How to Build Cross-Cultural Connections Over Food This Holiday Season

One evening this past September, I found myself seated around a table at the Dungan House—a guesthouse in Karakol, Kyrgyzstan—with a group of travelers from countries such as Spain, Canada and India. Together we were sharing a traditional meal of the Dungan people, Turkic-speaking Muslims who immigrated to Central Asia from China in the late 19th century.

The table was set with slices of watermelon as well as cucumber and tomato salads, and a steamed bread called jin momo resembling Chinese bao. Our hosts also brought out servings of beef-stuffed dumplings and bowls of lagman, a mix of beef, vegetables and pulled noodles, while we shared stories and learned about Karokol’s Dungan residents and their enduring Chinese roots. In a trip filled with incredible experiences, it was one of my most memorable—in large part because this dinner offered insight into a culture I knew very little about, in the company of others I’d only recently met.

“Food is a particularly good vehicle for sharing love,” says Lisa Kyung Gross, founder of New York City’s League of Kitchens, an organization that focuses on immigrant-led cooking classes to help build cross-cultural connections. Kyung Gross is also the author of the new The League of Kitchens Cookbook: Brilliant Tips, Secret Methods and Favorite Family Recipes From Around the World. “In every culture people come together and connect around the table,” says Kyung Gross. Her cookbook aims to share such global connections with readers.

Along with detailed recipes, The League of Kitchens Cookbook focuses on how foods are eaten in different cultures throughout the world—whether it’s using chopsticks or a piece of spongy injera bread to scoop up food with your hands—and features Q&A interviews with many of the League’s instructors, U.S. immigrants that originally hail from countries like Mexico, Burkina Faso and Indonesia. Questions range from “What are some of your favorite home remedies?” to “If you want to have something sweet after a meal, but you don’t want to make a whole dessert, what do you eat?”

“So much about the League of Kitchens and the cookbook is about humanizing immigrants and sharing their incredible expertise and all the ways they enrich our culture and society,” says Kyung Gross, who adds that the public dialogue right now is so polarizing. “People only really want to cause harm to others when they don’t consider them people on some level—when it doesn’t feel like your neighbor or the parents of your kid’s friend.”

The League of Kitchens Cookbook brings to readers what students of the organization have experienced for years—the ability to make an area of the world that “once felt so abstract and distant, now feel personal,” Kyung Gross says.

For instance, the cookbook features an interview with League of Kitchens instructor Nawida Saidhosin, an Afghan immigrant who came to the United States with her then-5-year-old son, Bahram, in 2010. In it, she shares details on the way that in Afghanistan, families and friends gather around a dastarkhwan, “a kind of tablecloth or thin rug that’s put on the floor,” she says, to eat. “My mother always wanted us to take the fork and the spoon, and my father would say, ‘Why don’t you let them use their hands? It’s more delicious.’”

Indeed, food has an undeniable way of breaking down barriers, whether it’s through learning about another culture’s culinary traditions or simply talking with others over a meal.

Sung Park is the chef and owner of Kothai Republic, a modern Asian restaurant in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset neighborhood, where the first-generation Korean American has spent the bulk of his life. Recently, Park started an initiative at his eatery, offering a small snack (“It’s our Asian version of chips and salsa,” he says) to tables that initiate conversations with other guests. “It’s a really small world,” he says, “and I don’t think we’ll ever learn that unless more people are willing to have a conversation with one another. Once you say ‘hello,’ the doors open, and it generates a certain energy that creates one big community feel.”

Park says that when he was growing up, he remembers knowing half of his neighborhood by name. “That seems to be dissipating over time, but I think we can overcome it by just breaking bread and sharing a meal,” he says. Park believes these connection-driven dining experiences are a key to creating community and, in the process, dispelling fear.

“All we need to do is talk to one another,” says Park, “but many of us are just out of practice.”

Kyung Gross agrees. “A great way to create that connection with others,” she says, whether it be the stranger we see in the post office each week or the family who moved into the home up the street, “is with the universal love that comes through food and cooking.”

That night in Karakol proved just how enriching experiencing a culture over its cuisine can be. Not only did I walk away with a new understanding of the Dungan people, but I also found myself dining with a group of strangers whom I now consider friends.

Connecting over meals

From dining alongside refugee neighbors to supporting in-house immigrant chefs, here are four U.S. opportunities to connect with other cultures—and, in some cases, each other—over meals.

New Arrival Supper Club; Los Angeles

Started as a pop-up in 2017, this L.A.-based supper club welcomes resettling refugees by sharing their cultures through food. Events range from picnics in the park to Sunday dinners at private homes, and they always include ample conversation.

United We Eat; Missoula, Montana

The culinary component of Soft Landing Missoula—a nonprofit working with refugees and immigrant families who are building new lives in Missoula, Montana—United We Eat offers everything from community supper clubs to occasional cookie sales. Take-out meals are also available to local residents who’d like to get a literal taste of another culture in the comfort of their homes.

Welcome Neighbor STL Supper Club; St. Louis

New refugee neighbors in St. Louis serve up traditional dishes from their countries of origin, as well as plenty of cultural exchange in the process. Groups of 15 or more can also schedule supper clubs of their own, with menus that include Moroccan chicken tagine and vegetable-filled briwats (a type of stuffed pastry) or Syrian manakeesh (Mediterranean flatbread) and baklava.

Open Test Kitchen; Oakland, California

This restaurant, market and community space is named after the flagship incubator program of Oakland Bloom, a nonprofit promoting economic equity in the food industry. The space’s hours and cuisines—which include foods by “immigrant, refugee and BIPOC chefs”—vary according to day, but recent menus have featured Palestinian-Cuban fusion on Wednesday evenings and vegan Nigerian on Friday nights.

Laura Kiniry | READ MORE

Laura Kiniry is a San Francisco-based freelance writer specializing in food, drink, and travel. She contributes to a variety of outlets including American Way, O-The Oprah Magazine, BBC.com, and numerous AAA pubs.