Most days when Taliha Masroor is at work managing Bistro Aracosia, her family’s flagship Afghan restaurant in the District, her group text is constantly buzzing. It might be her younger sister, Iman, at their Aracosia McLean location, trying to solve a staffing issue, or her aunt, Eve, at the tiny cafe that started it all, Afghan Bistro in Springfield, Va., letting them know that another customer came in to hug her that day.
The hugging started happening after Kabul fell.
They are three of the four Afghan American women, including Taliha and Iman’s mother, Sofia, now in charge of this local restaurant empire — holding positions of power that the Taliban’s takeover has essentially denied to most women who’ve remained in their ancestral homeland. All but Sofia, who fled with her family from the Russian invasion of Afghanistan as a child in 1981, were born in the United States and raised in the Washington area. And they’ve ascended to running the family’s business only in the past four months, as a deliberate statement of defiance to what’s happened to the country and culture they love.
“Ever since all of this stuff has happened, I have thought about how different my life would be,” if their family hadn’t come to America, or if they’d moved back to Kabul, as was their plan at one point, says Taliha. “Would I have all the opportunities that I have now, or the position that I’m in, as far as running a business on my own? I don’t think I would.”
Advertisement
Most guests coming into Bistro Aracosia might not realize that the young woman greeting them at the door is the sole person in charge — and how significant that is. Taliha is who decided to send over an appetizer on the house for the couple who’s been waiting to be seated a little too long. She hired most of the wait staff, organized their Jenga-like schedules and sometimes fills in for them, balancing plates of garlic yogurt stew and beef tenderloin on her arms. She arranged the collection of fall gourds under the painted portraits of turbaned prophets and kings. She picked the modern Afghan music wafting through the dining room. She juggles 150 in-person customers and 150 takeout orders on any given Saturday night.
Taliha is 23, and Iman 22, and they look like brown-haired twins. Their first jobs were as servers in the family business, which their mother and father, Sofia and Omar, started with the intimate Springfield cafe in 2016. Iman, in particular, grew up helping in the kitchen, as her mother served guests fragrant stews such as lamb shank moghuli, or the delicate leek and scallion dumplings known as aushak. Their paternal grandmother made those dumplings every Sunday morning when the girls would visit her place in Virginia.
Neither of them thought they’d each be in charge of one of their family’s restaurants at such a young age. They knew they’d eventually take over the business, years down the road. But the day Afghanistan fell, Omar, 46, sprang into action. He looked for reputable charities to donate to, and began holding occasional fundraisers in which they’d donate the proceeds from busy nights to organizations helping refugees. The DMV was home to about 60,000 Afghans before the Taliban takeover. Since August, 1,400 have resettled in Virginia, with another 8,300 still on Virginia’s two military bases. Somehow, though, it didn’t seem like enough.
Advertisement
So he decided to step back from the businesses and make all his restaurants women-run.
Since the beginning, Sofia, 44, has determined how the food is plated, picked the curtains and dinnerware and glasses and candles, and served as quality control. Now she’s overseeing supplies and operations at all three restaurants, as well as remaining the head chef, preparing spice mixes (turmeric, cumin, sumac) and training cooks how to marinate the meats and layer flavors in the stews. Rohia, Omar’s mother, 72, who designed the menu with 200-year-old, pre-Soviet “Kingdom of Afghanistan” recipes passed down for generations, still stops by every other week to taste the food and offer tweaks. Eve, 35, went from pinch hitting in Springfield to running the place. Taliha, who’s also getting a degree in business management from Northern Virginia Community College, went from learning how to be a manager at Bistro Aracosia to being fully in charge. Iman was swiftly promoted from being a server at Aracosia McLean to a manager-in-training, and recently graduated out of the “in training” part of her title.
“I mean, I knew I was going to eventually end up managing,” says Iman, “but I didn’t know it was going to be that quick.”
Advertisement
Their youngest sister, Zainab, 20, just started training to be a server at the McLean location.
As an Afghan man, Omar says, it was important for him to voluntarily and publicly fade into the background, as a direct reaction to how Taliban society forces women into the shadows. He says he told Taliha: “Look, even though I’m Afghan, that stuff doesn’t live with us. This is your business. Try and show the world what a woman can do.”
(Omar says the restaurants made it through the coronavirus pandemic surges without any layoffs, by quickly building a takeout business and adding outdoor dining areas. Indoors, all staff and guests wear masks, tables are spaced out and they’ve been operating below capacity for safety reasons. He says they’re prepared to return to a takeout-only operation if more restrictions come with the spread of the omicron variant.)
Advertisement
All of this has made the women closer, as the daughters text Eve, their aunt, to coordinate staffing or turn to Sofia for advice on everything because, well, she’s their mom. Their father, meanwhile, is focused on expanding the empire, including opening a new Georgetown location as well as a couple of Afghan markets next to their restaurants selling spices and imported jars of pepper paste.
Not all has gone smoothly; some of them have taken to management better than others, and there are tensions and exasperation, as happens with any family. But Omar’s trust in the women to take over, Taliha says, has made her grateful for where she grew up and who raised her.
“It was really nice,” she says, “that he thought I could be an example for other Afghan women.”
Every once in a while, when Eve is making her rounds at the tiny, 30-person Springfield cafe, another Afghan woman will come in to dine and ask her who is in charge, looking around for a man.
Advertisement
“I had one who asked me if there were men working there,” Eve says. “And I said, ‘Yes. I have a nephew who works here,’ and she said, ‘But who do you answer to?’”
Eve is 11 years younger than her brother and grew up to be the motorcycle-riding rebel of the family, who answers to no one. But she could understand the woman’s confusion. Northern Virginia is a center of the Afghan diaspora in the DMV, and the lunch crowd can be filled with women in hijabs, usually stay-at-home wives and mothers, who’ve recently immigrated, rather than U.S.-born Afghan Americans like she is. They come to Afghan Bistro because they say the cooking reminds them of home. It can take them by surprise to see another Afghan woman, uncovered and running a restaurant on her own, with men in her employ.
Eve loves the reaction. “They’ll have this smile on their face of complete disbelief,” she says, “Like, ‘Wow okay! So this is a woman who is running an Afghan restaurant. She is Afghan and there’s no male figure who’s holding her back or threatening her or male figure she has to answer to. This is her business.’”
Share this articleShareMost people, to be fair, seem surprised when they walk into Afghan Bistro. It’s an oasis of hospitality behind a freeway in a strip mall that also houses a used appliances store and a nail salon. Just past the Christmas lights in the window and the Rumi poem by the door are wall-sized paintings of whirling dervishes, and one of turbaned men on thundering horses playing the Afghan national sport of buzkashi.
Omar and Sofia each fled Afghanistan when they were 4, in 1979 and 1981, respectively, when the communists took over and the Soviets invaded the country. (Eve, Omar’s sister, was later born in the United States.) Back in “prewar” times, Omar and Eve’s parents ran a Kabul nightclub, and in pictures from that time, Afghan women looked like any other stylish women in Asia. They wore miniskirts, high heels and makeup; were educated; and moved freely in the streets with men.
Advertisement
“I’ve been asking my parents recently like, ‘How was it when they grew up?’” says Eve. “They loved it. They said it was peace. It was harmony. Everybody got along. The country was progressing. They paint a picture that makes you wish you saw it through their eyes when they were growing up.”
Sofia’s father was a civil engineer and her mother a homemaker, but her uncle worked in the government that fell and feared retribution for his family. They fled to the Pakistan border by car, and then crossed the Khyber Pass through the mountains on horses with Sofia and her younger brother. Her parents didn’t want to raise their children in a war and wanted to spare them from the oppression already occurring under communist rule. “They just wanted a better life for us,” says Sofia.
Omar’s family, among the most well-off in the country, lost everything under communism. They had been stripped of their money and land and were facing political persecution when Omar, his mother and his brother received asylum in Germany. There they lived on social services in a hotel filled with every family they knew from Kabul. His father, an appellate court judge, was placed under house arrest, unable to leave, and forced to help the communists prop up their government. It took three years for him to escape to Pakistan and reunite with his family in America.
Advertisement
“My mom is having flashbacks,” says Eve. “She told me that when they escaped, it was just a traumatizing experience. And now she’s like, ‘History’s repeating itself. It’s happening all over again.’”
As refugees in 1982, Omar (then 7), his mother and brother landed at a Lutheran church in Kensington, Md. — and soon reunited with his father. Sofia’s family had left Pakistan and was making a life in Northern Virginia. Fifteen years later, he and Sofia met through mutual friends and were married. Sofia was 20 and knew nothing about cooking, just enough to boil water for tea. She spent three years living with her mother-in-law, learning how to cook everything that you eat now at their restaurants. The menu incorporates generational recipes from both of Omar and Sofia’s mothers.
When the husband and wife started their first restaurant in Springfield, Omar had recently been selling used cars and Sofia was a stay-at-home mom to their five children (Taliha, Iman, Zainab, and their younger brothers Zakriah, 19, and Gabrael, 9). They wanted to build a place that celebrated a more “tolerant” and “understanding” prewar Afghan culture, says Omar, and named their District flagship Aracosia, one spelling of the Hellenic name of Kandahar province before Alexander the Great conquered it. More than anything, they wanted their restaurants to feel like someone’s home. The portions, which often come with heaps of Kabuli pulau and spicy chutneys, could feed a ravenous buzkashi team. It’s the way Eve and Omar’s mother, Rohia, cooked when the kids would bring friends over.
Before the latest Taliban takeover, Eve dreamed of taking her 8-year-old daughter, Mia, to see Afghanistan, just as her mother had taken her twice in the early 2000s. Eve and Rohia had visited relatives, seen an array of provinces and marveled at the storied, extraordinarily green landscape of mountains and lagoons. At one point, as they sat by a river to cool down, Eve noticed that the water was sparkling with fragments of emeralds and rubies — perhaps a product of runoff from the country’s many gemstone mines. “I was like, ‘This is insane,' ” says Eve. “I would love for my kid to come here and see that the rivers and lakes are filled with precious stones. It’s like the movie ‘Aladdin.’ It’s just beautiful like that.”
But she adds, “I’ve seen the oppression. I’ve seen how rough it is out there, firsthand.” While in-country, she’d had to wear a hijab and baggy clothes, at the risk of being held at gunpoint if she didn’t. She wasn’t allowed to walk alone in the streets and always had to be accompanied by a male figure, whether it was a 5-year-old boy or a 50-year-old man. Every day she runs the restaurant, she says, she’s grateful for the decision her parents made to leave. It means she can raise her daughter in a world where she doesn’t have to worry about bombs or gunfire when she leaves the house, where girls can get an education and wear what they like without getting beaten up or having acid thrown in their face.
Advertisement
It had been Omar and Sofia’s dream, too, to move back to Afghanistan. They’d even returned to Kabul in 2004 with the idea of starting their first Aracosia restaurant there. But the country felt unstable, and they were worried about raising their daughters in a place that had such regressive attitudes toward women, and where men, including many of Omar’s relatives, were allowed to marry as many wives as they wished.
After a week or two, Omar says, “I was like, ‘There’s no way I’m going to have my daughters coming here.’”
He points out that one of the most famous Afghan women is Sharbat Gula, the girl with the green eyes, photographed in poverty with her image exploited on the cover of National Geographic. He wants these restaurants to showcase the potential of Afghan women to be business superstars and big-time entrepreneurs, and to be an example for other Afghan men, to demonstrate the benefit of treating women with respect. “I’m going to clear the road for these women to become those strong women,” he says. “I’m just going to be that person with the mop in front of them, clearing the way for them to become who they’re supposed to become.”
The significance of an Afghan man stepping aside like that, says Eve, is not lost on her, and the whole experience has brought her and Omar closer. They grew up so many years apart, with his origins in Afghanistan and hers in the United States, that until now, she says, “I was a stranger to him and he was a stranger to me.” But the restaurant has made them friends. “We have a relationship and we can actually talk and joke, and I’m grateful for that,” she says. “This is the best aspect of this business for me, is that it’s brought me closer to my family.”
In July, Bistro Aracosia had a brush with the Afghan government, catering the meeting at the White House between President Biden and then-Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on his diplomatic trip to Washington as the last American forces were preparing to leave Afghanistan. A month later, the family watched the news that Ghani had fled the country.
The day Kabul fell, the women were each at the restaurants they now manage. Customers gave them updates on the Taliban takeover as they worked. That evening, the Springfield cafe was unusually packed for a Monday. And business has been on an uptick across all three restaurants ever since, as customers place bigger and more frequent orders. Some came in just to hug them. One dropped off flowers she’d picked from her garden.
They have family who haven’t left, women who are living under Taliban rule. They check in on them often.
The regime change at the Aracosia restaurant, meanwhile, is about finding moments of empowerment everywhere. The handwritten thank-you notes that go into every takeout order from Bistro Aracosia are Taliha’s personal touch. Iman, like her sister, had to overcome crippling shyness to get this far, but she loves celebration and, on one crisp October afternoon, followed the wait staff out of the kitchen to make sure a piece of birthday cake landed with the proper flourish in front of a pair of Filipino girlfriends. The “Happy Birthday” message written on the plate in chocolate syrup and colorful sprinkles was Iman’s touch, too, as are the American holiday decorations morphing from Halloween to Thanksgiving to Christmas.
“It doesn’t matter where you’re from, whether you’re from Afghanistan, America or any other country,” says Sofia. “I think women have to work harder to prove what they’re capable of doing or for someone to listen to them or to acknowledge them.”
At the end of the night, the daughters go home, where they live with their parents, and download their days, plot their next moves and get some sleep. They have work to do in the morning.
correction
A previous version of this article misspelled the name Taliha as Thalia in one instance. Sofia was also misspelled as Sophia in one instance. The article has been corrected.
More from Voraciously:
President Biden reminds us that he can’t cook. Not even eggs.
Casseroles made and missed: Why so many obituaries honor this treasured dish
Amid food-industry upheaval, Baltimore businesses are handing workers the keys
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLOwu8NoaWlqYWR%2Bc3uQbmaanpedrq%2B10q2Yp2WnpLqmuoyrnKyskaq%2ForrTZpirmZOkwKqtjg%3D%3D