In a quiet laneway in suburban St Kilda there is a slice of Syria.

The Flavours of Syria Café has been established by asylum seeker chef Nayran Tabiei, who fled both Iran and Syria as a refugee from brutal, authoritarian regimes.

Nayran, her husband Majid and daughter Alnour were detained on Christmas Island before settling in Melbourne.

Until this month Nayran ran a catering business under her Flavours of Syria banner, cooked meals for the needy, and hosted popular cooking classes with social enterprise Free to Free, which offers food-related business opportunities to refugees.

With the help of Space2B, an art and design social enterprise that supports migrants and refugees, Nayran established the café to bring authentic food Syrian food to Melburnians.

Each morning she makes the hour-long drive from her home in Braybrook to the café, a small indoor-outdoor space in the laneway behind 144 Chapel Street, St Kilda.

“I feel like I’m flying here in the mornings; like I’m going to my grandma’s house. And I have tried to recreate my grandma’s kitchen here,” Nayran said.

She and Majid have decorated the café in middle-eastern style, with blue Syrian tiles, rugs and soft furnishings. In the corner are wreaths of garlic and onions – a tradition in most Syrian kitchens.

“We want people to feel like they’re in Syria. It’s been a long-time dream of mine to share something of my culture with people – to see smiling faces eating and drinking,” Nayran said.

“They come and they feel like they’re in Syria and I feel like I’m back in Syria in my grandma’s house.

“I’m just doing what my grandma told me to do – to put my soul into everything I do and our customers feel that – even people who don’t know us,” Nayran said.

In keeping with her philosophy of giving back, Nayran is giving training and work experience opportunities to other refuges and asylum seekers. She also provides cooking classes and catering services.

“We want to give people the opportunity to stare their own businesses so we are teaching them how to make coffee, cooking and hospitality,” she said.

“I’m taking my food to the wider community. Australian people have been so welcoming to us. I feel blessed to be here and so I’m happy to cook and serve,” she said

Dishes include stuffed eggplant and a light chicken and sumac wrap called mesakhan, baba ghanoush and hummus.

Nayran and Majid are refugees twice over.

In 2010, for the second time in their lives, the couple were forced to flee their home, leaving behind their possessions, friends, and established lives when the Damascus café they operated was bombed by Sunni rebels opposed to the brutal regime of Syrian President Bashar al Assed.

A few years earlier they had owned a successful wedding catering and clothing business in Tehran, Majid’s home city.

But when local religious authorities objected to them allowing brides and grooms to meet under the same roof to decide on wedding arrangements, they were subject to a Sharia law ‘haram’ and banned from operating their business.

What’s more, the religious authorities seized their building and turned them into social and legal outcasts, forcing them to leave Iran for Syria.

The couple moved from to Nayran’s home town Damascus in 2010 where they opened their restaurant.

“I lost my belongings, my life two times,” Majid said, speaking from his home in Melbourne’s western suburbs.

“It was terrible. We were living in an area of Damascus which the rebels were targeting. People were being killed and everything was destroyed,” said Majid, a qualified IT engineer.

Majid and Nayran sent their three sons to live with Majid’s mother in Tehran to avoid the conflict but kept their young daughter Alnour with them as they searched for a new place to settle down somewhere in the Middle East.

They tried Tajikistan, Turkey, Afghanistan, and even Bali but could not find anywhere safe that would accept them.

They applied for asylum in the US three times but were refused. The difficulty of their search for a new home was compounded because as an Iranian, every time he wanted to travel to another country Majid had to return to Iran.

“We could not return to Syria because of the fighting and if I go back to Iran I might end up in prison,” Majid said.

It was while the family was in Indonesia investigating the prospect of setting up a business there that they heard about the possibility of getting on a boat to Australia.

As refugees from Syria, they had registered themselves with the UN in Jakarta as asylum seekers but were told they faced a wait of three years before their claim could be processed.

Majid said it was a difficult decision to get on the boat but at the time they were faced with few alternatives.

“When we arrived in Jakarta the taxi drivers were asking us if we wanted to go to Australia. I wasn’t sure what they meant but it turned out they were not taxi drivers but people smugglers,” he said.

“They said to us ‘why wait three years, give me money and I’ll take you by boat’,” he said.

“We didn’t trust them at first and thought they might just rob us but then we met people who had relatives taken to Australia by the smugglers. So we decided to go.”

Majid said the three-day journey with 63 other people on a small fishing boat was hellish.

“It was a terrible journey – all the time I was vomiting. I spent three days beside the exhaust pipe breathing in fumes. But we were lucky. I heard stories of other boats that took much longer and had 200 people aboard,” he said.

“And of course some even sank,” Majid said.

The family reached Christmas Island in 2012 where they spent four months in detention before being transferred to another centre at Port Augusta, in South Australia, eventually settling in Melbourne.

Flavours of Syria
Open Tue-Sat 8am-2pm
Laneway, 144 Chapel Street, St Kilda, 0468 918 148
flavoursofsyria.com.au