in Shanghai, China's economic powerhouse, and Guangzhou near Hong Kong. A further restaurant is located in Yiwu, a small city in Zheijiang Province a few hours outside Shanghai that hosts China's biggest Arab community, numbering about 20,000, attracted by the wholesale goods markets there.
A year ago in March 2009, aged just 48, Fakhour was hard at work on plans to open more restaurants in more Chinese cities as well as expanding to London and Australia when he suffered a fatal heart attack.
“He did everything himself and made a big name here in China,” said his nephew Ashraf Ghanem, 31, who runs the chain's newest restaurant in a swanky Beijing shopping mall.
“Now for us the priority is to take care of this name and this brand. What we are doing in these restaurants is something special.”
Ashraf was working in luxury hotels in Lebanon and trying in vain to get a visa to a western country when he took a call from his uncle asking him if he fancied working in Beijing. He knew nothing of China except for what he had seen on TV, where he says the world's most populous nation was portrayed as a poor and backward place.
Now he has been in China for three years and speaks to the staff he manages at the company's newest Beijing restaurant in Mandarin Chinese.
Following Fakhour's death, expansion plans have been shelved for the moment and Ashraf is concentrating on maintaining the quality of food on the menu's many dishes.
Many of the ingredients, such as humus, lentils, chickpeas and stuffed vine leaves are imported fresh from Syria – “it's not easy, it's not cheap, but we have to do it,” says Ashraf. Couscous, a Moroccan specialty, is also on the menu following requests by French diners, while the Arabic desserts are not quite as sugary as their counterparts in Damascus because their sweetness is unfamiliar to the Chinese palate.
Ashraf himself no longer dreams of the West. He would like to visit Brazil and Spain but sees a long-term future for himself in China.
“I like it here,” he says. “Things are changing very fast and you also feel like you are changing the country.”
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To visit the website of this Syrian restaurant in Beijing, click on 1001nights.com.cn
