FO O D & D R I N K Jamil Kadoura at the Med Deli counter PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA
Paying It Forward Since opening Mediterranean Deli in 1992, owner Jamil Kadoura has put community giving at the center of the restaurant’s mission. BY REBECCA SCHNEID food@indyweek.com
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n Palestine, Jamil Kadoura would not be called Jamil. Traditionally, once a Palestinian man has a son, he is usually called by his son’s name, with the prefix “Abu,” which translates to “father of.” Jamil and his wife, Angela, have three children: two daughters and a son, Zidane. Technically, Jamil should be called Abu Zidane. But this is not what Jamil’s mother, Ayshi, called him before she passed away six years ago. Ever since he was a child growing up in Jerusalem, she called him Abu Iieta, which means “Father of Giving.” He doesn’t remember exactly when she started calling him this. Maybe it was after Ayshi gave him her signature chickpea dish to sell in town and he gave every cup but two out for free. Maybe it was because she used to tell him, “When you give, throw it in the ocean, and it will 24
April 27, 2022
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somehow come back to you,” and she saw that he took it to heart. Likely it was a culmination of many things because giving is as significant to who Kadoura is as his exuberant hand gestures and the wide breadth of his arms as he leans in for a hug. For our interview, we met mid-morning, coffee in hand, at his restaurant, Mediterranean Deli, which occupies a coveted spot on West Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. Though it was long before the usual lunch rush, multiple people still entered the deli—from businessmen to delivery workers to employees. The first thing all of them did as they entered was to head straight to Kadoura, hug him, and tell them they loved him. After opening in 1992, Mediterranean Deli has steadily grown into a Chapel Hill institution. In the beginning,
the cafe only fit 12 tables and a small six-foot deli case. Today, it’s a popular lunch stop for college students, visiting parents, professors, and townies alike, with a 60-foot-long deli case. Kadoura was born in Israeli-occupied Palestine in 1960. One night in 1967, when he and his siblings were playing marbles in their pajamas, Israeli soldiers knocked on the front door of their home, telling them to leave. In refugee camps, Kadoura received food, blankets, and kindness from humanitarian organizations, which is why he says he invests so much in the Chapel Hill community. Eventually, his family settled in the town of Qalqilya in Palestine, where he attended a United Nations elementary school. It was here, in his mid-teens, that he discovered his passion for cooking at the schoolyard falafel stand at recess. Though the green stand was small and simple, its owner managed to make and sell falafel to hundreds of kids at recess. Like Kadoura, many of the school’s students had been displaced. When so much is lost, he realized, food is what binds us together. “You make love over food; you make peace over food,” Kadoura tells me. “Food is the most important connection in the community.” Magid, the owner, only had two sandwiches on his menu: a falafel sandwich and a hummus sandwich. It took a lot for the normally shy Kadoura to offer his boss some new ideas. Why not combine the two into a falafel-hummus sandwich, for starters? It was a hit. It was this moment, many years before the deli was even an inkling in his mind, that started Kandoura’s journey towards Med Deli’s creation. For college, he moved to Minnesota and attended the Minnesota School of Business. The unemployment rate in Minneapolis was high, and with only $35 dollars in his pocket, Kadoura needed money. He walked in the snow every day, he says, searching for work. Eventually, his persistence won him a dishwashing job at Jolly Troll Smorgasbord, an all-you-can-eat Swedish restaurant. Though it was at the falafel stand at his school that Kadoura was introduced to ingenuity in the food industry, it was here that he learned about the business and decided he wanted to enter it. Soon after, he moved to North Carolina. He opened Mediterranean Deli, three doors down from its current location, with the help of his wife, his mother, and his sister. Guests would sit at one of the 12 tables, and though the profits were small, Kadoura knew it was worth it. “You can’t do it just for the money,” he says. “It’s too stressful and too hard to make it.” Kadoura remembers coming into work at 3 a.m. and watching UNC students walk home from bars as he prepared food for the lunch rush, sweat dripping down his
