Detroit Free Press: Omar Anani closed award-winning Detroit restaurant. What food fighter did next changed him
Detroit Free Press
Omar Anani and his staff at Saffron De Twah were just a couple weeks into a fruitful awards season and the swell of customers that a nod from the James Beard Foundation brings when business suddenly dropped off a cliff.
The novel coronavirus was spreading quickly in the United States and local restaurants had begun to feel the pinch even before Michigan’s first cases were confirmed. After consulting with health care workers in his family, Anani made the decision to close the award-winning modern Moroccan bistro days before the governor mandated it.
“So we shut down and said, ‘What is it we can do?,'” Anani recalls. “We have all this food sitting here. All these restaurants are closed. Let’s feed these restaurant workers because a lot of them are on tipped wages and live paycheck to paycheck.”
Named one of this year's Detroit Free Press/Metro Detroit Chevy Dealers Food Fighters, Anani took care of his staff first, then reached out to other restaurant folks through industry-specific Facebook groups, offering free meal kits to anyone in need. The first day he received a handful of requests, but it quickly ramped up to 30 or 40 a day, many of which Anani delivered himself because the recipients had no transportation.
That was just the beginning and not a sustainable solution. As the pandemic progressed, Saffron took part in multiple grassroots initiatives to feed those in need, including workers at a Dearborn hospital, as well as a partnership with Brilliant Detroit that had the restaurant cooking between 600 and 700 meals a day at its peak.
“Then we found out that the scarcity was so huge, there were other areas where they couldn’t find restaurants to sign up, so we signed up our food truck and took the Twisted Mitten truck to the Fitzgerald neighborhood and gave out meals there,” Anani says.
That excursion was a turning point for the entire Saffron team.
“The truck was more impactful in that the cooks are serving directly to the people, so you get to hear the gratitude,” he says. “It completely changed the way we think about hospitality for all of us.”
By July, Saffron De Twah had completely transformed into the Saffron Community Kitchen, fully dedicating itself to community efforts instead of running any kind of public-facing dining option, this despite being on the Beard’s shortlist for Best New Restaurant in the country just a few months earlier.
“I sat down and thought, ‘I’m not famous by any means, but people do look at me with some bit of respect because of the awards and what I’ve achieved, and we need to utilize that platform to do better for Detroit,' ” Anani says. “We have all these people who are food insecure. How do we take these people and make them a part of the solution? Take them out of the line and into the kitchen, where they can learn to cook and can become a part of the solution. The thought process of healing the problem instead of just putting a Band-Aid over it by giving people meals was something important to me.”