BABA'S PANTRY

It takes a village to open a restaurantor in this case an entire family

I didn't know a thing about the Kamal family when I stepped through the doors of Baba's Pantry, a Palestinian American café in Kansas City, Missouri. And I didn't know much more about them when I stepped out through those doors an hour later, deliriously full, blinking in the Midwestern sun. What I did know was that the hummus I had just eaten-rich and velvet-smooth, topped with a luscious mound of aromatic shaved beef and lamb was perhaps the best I'd ever had. Everything else I learned later.

I came to know, for instance, that the ebullient moustached man who emerged from the kitchen to answer a question I had about the homemade preserved lemons being sold by the jar was Yahia Kamal"Baba" to his children and just about anyone who knows him the patriarch of the family. I learned that he has run a number of different food businesses since he immigrated to America from Palestine in 1979, but that this was the first restaurant he had ever called his own and the first time he had declared his business to be proudly Palestinian.

I also learned that the warm, softspoken person working the counter that day was Kamal Kamal, Baba's. oldest son, an interior designer who transformed the humble storefront into a deeply personal space that honored both his family's Palestinian homeland and their life in the diaspora. And that he was in town from New York, covering shifts for his younger brother, Omar Kamal, who left his job at Apple to help his father realize his dream.