In the heart of Hollywood sits Flavors From Afar, a restaurant where a Navajo-Apache, a Sudanese refugee, an Inglewood native and a first-generation Ethiopian American work side by side. Founded in 2018 by Meymuna Hussein-Cattan, the global and Indigenous restaurant sustains Tiyya Foundation, a nonprofit supporting displaced people with the resources they need to build new lives.
“It’s a very beautiful—I don’t know what to call it,” Hussein-Cattan said. “It’s like a proof of concept. People talk about diversity in Los Angeles, but I get to live it every day in the kitchen.”
L.A. is home to some of the largest diasporas outside of their homelands, including Salvadorans, Filipinos, Armenians, Japanese, and Iranians.
The list goes on. However, this global representation doesn’t always translate to Angelenos’ lived experience. Due to urban sprawl and Los Angeles being the sixth most racially-segregated metropolitan area in the country, according to the Legal Defense Fund, these communities often exist in silos.
But not at Flavors From Afar. The dining room reflects the restaurant’s global mission. Jars on the coffee bar labeled “Somali” and “Ethiopia,” diasporic wine selections from Palestine, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, and floor-to-ceiling windows leading to a patio that seats about 50. The buffet-style setup encouraged guests to engage with one another in line rather than sit and wait to be served. With its new brunch series, Sounds From Afar, that spirit now extends to music.
“I feel like every time I meet a refugee client, whether they were from Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia, or Venezuela, what they always packed were cassettes or vinyl from back home,” Hussein-Cattan said.
She had been imagining a series around this idea for years. Then she met creative director and music curator, Osmar Romero, and the two co-created Sounds From Afar: a monthly brunch pairing global menus with vinyl records and live performances from the same regions. Past installments have highlighted Sudan, Venezuela, and Eritrea, creating multisensory events that blend dining, storytelling, memory and migration.
In October of last year, the spotlight turned to Chef Maite Gomez-Rejón, who grew up on the Texas–Mexico border and sits on the Tiyya Foundation’s board. Her menu explored the layered identity of the borderlands, an especially timely story of regional migration, hybridity, and belonging.
When Hussein-Cattan invited Gomez-Rejón as a featured chef, Gomez-Rejón was shocked. “Cook for people?! I usually teach cooking classes,” she said laughingly. “It blew me away.”
“Whether she’s on the microphone or behind the scenes, she’s been really coaching us on how to elevate the conversation to just feed people intellectually as well,” Hussein-Cattan said.
During her welcome remarks, Gomez-Rejón spoke with urgency of the moment. “It feels so significant to do this today when Latinos are being literally erased,” she said. “We’re not going anywhere because our food is deeply, deeply, deeply rooted, as is our people.”
Though she isn’t a refugee, she felt compelled to participate because of the political climate. “I feel desperate sometimes, not knowing what to do,” she admitted. “But we can celebrate our stories and histories through food.”
Gomez-Rejón’s menu traced the Indigenous and colonial histories of the Texas–Mexico borderlands: mesquite, pecans, tomato, corn, cactus paddles, prickly pear, foods native to the region long before conquest, paired with ingredients introduced later, like Challah bread and beef.
For this brunch, Romero decided to highlight the music native to the Texas–Mexico borderlands, “the northern Texan sound, which is a fusion of Mexican corridos and German polka,” he explained. He curated vinyl from the late Flaco Jiménez, honoring both the Tejano legend and his father, Santiago.
To bring that history to life, he invited Carlos y Charlos, a beloved L.A. County trio devoted to norteño music from Mexico and Texas. Their 45-minute set filled the room with accordion-driven rhythms and borderlands nostalgia, grounding the meal in the soundscape of the region that inspired Gomez-Rejón’s menu.
“For me, the music and the food are just pretexts to gather,” Romero said. “Especially right now, in such a difficult moment for migrant communities, which I’m part of, it’s the perfect moment to speak up, to not stay silent.”
The gathering comes at a moment of heightened anxiety for many immigrant communities. An analysis from the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge examining ICE detention data from February 2024 through September 2025 found that arrests of Latine immigrants with no criminal convictions increased sixfold, driven largely by aggressive workplace and public-space enforcement.
Nearly nine in 10 noncriminal Latino detainees were ultimately deported, while only a small fraction were released back into their communities. Researchers warn that the trend signals a shift toward broader detention practices with far-reaching consequences for families and neighborhoods across the region.
Romero, who grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, came to California six years ago without speaking English, knowing how to drive or much about American culture in general.
“I see myself as contributing my little grain of sand,” he said, “with a heart that’s Venezuelan but rooted here in California, for now.” He added, “Flavors from Afar is a very special place. By coming, you’re supporting an initiative that goes beyond the culinary. It’s a social project.”
Gomez-Rejón said cultural recipes are “continually alive and changing,” and cooking is “a constant search for home.” For the brunch, she returned to Laredo and crossed the border to get the star dish, machacado, a dried-beef foundational to South Texas and northern Mexico diet.
“You can’t find machacado here,” she said. “I’ve seen it advertised in L.A.—it’s delicious, but it’s not the same.”
Volunteers like Sandy Schnur, who traveled from Santa Monica, helped shape the atmosphere. After discovering Tiyya at LA Tech Week 2024, she helped with front-of-house operations. Schnur, who is Jewish, was fascinated by the challah French toast. Gomez-Rejón explained that challah is a nod to Jewish communities who migrated to northern Mexico to practice their religion more freely. “There’s a diaspora,” she said. “I love hearing about how things have been integrated and the interconnectedness.”
In the kitchen, Chef Heidi Alsangak, who is Sudanese but can make it all, prepared the dish alongside her. “It’s kinda like Nigerian stew, huh?” she said. Chef Lou Chavez, who cooks a Navajo–Apache dinner menu with his father, added, “I’m Native American, but I’m an international chef.”
“We’re a great team,” Gomez-Rejón told the chefs, who joked that their only stress came from “the situation with the eggs.”
As the cassettes and vinyl refugees do, Hussein-Cattan said recipes often travel in people’s memories, unwritten, adapted and resilient. “Refugees and displaced communities truly lost everything,” she said. “And I see how they’ve alchemized nothing into creating a whole brand new life for themselves and maintaining joy.”
Hussein-Cattan’s own family story of alchemy is woven into every part of Flavors From Afar. Her parents fled Ethiopia in the 1970s. She was born in a refugee camp in Somalia and came to the U.S. at age three. Her father eventually secured a stable job with Orange County in 1985 and worked there until 2018.
“I saw firsthand how hard it was for refugees to transition here—language barriers, education barriers,” she said. “You can be a doctor in another country, and it doesn’t transfer.”
In 2010, she and her mother founded the Tiyya Foundation, “Tiyya” meaning “my love” in Oromo, to support new arrivals with basic necessities, employment, community building and entrepreneurship. The work was born from resilience: families rebuilding after displacement, pushing through language and labor barriers and refusing to let their histories fade. Flavors From Afar emerged from that same ethos. It began as a catering business in 2018 to help sustain the non-profit. Their first brick-and-mortar in Little Ethiopia was set to open the very week stay-at-home orders were announced in March 2020.
For the communities she serves, she said, the political climate has always been fraught. “The creation of Flavors From Afar was because of cuts to refugee and immigrant aid,” she said. “I have to be very tunnel-visioned and focused on what we’re building here.” She watched major companies shut down during COVID-19, the strikes, and the fires, moments that stirred doubt and imposter syndrome. To keep going, she reminded herself, “We’re fulfilling a need. We’re the only place in the country that not only trains refugee chefs but celebrates their cuisines — cuisines preserved despite displacement.”
Lately, she’s felt the heightened political mood even more deeply. “This is the first time in my history living here in the U.S. that I’ve attended a going-away party,” she said. The restaurant has only been open to the public at its Hollywood location since June due to permitting delays. Still, Hussein-Cattan remains energized. “I chose a very difficult industry to fund an already difficult, low-funded nonprofit,” she said. “But there’s a level of nourishment I have that I want to communicate to everyone.”
For Gomez-Rejón, the brunch was “a love letter to the city,” and for Hussein-Cattan, it reaffirmed why Flavors From Afar exists. In a city where different ethnic neighborhoods rarely intersect, Sounds From Afar creates a space where food, memory and migration meet. It transforms brunch into an act of community, resistance, and remembrance, one plate, one record and one story at a time.
“L.A. is the whole world,” Gomez-Rejón said. “You can travel without getting on a plane.”