Author:Frank Bures
A family dining at Qoraxlow’s recently opened Lake Street restaurant.
A few months before I moved to Minneapolis, I stopped at a gas station while visiting the city looking for a place to eat. The cashier and two customers—all of whom were Somali—conferred for a minute, then pointed me up the street to a building that didn’t look much like a restaurant. The windows were dark and the façade was strange, but high on the roof was a sign that read: Qoraxlow Restaurant #1 African and American Cuisine.
I walked inside. The place was run down: a giant TV played CNN, there were no menus, and the credit-card machine was broken. But once the door closed, the sound of talking and laughing, and the smell of rice and goat meat, brought me straight back to East Africa. I’ve never tired of eating at Qoraxlow since.
That was nearly a decade ago. Somalis had started landing in Minneapolis in force a few years earlier. After the Somali civil war started in 1991, people came to Minnesota to work in meat-packing jobs in the western part of the state. By 2010, according to Ahmed Ismail Yusuf, author of Somalis in Minnesota, their numbers had grown to somewhere between 36,000 (the U.S. census number) and 70,000 (the community’s estimate). Before long, you could find places like Qoraxlow across Minneapolis. For someone like myself, with young kids and little extra money for the kind of globetrotting I did when I was younger, these places felt like an escape. Sometimes I would meet old Somali men who spoke Italian and young ones who spoke Swahili. I could eat sambusas and drink chai and feel refreshingly far from home.
One of the central spots in this community was Karmel Square, a massive Somali mall that felt like a peaceful and prosperous Mogadishu market. It was full of bright-colored fabrics, wafting incense and perfume, cheap sandals for sale, and bookstores that only sold the Koran. This complex—the Suuqa Karmel, as was written on one side—was built in the early 2000s by a charismatic property developer named Basim Sabri, who had immigrated from Palestine. Subsequently, Sabri spent a few years in prison for trying to bribe a Minneapolis city council member, but, notwithstanding his legal woes, his mall has continued to thrive.
A few years ago, I stopped by Karmel Square to interview Sabri. He told me he’d just bought the building, which had sat empty for 20 years, when two guys from Somalia walked in and asked if there was going to be a coffee shop there. Sabri said, “sure,” then gave the guys a break on rent to open one. Soon, the mall was so full that he built another, bigger building next door, which now houses at least 175 businesses: shops, grocery stores, a mosque, a learning center, a day care. It also houses the second and third locations of Qoraxlow. Today it has a third floor (which collapsed once during construction). The Qoraxlow in Karmel Square is crammed into an odd corner of the building. The walls are covered in steel plating, and painted above where the metal ends. Sometimes when you show up for lunch, the food isn’t ready. Sometimes, you just have to eat whatever has been cooked.
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Source: Roads & Kingdoms
