By Mary Beth Roach
The Salt City Market in downtown Syracuse celebrates a mix of cultures with a smorgasbord of ethnic food booths, several of which are run by immigrants, including Baghdad Restaurant, Cake Bar, Erma’s Island, Habiba’s Ethiopian Kitchen and Mamma Hai.
The Allyn Foundation formed a nonprofit operating entity, the Syracuse Urban Partnership, to create the market, at 484 S. Salina St. The goal was to build generational wealth and show off culture by showing off Syracuse to itself, according to Adam Sudmann, market manager.
“Food brings people together,” said Ali Adilo, of Baghdad Restaurant. Adilo said his family came to the states in 2014 from Baghdad because his father, Firas Hashim, “wanted a better future.”
They settled in Syracuse because Hashim had a friend here. Baghdad has been at the market since it opened in 2021 and among its specialties is the saj, which is a thin wrap, toasted on both sides and then filled with chicken, beef, lamb or falafel.
Some vendors were not available the day of a recent visit to the Salt City Market, but Latoya Ricks of Erma’s Kitchen and Ngoc Huynh, of Mamma Hai, were featured in this magazine a few months after the market had opened.
Ricks, from Jamaica, said in that earlier interview, that cooking had always been a love of hers, “to bring what I love to this area.”
Huynh was born in Vietnam, raised in Nebraska and learned to cook from her mother and aunts. When we interviewed her a few years ago, she said she had been a journalist and thought she’d try this as a side job. But balancing both would prove challenging, so she became a full-time restaurateur a little more than three years ago.
Duyen Hguyen of the Cake Bar is also from Vietnam. She is following in the footsteps of her mother, who had owned a bakery and she’d help out in the business, according to her bio on the Salt City Market’s website. She came to the U.S. in 2012 and went to Onondaga Community College to get a degree in culinary management.
Habiba Boru runs Habiba’s Ethiopian Kitchen. She noted in her online bio that she and her family left Ethiopia when she was 4, and spent 10 years in a Kenyan refugee camp. It was in this camp, Boru said, that she watched her mother support her family by cooking and selling meals out of a hut made of mud and sticks. “Her cooking created joy, laughter, community and opportunities. It was in that camp and through those moments I saw and felt the desire to do the same,” she wrote.
The idea of sharing food across cultures “is a great way to demystify one another,” Sudmann said. “We can be neighbors with one another. Food’s a start.”
