This Year’s Hottest Restaurant Openings Were Powered by the Whole Family

Before the pandemic, Yahia Kamal mostly ran his Palestinian food stall in Kansas City, Missouri, on his own. Stationed within a downtown grocery store called Cosentino’s, he made the falafel wraps and blended garbanzo beans with tahini and lemon juice for his daily batches of hummus. But in 2020, when offices went dormant and downtown became a ghost town, the 62-year-old restaurateur was ready to go bigger. He went to his wife and four children and made the pitch—relocate to a more populous neighborhood and open a brick-and-mortar, with everyone in the family on board. Baba’s Pantry, a year-old Palestinian American café and one of Bon Appétit’s 10 Best New Restaurants of 2022, was born.

Now, every morning at 8 a.m., Omar Kamal, the younger of two sons and the restaurant’s sous-chef, marinates chicken for shawarma while Kamal Kamal, the oldest, sets the tables and organizes the deli items. Kamal’s eldest daughter, Jefnah, and his wife, Yusra, fill the pastry case with their baklava and hilbah. And Hannah Kamal, the youngest child, manages social media.

It’s not unusual for families to run a restaurant together. But as opposed to longtime places that have been passed down from one generation to the next, Baba’s Pantry is one of a crop of businesses across the country taking a different tactic. These families are collaborating on new restaurants together—creating contemporary spots that tap into the nostalgia, history, and culinary knowledge of an older generation.

In Long Beach, California, there’s the Vietnamese café Sesame Dinette, and in Manhattan, there’s a pasta bar called Nonna Dora’s. It’s a hopeful development, after a pandemic that ravaged so many long-standing family-run spots. These restaurants are the outcome of families coming together to cook their food and share it with others.

For the older members of a restaurant family, operating a multigenerational restaurant means maintaining an open mind to new ideas in order to appeal to younger diners. Judy Mai Nguyen, a 73-year-old chef with decades of experience under her belt, opened Sesame Dinette in April with the help of her daughter Linda Sivrican and granddaughter Kiera Sivrican. Nguyen is an expert in bánh mì and makes all of her pork cold cuts in-house.

These days, though, she’s serving the traditional sandwich with a twist: on barbari, an Iranian flatbread, instead of a baguette. That was her daughter’s idea. Linda’s husband is Turkish, and she often shops at Middle Eastern markets where she buys barbari for breakfast. “You get a surprisingly crunchy texture that doesn’t feel heavy because the bread is thin and crispy when toasted,” she says. Nguyen also slices her pickled veggies instead of shredding them, which adds another unique element to the sandwich.

Nguyen’s experience with different cuisines extends to the rest of the menu at Sesame Dinette too. Her “famous” beef bourguignon (as Linda calls it) comes from her French training, while her vegan prosperity soup is a dish she makes regularly for the members of her Buddhist temple.

While updating and revising classic dishes to appeal to changing tastes can help bring in business, it’s also a meaningful way to preserve culture. At Baba’s Pantry, Omar Kamal created a jackfruit shawarma, knowing that many people in their 20s and 30s don’t eat meat. He started playing with mushrooms, but eventually landed on jackfruit because of its similar consistency to chicken. It’s drawn vegan diners, Kamal says, while still tasting distinctly like the Palestinian shawarma of his father’s original recipe.

At Uncle Lou in Manhattan’s Chinatown, one of Bon Appétit’s 50 Best New Restaurants of 2022, the collaboration between proprietor Louis Wong and his younger friends and family is partly a way to preserve the cuisine of the loh wah kui—a term that refers to the first immigrants that came over from Cantonese villages around the Pearl River Delta. The loh wah kiu are responsible for having built Chinatowns throughout the U.S., and “most Chinese Americans and Chinatown families can trace their ancestry to this region,” says Wong, who is in his 60s.

Locals in their 80s and 90s come in to enjoy Chenpi duck and steamed buffalo fish with braised pomelo peel, foods they grew up eating that are otherwise hard to find in New York’s Chinatown. On the heels of plenty of positive media attention, younger diners are swarming Uncle Lou, too, excited to try these dishes. The influx of a generation of younger diners gives staying power to dishes that might otherwise have faded into obscurity.

“As great as it is to have Lou’s friends come in, what’s exciting is that we’re turning a new generation of people onto this type of food,” says Andy Chau, a 33-year-old server.

Still, the foundation of the food comes from the older generation at these restaurants. The chefs in the kitchen at Uncle Lou, many of them from Wong’s generation, are well-versed in cooking these often time-intensive dishes. The same is true of Yahia Kamal, who prides himself on taking no shortcuts in anything he makes. “If I took you to Amman, Ramallah, or Jerusalem, you’ll have the same thing—no fillers, no additives,” he says. “The way it’s done over there is how it’s served here.”

In Manhattan’s Kips Bay neighborhood, the 86-year-old pasta maker Addolorata “Dora” Marzovilla runs the show at Nonna Dora’s, and she prides herself on staying traditional as new pizzerias and brunch restaurants open on the surrounding blocks. The orecchiette with rabbit ragù is a dish that her son and business partner, Nicola Marzovilla, remembers eating every Sunday as a child in Puglia. Nicola once owned Italian restaurants, including I Trulli, where he served food from the Apulia region, and for more than 30 years, Addolorata helped to carefully make pastas by hand for his menu. When I Trulli closed recently, Addolorata wasn’t ready for retirement. Now, customers clamor for reservations at her 32-seat pasta bar.

These restaurants strengthen cultural ties, but for the families who run them, it’s also a way to reconnect with one another. In Long Beach, Nguyen has the help of her husband, her 69-year-old sister, and Kiera, who had prior restaurant service experience but is only now learning how to be a chef by working with her grandmother. Meanwhile, Linda’s role is to oversee front-of-house duties and make drinks, like perilla gingerade tonic and iced Vietnamese coffee.

Nicola’s wife, Astrid, who never wanted to work in I Trulli’s bustling 200-seat dining room, has taken to the intimate energy of Nonna Dora’s. After all that time working with his mother, the rest of Nicola’s family has joined them in the new restaurant. Nicola’s daughter Olivia wanted to learn how to bartend to put herself through grad school, and has since taken over the beverage program. Running the restaurant has become a “pet project” for the whole family, Nicola says.

“It gave me a chance,” Nicola says, “after not being able to spend time with my children because I worked nights, to be able to work with them.”