Meet the woman creating amazing food at Cork's Izz Cafe

ON George’s Quay, the vibrant green mural emblazoned with ‘Greetings from Palestine’ has become one of the city’s most recognisable pieces of street art. Corkonians pass it with hungry bellies and salivating mouths towards Izz Café.

As the door swings open, an aromatic blanket of cardamon, sumac, za’atar and coffee wraps itself around you. Here is where there is time to rest and recuperate with delicious food and life-affirming coffee.

Izz Café, Cork’s much-loved restaurant serving Palestinian and Middle Eastern food, is the labour of love of husband-and-wife Eman and Izzedeen (Izz) Alkarajeh. Izz runs front of house, roasting and blending their famous Palestinian coffee, and managing their significant social media audience, (to name just a few jobs required for running your own business), but it’s Eman and her food that keeps their loyal following coming back.

Eman’s family were originally from Palestine, fleeing to Jordan in 1948 following a bitter civil conflict that left the two countries with a great animosity toward each other than lasts to this day. She was born and raised in Jordan in a family of 11.

Izz’s family are in Palestine, but he worked as a software developer in Saudi Arabia for a few years before he and Eman met and married in 2002. With Eman from Jordan and Izz from Palestine, neither could live in each other’s countries, so they returned to Saudi Arabia together to raise their family.

“Life was really good there. Izz was working, I was looking after our four kids. We had a big community there, 35 families, and every week we’d all meet up to eat and socialise,” said Eman.

Saudi Arabia was home for 14 years until 2016, when Izz’s company let him go due to an economic downturn, and the government-funded project he was working on stalled.

Without a job, the permit to stay in Saudi Arabia expired, and they were faced with finding somewhere to call home for their family of six. They couldn’t stay in Saudi Arabia or go back to Jordan or Palestine.

“We started looking for any country we could go to and, because my kids were in International School in Saudi Arabia, we were looking for a country speaking English. Izz mentioned Ireland, so we started our plan to move here,” says Eman.

We had read lots of things about Ireland, but never heard anything about Direct Provision (DP). We thought everything would be good for us; we saw beautiful pictures about Ireland, but we didn’t know anything about the system.

Only when they arrived did they find they would be housed in DP while their application was processed.

“We thought we would be living independently until they looked into our case. We didn’t realise we would have to be hosted in DP until we lodged the application. It was a big shock.”

They spent 14 months in DP; “We were lucky,” Eman says, “some spend years there.”

Eman had grown up cooking with her mum and extended family; cooking daily for her children and husband, feasting at Eid, and sharing food. In Eman’s culture, food is incredibly important. The prospect of an institution controlling your food, when and how you eat, is a bitter pill to swallow – especially when food, culture and identity are intimately bound.

But, Eman says, they were the luckiest family in the Irish DP system. The rules around DP changed one week after they were placed in a government run ‘model DP centre’ on Kinsale Road. Residents had access to kitchens and were permitted to cook their own food.

“We had a kitchen, I was so happy,” says Eman. “I started by buying ingredients and I started to cook my kids’ favourite dish, called Magloubeh.”

It’s always on the menu at Izz Café, made with chicken, rice, aubergine, potato, and spices such as cardamom and za’atar, all cooked together.

“It’s very comforting,” says Eman of Magloubeh, “and when I start cooking, always people and the manager smell our food and come and ask about it. I put samples for them to taste every day when I cooked.”

Around 300 people lived in the centre: nationalities from all over the world. Two people representing each nation were asked by the centre manager to suggest a dish from their homeland the chef could cook and put on the menu once a week.

We taught the chef how to make Magloubeh, they loved it and put it on the menu every week. I was so happy because I wanted everyone to try it.

This reception to their food sparked the original idea for Izz Café as they had noticed a gap in the market for “proper Middle Eastern food in the city”. After they received their papers, they stayed in the centre for another six months while they found a home. Meanwhile, a good friend had introduced them to Darina Allen, who listened to their idea of establishing a Palestinian café and suggested trying out the concept at Douglas Farmers’ Market.

“We did our first market in May, 2018. We were so stressed, especially me because I prepared all the food. We sold out everything in just two hours!” recalls Eman. “It was a big day for us.”

One year to the day later, in 2019, Eman and Izz opened their café on George’s Quay.

Many recipes for dishes on the menu are close to Eman’s heart. It’s food she learned to cook with her mother in Jordan and cooked with other women in her extended family on feast days and celebrations. To cook this food for those yearning for a taste of their homeland, or by people who simply enjoy Eman’s cooking, fills her heart.

“I love to cook, to smell the spice. I learned a lot about food from my mum, and I love the traditional dishes - I love our way to cook anything,” she says.

I feel everybody should try our food.

Eman describes the food of Palestine as about fresh ingredients with vegetables, spices like za’atar and sumac, citrus and olive oil hugely important to the cuisine. Palestinian food culture is an ancient one, and Eman describes it as a healthy food style, rich and comforting, and full of stories.

“Sometimes we bring in traditional spices, especially sumac, from Palestine and Jordan. It can be expensive and take a long time to arrive, but I just want people to taste the real flavour.

Every recipe has its own story, and the whole story is about the culture itself. Sometimes, we ask our mothers about the name of a dish and there is always a long story about why it has this name!”

Eman and Izz wanted their café to be a place where they could use food to tell the story of Palestinian food, culture and the Palestinian struggle.

“Everyone who has a business wants to earn money, and of course this is important, but for us it is more than this. We want to share our food, our culture, our everything with the people,” explains Eman.

I try to do everything like how I do it at home or with my mum, because it’s good to feel that experience.

“Sometimes, when we serve the food, people say ‘Wow’ – and this wow, I love it!

“In some restaurants, they put a small bit of food on a big plate, I can’t do this! Our meals are big and generous, so I only want to serve our food our way.”

Izz Café has been serving their comforting and delicious food in Cork for five years, but in many ways, it feels like they have been here forever, such is the way the café, the food, and Eman and Izz have woven themselves into the fabric of the city.

“We are really lucky with the people of Cork; they are always so supportive and so kind,” says Eman.

In April, Eman and her family observed the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. For 30 days, Muslims fast between the hours of sunrise and sunset, then break their fast with a meal called Iftar. The end of Ramadan is celebrated with the feast of Eid, a lavish affair with lots of different dishes shared with family and friends.

The month of Ramadan changes each year as the Islamic calendar differs to the Georgian calendar. For Muslim’s living in Ireland, the most challenging time of year to observe Ramadan is the height of summer, when sunset can be as late at 10pm and sunrise as early as 5am.

“Our first year of the café, Ramadan was hard because the sunset was around 10pm and it was eighteen hours of fasting. This year it was around 8:30pm, so that was OK. We do our Iftar in the café afterwards everyday with our staff after we close.

“We prepare our food one hour before, then when we close, we put a big table in the middle of the restaurant with all the food laid out, and we dine together. Our staff try to fast with us sometimes, I told them no need to do this but thank you so much, but they wanted to try.

They ask lots of questions because for them its new and we are happy to answer. Sometimes, I’ll ask them about Easter because I didn’t know exactly the story behind everything.

Eman and Izz say they always have plans for their business, but challenges such as the pandemic, energy price crisis, and spiralling commercial rents in the city, has delayed their expansion plans. It’s a source of frustration to them both, as, they say, sometimes they are turning away customers who want to sit in to eat because of a lack of space.

It’s not been an easy journey to make Izz Café a reality, and running a café six days a week where Eman is cooking everything from scratch, from slow cooked meats and handmade salads to the stuffed Medjool dates, baklava and breads, and four school-aged children at home takes a lot.

But, Eman says, Cork is feels like home to her.

“When we first came here it wasn’t easy, but we work so hard and the people of Cork make us feel like we are already home; they are very kind, supportive and friendly. We are so lucky.

“We have visited Dublin and other counties, but we always feel at home in Cork – the Real Capital!”