NOTHING GOOD TO EAT? BLAME IMMIGRATION RESTRICTIONS.

AuthorBoehm, Eric

THE AFRO DELI feels like a cross between a Chipotle and a slightly upscale burger joint. It's brightly lit, with colorful menus displayed on large HD televisions. Uniformed workers tap your order into iPads and deliver your food on reusable plastic trays. On the strip of Washington Avenue that passes through the University of Minnesota's campus in Minneapolis, it fits right in between a Bruegger's Bagels and a generic pizza place.

The restaurant looks 100 percent American. But the food is distinctly Somali.

As we sit down in a corner booth to chat, owner Abdirahman Kahin brings me a cup of tea from his home country. It's milky and flavorful, a hot chai spiced with ginger and cinnamon. It's delicious even at the end of August, but I imagine it would go down even better during the bitterly cold Minnesota winter. Later, I try what Kahin tells me is one of the most popular items on the menu: sambusas, a sort of afro-pierogi, deep fried and filled with a mixture of beef, lamb, spinach, lentils, and cilantro. It's savory, but milder than I'd expected after trying the tea. "Minnesota spicy," Kahin says with a grin, a concession to the tastes of the Nordic population that is a majority in the state.

From the open quick-service kitchen comes the sweet sound of sizzling meat, as a line cook grills up some Somali steak sandwiches--think cheesesteaks without the Cheez Whiz, topped with diced tomatoes and fried onions, and served on focaccia bread instead of a hard roll. Focaccia is common in Somali dishes, Kahin tells me, appropriated from the Italians who colonized the region in the mid-1800s.

"People don't discriminate about food," he says. "They don't really care where the food came from, as long as it tastes good."

It's hard to argue with him. On this Tuesday near lunchtime, the Afro Deli is packed with college students and university employees, seemingly thrilled to be eating something other than a burger or a sub--to have a lunch that's possible because of America's willingness to accept strangers from foreign lands.

The Twin Cities are home to more than 25,000 Somali immigrants, the largest such community anywhere in the world outside of Africa. That so many Somalis, who hail from a place where the weather alternates between hot and dry and hot and wet, would end up in Minnesota seems a bit surprising. But decades of immigration to the area have established a community that welcomes newcomers.

In the early 1990s, the United States agreed to...

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