Why Did These Two Run a Restaurant for Seven Years That Served Only "Enemy Food" From Countries at Odds With America?

"Conflict matters. Before you can find a solution, you have to bring the conflict out into the open," Dawn Weleski says.

Around 7 a.m., the staff of Conflict Kitchen arrive at the small restaurant beside Schenley Plaza, on a corner of the Carnegie Mellon University campus, and start getting ready for the day.

Calling it a restaurant is generous. It is closer to a takeout stand with a single service window. Customers order, then sit at a few plain tables in the open-air garden alongside and wait for their food.

The decor changes from time to time. On April 2, 2017, Conflict Kitchen opened its second Palestinian food season, so the exterior turned into Middle Eastern red-and-green geometric patterns with a sign in Arabic.

Most of what the kitchen hands do before opening is what any restaurant does: take in the day's fresh ingredients from suppliers, slice a mountain of lemons, cook sauces, check what's left in the fridge.

The dishes are everyday Palestinian food: hummus, falafel, fattoush, shawarma and more.

The staff stack up a pile of brightly colored food wrappers, printed all over with excerpts from interviews the Conflict Kitchen team recorded in Palestine. Sometimes they also set a screen outside the window playing footage tied to the season's theme. While people wait in line or eat, they can read and watch their way into the country's culture.

At 11 a.m., the restaurant opens. Soon diners gather at the window in twos and threes. The lunch rush from the university and the surrounding neighborhood peaks around noon, when the line can run 40 to 50 people deep. The five kitchen staff get busier.

That is a typical day at Conflict Kitchen, as described to QDaily by Dawn Weleski, one of its founders, who came to Shanghai at the invitation of BottleDream.

Weleski is young, a Polish American. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon University's art school in 2008, she started Conflict Kitchen as an assistant lecturer, together with art school professor Jon Rubin.

Conflict Kitchen grew out of a waffle shop the two ran together, open only Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., selling cake, coffee and other light fare. Customers could buy something to eat, and they were also invited onto a small stage in one corner of the shop to play reality-show performer and give their views on whatever social question was at hand.

"Pittsburgh is a declining industrial city, with a lot of empty storefronts and property, and that gave us the chance to do something like this," Weleski says.

The waffle shop caught on; word spread and people lined up at the door. So the two decided to do something more, and bigger.

Their first idea was to sell food Pittsburgh didn't have — Afghan food, Persian food, Cuban food. Then they realized these were all "enemy foods," from countries long in conflict with the American government.

That is how Conflict Kitchen was born.

For Rubin and Weleski, both trained in art academia, running Conflict Kitchen was not so different from putting out an independent art magazine. Once they picked a theme, they researched the country's culture, art and social customs, found and interviewed immigrants from that country living in the United States, and commissioned designers to make the takeout stand's sign, promotional material and food packaging — while planning a series of public events around the theme.

The first theme, Iran, came from an Iranian friend of Rubin's. Through him the two got to know a small Iranian community in Pittsburgh, mostly immigrants, some of them university professors.

The Iranian menu included grilled lamb kebabs, stuffed grilled fish (mahi shekam por), grilled corn and other staples.

Besides selling Iranian food, Rubin and Weleski held a series of lunchtime discussions on subjects that link the two countries: war, nuclear weapons, government sanctions, poetry and family.

Online, the same thing ran in parallel. Every two weeks, artists and photographers in Iran took over Conflict Kitchen's official Instagram account and posted the Iranian life they saw. Jon Rubin also ran the account himself while doing fieldwork in Iran.

The second theme was Afghanistan. Traditional Afghan meat pies came wrapped in paper the designers had made with care, printed all over with an introduction to the country's culture.

"A lot of Americans don't even know the difference between Afghanistan, Iran and Palestine. They think Middle Eastern countries are all the same," Weleski says. "People don't know what cultural differences exist among these countries. But they have different foods, different habits. This happened to me too, which is why I love doing this project — it gives me the chance, and makes me, go learn the different cultures of these different places."

The people who come to Conflict Kitchen include immigrants from the country of the season and Pittsburghers born and raised there, curious enough to try Middle Eastern food they have never eaten. They eat, they read what's printed on the wrappers, and they talk freely with whoever is next to them.

"In that atmosphere, people are willing to say things they wouldn't dare say at their own family table over the holidays," Weleski says.

By designing several levels of conversation, Rubin and Weleski wanted to get at the richer cultural friction produced by two countries' different political systems and their history of conflict. Food is the way in, words and images the support, so that Americans can drop their guard and learn something about a distant country that usually shows up in textbooks and the news in a bad light.

Weleski's original plan was that this experiment would "run about three months and that would be that." It lasted seven years. They also left the old waffle shop and, with support from Carnegie Mellon University, moved to the plaza near campus, growing from a single takeout window into a small restaurant.

Over those seven years, Conflict Kitchen ran kitchens devoted to Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, the Iroquois Confederacy (Native Americans living in upstate New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Quebec, Canada), Vietnam and others. The themes were often chosen or changed according to the mood of the country or whatever had just happened.

Weleski and Rubin also designed different forms of talk to push participants into contact with one another. To encourage people to be braver about asking citizens of a conflict country questions, for instance, Weleski planted a "messenger": American diners put their questions to the messenger, and the messenger relayed them over Skype to citizens living in the conflict country.

Conflict Kitchen once hired two actors to play former U.S. president Barack Obama and Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, ride swan boats around a lake in a park near the restaurant with diners, and take questions from the public.

Weleski believes that when people look into a question or a phenomenon they used to ignore, they are also learning more about themselves. She uses the North Korea kitchen to explain. Many South Korean students from conservative families, seeing a Conflict Kitchen on campus decorated with North Korean national motifs, ran to Korean forums to air their anger.

"When people stand in front of our food window, they find that the prejudices they hold go deeper than they thought," Weleski says. "Our kitchen is like a classroom and food is the teacher. It tempts people into discovering new things without deciding what is absolutely right or wrong, and lets each person find their own answers to 'Who am I?' and 'What is our responsibility?'"

Most Pittsburgh residents took to Conflict Kitchen gladly, and it became part of the city. After the move next to campus, business steadied: open seven days a week, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., serving 200 to 300 people a day. Tourists have traveled a long way just to eat there. Weleski jokes that a project she never meant to make famous has drawn all kinds of attention from around the world, including "interviews with at least ten Chinese media outlets" and "foreigners calling in all seriousness to book a formal dinner reservation."

Because it runs well, Conflict Kitchen has, since the beginning, been an art project that funds itself entirely out of what it earns selling food. Weleski and Rubin have even been able to spend part of that money taking the team to the "conflict countries" on small research trips, so the kitchen can cook the dishes more faithfully.

In 2014, during the first Palestine kitchen, Israeli groups challenged Conflict Kitchen, and it received letters threatening the founders' lives. That was probably the worst crisis Weleski and Rubin had faced since they started. But seven years into the project, Weleski still thinks she has more problems left to solve.

"Our work is still full of difficulties," Weleski says. "My partner and I are both white, for one thing, and together with our academic backgrounds people read that as a kind of privileged class, so we have to be especially careful. I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, so all this feels natural to me — it's what I want to happen in my city. Jon Rubin has lived in Pittsburgh for many years too. We understand this city."

For those reasons, and despite seven years of invitations from people in cities all over the United States, Conflict Kitchen has never left Pittsburgh.

With Pittsburghers, Weleski believes Conflict Kitchen has always worked as a way of making chances for people to talk to one another. But its audience has not grown more varied over time, and some customers have come to treat the place as a novelty spot to eat rather than somewhere to pick up new knowledge or a cultural experience.

Weleski knows that "Conflict Kitchen has to reach a wider audience." The people who voted for Trump, for instance. "We have to find them. But we're not teaching people how to vote, or what theory to believe in. We just want Americans to be more curious about educating themselves. Because I imagine that's a quality an American citizen should have."

That is not simple to do. Weleski said in the interview that the Conflict Kitchen team will not go to other American cities as an independent restaurant operator and open branches. "Jon and I are artists, not activists or entrepreneurs. We might try some things on a small scale, but they have to be responsible to the city," she says, repeatedly. "Right now we plan to work with local cultural institutions, food-service organizations and other partners in other cities. It might take the form of a truck that moves between cities, or a series of themed lunches and dinners, or a proper restaurant — but it has to be a form that belongs in that particular place."

"I've never thought about how long Conflict Kitchen will go on. Maybe a month, maybe a very long time. Every project has its own life." Asked about the future of Conflict Kitchen, Weleski answers: "This project rests on the importance of building dialogue, and on Jon's and my own interest. As long as dialogue is still necessary — whether that's Conflict Kitchen or other projects it inspired, and as far as I know there are already similar public art projects elsewhere in the United States — that is meaningful enough for me."

Shortly after QDaily's conversation with Weleski, Conflict Kitchen's website blog posted an entry: "Conflict Kitchen will close its Schenley Plaza restaurant as of May 31, 2017." The reason given was that Carnegie Mellon University would no longer provide administrative support.

But Weleski and Rubin do not see this as the end of Conflict Kitchen so much as a new beginning. The entry ends: "Conflict Kitchen will take this as an opportunity to expand educational work throughout the greater Pittsburgh region, and to produce curricula, performances, public events and publications together with cultural institutions, community organizations and schools."

The cover image and all images without a credit come from: Conflict Kitchen