Fresh Air - Restaurateur Rose Previte's Lessons Learned From Around The World

Episode Date: January 3, 2024

In her new cookbook, Maydān: Recipes from Lebanon and Beyond, Rose Previte writes about what it's like to be a women restauranteur in a male-dominated industry, and what it was like to grow up in rural Ohio in a Sicilian-Lebanese household. She shares her mother's staple recipes and dishes she learned from other women from around the world. Also, we remember Full Monty actor Tom Wilkinson, who died on last week at the age of 75.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. One of the first lessons restaurateur Rose Previtt learned early in life was what she calls the secret code, the ways her family used food to hold on to culture. Previtt grew up in a small town in Ohio, eating almost exclusively home-cooked Lebanese dishes that were passed down from her great-grandparents who immigrated to the U.S. But as she writes in her new cookbook, My Dawn, Recipes from Lebanon and Beyond, it took a life-changing move to Russia for her to discover that following in her family's footsteps was her calling. In her new cookbook, which Bon Appetit recently

named one of the best cookbooks of the year, Previtt shares some of her family's tried and true recipes, as well as recipes from home cooks throughout the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Many of these recipes come from areas we often think of as conflict and war zones, like Lebanon, Georgia, and Ukraine. Prevett owns four D.C.-area restaurants, Compass Rose, which serves street food from around the world, like Jamaican Curried Conch, Mexican Tacos, El Pastor, and Algerian Vegetable Tajin. The Kirby Club in Virginia, which specializes in kebabs, and the Michelin star-rated Maidan, which serves food from Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East.

She also runs the neighboring cocktail bar, Medina. Rose Previtt, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you for having me. That was a kind introduction. Maidan is such a rich word because as we learned from you, it's a word that carries across regions and languages and it means the same thing. I find it a really powerful word. And, you know, ironically, it is an Arabic word that I learned in Kiev, Ukraine, which seems like not a place where you would hear a lot of Arabic. But as I was sightseeing while my husband was working back in like, I guess it was 2009, I just kept hearing everyone say meet at the Maidan, meet at Maidan. And I came to find out it was sort of the slang, you know, or the colloquial local way of saying, like the main square, which I believe is Freedom or Independence Square, technically. But generically,

it's called Maidan. And so I looked into it a little bit more and realized in Tbilisi, Georgia, in Tehran, Iran, in all of these countries, the word is used in the exact same way to mean this kind of central gathering place. And I thought that was the power of what I wanted my restaurant spaces to be, you know, like where the food is very similar throughout a vast region, but it's actually all the same at the end of the day. In this cookbook, we not only learn recipes from home kitchens that span across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. We also learn your origin story, how you came to this idea of bringing home kitchen food from the world into a restaurant setting. So I think it's best to start there because your journey started with a three-year stint in Russia beginning around 2009. And your husband is journalist David Green, who folks may know as the former host of Morning

Edition. At the time, he had gotten a job as a foreign correspondent in Russia. This was his dream job, but this is not, it was not part of your life plan. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Absolutely. I don't know if any of my life plan went the way I expected after I met David, but most of that is a very good thing, actually. We were living in New York City just one year exactly when he came home and said that there was an opening in the Moscow Bureau. And nowhere in my whole life had I desired to live in Russia. Had you ever visited before? Oh, heck no. No. I had done study abroad in the south of Spain. I traveled Europe. Had you ever visited before? the decision right. And, you know, I was also probably overly confident that study abroad had prepared me for Moscow because it didn't. I assure you, nothing prepares you for that. And I also think I underestimated the difficulty of not knowing the language before we went.

Nothing I anticipated. And probably that's why we went, because had I realized how hard everything would be, I might not have agreed. You would have said no right away. Yeah. The thing as well was that you had a career that you were headed towards in public policy. Oh, yeah. I was fresh out of grad school with like the vigor of, you know, a young person who thinks they can go out and change the world now that they've studied, you know, the law and policy. And that's what I went to DC for in the first place was to change the world and fix things. And I felt policy school was going to be that way.

And I had worked for just one year exactly with the New York City Council, was really enjoying it. I was a policy analyst. So yeah, it wasn't exactly in the cards to get on an airplane to Moscow exactly a year after moving there. So you all were stationed there in Moscow. You and David also, though, while you were living there, visited lots of other places, I think more than 30 countries. And this is where most of your culinary discoveries happened. You write about how you and David would try to eat local foods wherever you went. Always. And David has a stomach of steel. I should also give credit to that. He can eat anything.

That was the greatest part. We learned a lot in Russia, but the fact that we were able to travel was really powerful. It was to places we would never have been like, oh, let that we were able to travel was really powerful. It was to places we would never have been like, oh, let's go on vacation to Kazakhstan. No, like Americans rarely say that, right? But there we were, Kazakhstan, Belarus, parts of Central Asia, and then in the Middle East, which I didn't travel to as a child. So it was very cool to start going to Egypt and Turkey regularly. So it was all around, yeah, like a food-filled travel experience. When David wasn't working, we would explore together and often get lost together. And,

you know, this is, by the way, he has a black market iPhone. I don't. This is on just the cusp of iPhone. So we're still getting around with like maps and stuff. Oh, you've got like Thomas Guy type maps. We've got our Let's Go books. We've got all that because truly we don't have that access that we have now. So we were getting lost a lot. But what would end up happening is almost always we would find some amazing place to eat and find directions. But then, you know, stay for something, some snack, and then get back on our way. Once we figured out we weren't forever lost and we were going to get home, you know. You all had something called the kebab test where you would have a kebab and it would tell you something about a place.

We have this theory that, you know, almost all the countries we went to had a kebab culture of some sort and it was always tied to street food. And that's why Compass Rose's first menu was based on street food. Your first restaurant. Yes, Compass Rose, which we opened in 2014 after getting back to the U.S. but it was a menu of street foods from around the world because that is was David and I's favorite thing and that tended to be where our greatest memory was held was again in some street stall rarely a food truck let me tell you the places we go food trucks are really a privilege and and luxury like most of the time you're just talking a grill or a fire on the side of the road. Like a stand.

Just a stand. Yeah, there's nothing fancy about it like we have here. So I'm talking just grills, fire. Sometimes a whole goat is just hanging and they're cutting off slices of goat and throwing it on the fire. Sometimes it's camel. We did that in Oman. But we ate all of it and we couldn't have been happier.

And then always had like some memory, like getting lost or finding someone amazing to talk to. And it always came back to the food. But the kebabs, like to me, they carry like the flavors of whatever country you're in. So often it's whatever spices, like when we were in Oman, it was tamarind. Tamarind rubbed in marinated shrimp. And tamarind was a flavor that, for example, in Lebanese cooking, we don't use that often. So it was just a profile that I will always associate with that trip, with that experience, with the guy who was grilling the shrimp, who we begged for the recipe, who was really confused why we would want it. Oh, really? When you asked, he thought, whoa. Yeah. There isn't some big food culture or restaurant culture in a lot of these places.

So for me to say, I'm dreaming of opening a restaurant one day, I'd really love to know how you made this. It takes a minute. And then usually there's an element of, you know, kind of surprise and then flattery. That's like, oh, okay, you like it so much, you would bring it back to America and put it in a restaurant. And, you know, we had that experience over and over again. But I feel like, yeah, the kebab tends to be a real, you know, example of what you're going to find when you dig deeper into the food culture of that country. Well, what's interesting about your restaurants and this cookbook is that you all traveled all around the world, but your eyes are kind of set on Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and specifically places where we consider them conflict zones, where anytime those

areas are brought up, it's in the context of something that has happened there. But you're drawn to those areas. Definitely. And I think my sense of adventure is great. So that overcomes fear often. And David, as a travel companion who's gone into war zones for his entire career, is not afraid of anything, you know. So we were definitely not afraid to travel to parts of this region, like, you know, generally called the Middle East. A lot of us are trying to get away from that terminology, but for purposes of the cookbook, it was definitely easier to use that to describe the region. But I like to say we traveled from, you know, Tangier to Tehran and from Batumi to Beirut. So if you think

of that region of the world, that's where we concentrated a lot of our travels from while we're in Russia. And since we've been back in the States, I go repeatedly back to Lebanon and to Turkey. I'm dying to go back to Oman, but I haven't been there recently. And then the Republic of Georgia, which a lot of times is not associated right with the Middle Eastern food, but it is the crossroads of everything. And you'll hear me talk about it, and you'll hear it in the book over and over again. It's in the cookbook, yes. I'm sorry, I'm obsessed.

You have a love affair with Georgia. And not a drop of Georgian blood. I mean, you know, 23andMe will confirm. What is it about the people and the places and the food? It is such a beautiful place physically, but the people, the hospitality, the food and the wine are like nothing I've experienced. And now we've been to over 60 countries. And Georgia reminded me so much of Lebanon or Lebanese culture, where it's like,

our love language is food. We are going to invite strangers to our table. We're not afraid of you. We want, regardless of the fact that you don't know who we are, because like you said, of conflict, if it was part of the Soviet Union for so long, that so many Americans just clump it with Russia and it couldn't be more different. One thing that you write about so beautifully in this cookbook is kind of the realization that you had given up your dreams for your husband. And so I want to go into that moment because it's what Russia represented for you in that moment of time. Was there a particular moment or a culmination of moments while you were there in Russia that you realized, I'm not sure think I went in thinking I'd figure out something work-wise. I figured I would, worst case, bartend because I was a 10-year bartender back in D.C. You know, I was like, I'll figure it out. But as it became more and more apparent, there was nothing I could do work-wise.

I couldn't get a visa. I couldn't speak the language. I was starting to get, you know, the realization that I was a housewife because we didn't have kids. And while I was traveling, it's like everyone says, the grass is always greener. You think it's so romantic. And my girlfriends at home are like, wait, all you do is follow your husband around traveling? What the hell are you complaining about? Eating wonderful food. Yeah. I'm like, I know, I know. And this is an enormous privilege. And I'm 100% recognizing that. But I'm a little worker bee. I

just got out of school. I'd never not worked in my whole life. And because I 100% recognizing that. But I'm a little worker bee. I just got out of school. I never not worked in my whole life. And because I grew up in a very patriarchal home, it was very traditional. And we came from a very traditional background of women stay home and men work. I was determined that I was not going to follow that pattern. And I think that's why it really, really got me when I figured out that that's what I was doing. And I talk in the book about cleaning this chicken, and it's true. I was in the kitchen with my phone to my ear, talking to David, who's in the office, about what he wanted for dinner. And I'm literally holding a whole chicken over a sink. And I look in the mirror, there's this big mirror, and it's dark because it's winter.

So even though I'm making dinner, it's pitch black. It's four o'clock in the evening. It sure is. It's four o'clock and I have no idea what time it is because it's never gotten light because it's winter in Russia. And I see this reflection of myself, chicken in hand, phone on my ear. And I had seen my mother in this pose so many times. And my mother is so beautiful and so amazing in so many ways. But I knew she didn't get her dreams of what she wanted her life to be because she was raising kids and following a very old-fashioned way of being. And I had been so determined. And there I was looking at myself like, well, here you are.

There was this important trip that happened near the end of your stint. You and David traveled the full route of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which, let me get this right, it spans 6,000 miles. Yes. I bet a lot of contemplation about life and purpose happened with you on that train trip. Mm-hmm. It comes full circle. This is like a full year from the chicken moment to the train is probably like a full year of brooding, right? Because it was toward the end of the trip. I was really antsy to go back to work at this point. And then David says, my finale story is going to be

this train from Moscow to Vladivostok. And it's the length of the largest country in the world. And we're going to take the regular old train. And you've got to describe this train. But anyway, yeah. Surprisingly, I think everyone sees the vision of the train as cold. What's funny is it's below freezing every single day. Not one day did it ever get above freezing that we're in Siberia in December in 2011. So you're wearing, what are you wearing on the train? You're full? Well, by this point, I figured out what kind of winter coat. So yeah, we're all bundled up,

but the train itself is actually very hot because it's fueled by coal. It's very warm. There's a samovar full of water at the end of every train car. So the one gift the train gives you is constant hot water. So we're eating, you know, ramen noodles and stuff like that because the train car that has the dining car that has this huge menu actually turns out to have none of the food that's on the menu. And it ended up being a joke with us because, you know, after days, we're talking like you go 60 hours without getting off the train, right? And the only thing you have to look forward to is the meal car. So we'd go down regardless of what train we were on because we would get off.

We took three weeks to take this trip. You can do it in four days if you don't get off at all. But we're getting off in villages. We took three weeks to do it. So we were on different trains. But the one thing that every train had in common as a food person, you can understand my utter dismay, was a completely wretched food car. And there'd be this elaborate menu as thick as the Bible. And you couldn't get anything on it. What could you get? Borscht. And you have to describe what that is. I mean, the only thing they had was

borscht. And we still laugh about it because we're like, chicken kia, stuffed cabbage. We point to all these beautiful things and they say, nyeh, nyeh, nyeh, just no, no, no in Russian over and over and over. And then finally they'd say borscht, which is a beet-based vegetable soup. You can add meat if you want, but oftentimes on the train there was no meat. It was just vegetables and, you know, beets basically, so this red broth. And while good at first, it gets real, real old. Like I couldn't eat beets when we got back to the States for a couple years. Like it was memory of these long journeys and the just complete disappointment of thinking that you

were going to get a nice hot meal and all you would have was borscht. So that was the state of the train. Lots of tea, lots of ramen noodles. You would get off for a minute, maybe at a stop, and you could buy like sausages or these stuffed baked goods or stuff with potatoes or cabbage or whatnot, you know, on the side of the train tracks or something when we could jump off for a few minutes. But it really wasn't enjoyable because it was freezing wherever you were. So to get off, it was like a shock of cold and then you get back on the hot train. You did have these hosts though. You'd stop and people would host you. So what were some of the things that they fed you when you would stop at these homes?

And that's the beauty. And that's where I wanted to make the distinction between Moscow. Because when we were out in, you know, deeper into Russia, into smaller towns and villages, we were very welcomed. People were very friendly. You know, David's approaching them as a journalist. So often we would just be talking to strangers, but they would never just leave it at, I'm going to do this interview. They would always invite us into their houses. Yeah. And so we were getting these beautiful pickled tomatoes, pickled cucumbers, pickled anything, and vodka. Like there's really that stereotype is real.

Everyone did give us vodka. But again, what is in the heart of all these stories that I'm telling you, it's always food. And that I carried right back onto the train. And that started to bring me back to, you know, my somewhat angry, angsty, you know, musings about not knowing what to do with my life. Because now we're on the cusp of going back to the U.S. I haven't worked in three years. We're not moving back to New York. We're moving back to D.C. where I hadn't even worked a year before that. So now I'm like looking at five years of nothing on my resume and not knowing, you know, what was going to happen. And truly those many, many days of frozen tundras

and little wooden houses with covered in snow. I mean, that's what you're looking at out the train window. And again, no iPhone. And even if we did, there's no charge. So like you can't even charge your devices. There's no iPhone. And even if we did, there's no charge. So like you can't even charge your devices. There's no electricity. So we're just thinking and talking and thinking. And that is really, if you've already been kind of musing on something, if you really

want to hit it home, hit home, you know, the question you're asking yourself, sit on the Trans-Siberian for 60 hours at a time over three weeks, and you will start to have clarity. And I realized like food was such a part of my life. By denying myself, you know, even contemplating how to make a career out of it, I was kind of denying part of myself. And when I started to think about, you know, my mom, after all those years of taking care of us, she finally at 60, six zero years old, got her own restaurant. And she did finally use food to propel her dream of having a restaurant and start to feed the entire community. And she had been doing that out of our house while she catered, you know,

just from our kitchen growing up. But for 10 years, she did have her own business. And I saw her pride in that. And I saw her success and it warmed my heart so, so much. But what I felt bad about was she got it so much later in life that she didn't get to enjoy it. And I had always been very, I think, conservative or not trusting myself up to this point. So this was a moment of also trusting myself that I can make a career out of food. And everyone knows the statistics on restaurants. Like everyone knows that it's not a

good business to go into if you want any kind of stability or work-life balance. So most of the odds are against you. But in that moment, I was like, you know what, why don't I just do it now? That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go back to America and I'm going to at least explore how you start your own business in food, having no idea how, but I would figure it out. Our guest today is Rose Prevett. She's a restaurateur with four restaurants in the Washington, D.C. area. She has a new cookbook called My Don, Recipes from Lebanon and Beyond. More after a break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air's Anne-Marie Baldonado. If you're already a Fresh Air Plus supporter, you may have heard Terry talking about the first daily national broadcast of the show in 1987.

It was still like making a national debut both to the audience and to program directors because we weren't on that many stations to start with. Dave Davies talking about his job driving a cab. This is a fascinating city of many diverse neighborhoods and it was fun to just tool around in a cab all day. Or archival interviews with people like Arthur Miller, Nina Simone, and Audrey Hepburn. Timing you can't rehearse. It's an instinct, especially comedy. I mean, that's what made Carrie unique. That's why there haven't been a whole lot of Carrie Grants. Are you not a Fresh Air Plus supporter yet?

You could be. Subscribe on plus.npr.org or on Apple Podcasts. Today, we're talking to Rose Previtt. She's the owner of three restaurants and the writer of a new cookbook called My Don, Recipes from Lebanon and Beyond. Previtt's restaurants include the D.C.-based Compass Rose, which serves street food from around the world, the Kirby Club in Fairfax, Virginia, and the Michelin-starred My Don, which specializes in North African and Middle Eastern cuisines. Prevett is also the co-founder of the wine company Go There Wines. Her love of Lebanese food comes from her upbringing. Her great-grandparents migrated from Lebanon, and she grew up with her mother cooking Lebanese

dishes almost seven days a week. Rose, one of the really interesting threads in your book is what you call the inherited immigrant experience. And I was really drawn to that way of describing it because as Americans, we tend to separate ourselves from our immigrant heritage after a few generations. We separate ourselves and really don't connect it to our current day identity. Did you ever have a phase in life where you pulled away from your heritage? You know, interestingly enough, no, because I think my parents' generation did because of when they grew up. They grew up in civil rights era Detroit, my mom did, and it was a time of danger to look different or not American, and that was very much what my mom's Lebanese family was. And so Arabic was taken away, like, don't speak this in school, even though my mom grew up with her grandparents, and as a kid did speak it, it was taken away for safety. And so their generation pulled away. But they kept it behind closed doors, you know, in the home, it was always

the food. And then in moving us to a small town in Ohio, where Ada, Ohio, population 3000. It is not a suburb of anything. The closest cities are Dayton is about an hour away. Toledo is about an hour and a half away. And there they knew they were going to have to overcompensate because there were no Lebanese restaurants until you got to Toledo about an hour and a half away. So we were going to have to, they were going to have to go on overdrive of passing down culture and food was the way that they did it. And it was very much, my mom did an amazing job of making sure we were proud of it, even though it was quickly realized that we were different. That was part of our identity of something to be proud of.

And I grew up in a place that while we were very different, we weren't made fun of. I was very fortunate. We weren't made fun of for being different. We always felt a little odd, especially with... You felt other. We felt other. We had the garlic smelling house and we had, you know, we went to school with our clothes smelling like food. Nobody else's did. Our lockers, we had all those stories, but we were very welcomed. And by high school, it was like we were the house to eat at. Like that's definitely where you went for the good food, you know? What kinds of stuff would your mother make? Oh my gosh. I mean, all of the favorites. I mean, back then, this is like 90s Ohio, you were drinking Mountain Dew and pizza at other people's birthday parties. But at ours, we were either doing like authentic Sunday sauce, which let me tell you, includes pig's feet and things like that. That's, you know, if we did

the Italian stuff. But my mom would do, you know, cousa, like the cored out squash that are stuffed with lamb and rice, which is one of the recipes in the cookbook, to buli instead of just a green salad. We'd have a parsley tomato bulgur salad. You know, that was how the messaging was. This is who you are, and we're not going to hide from it. In fact, we're going to present at all of these parties. The teenagers were eating well. They were eating well. And I have three brothers, so there was constantly food. There was a lot of big boys who were eating in our house. And, you know, there was always food on the table regardless of what time you stopped by. And we just came to identify pride with it. And, again, because we weren't, you know, we were accepted in the community, it was probably a little bit easier.

And I know that's harder for people who do deal with bullying and things like that. But we didn't. And very quickly we almost became cool for it. It's still a little odd to be called exotic in high school, but that was a word often. You were called exotic. I was called exotic other things as well. But again, often by just almost like people who didn't know they were saying something inappropriate or asking what I was. That was like a daily basis. Like, well, what are you? Because you couldn't be placed exactly. So I quickly had to become articulate in how to explain where I'm from and why. But that inherited immigrant experience was like, but I'm not.

Myself internally, I felt guilt because I knew I wasn't born there. I knew my mother wasn't born in Lebanon, but I was claiming this history and this culture and wanting to make sure that was okay because I hadn't suffered through the immigration that my grandparents had gone, you know, generation had really suffered through. But so much of what they went through was passed on. Like my mom grew up with her grandparents, who were the ones that came from Lebanon. And she, you know, the hard work, the poverty was inherited, you know, and there's just certain traits that are passed down to you from that, that I felt were a huge part of my life and defined who I was. So it was kind of saying, it's okay for me to own this. You all would go to Detroit often, though. Your parents,

your mother in particular, is from Detroit. Your aunts and uncles lived there, your grandparents. And Detroit has a very large Lebanese population. It actually does hold the distinction, or it held for a long time, as having the largest Middle Eastern population outside of the Middle East. So you can get all types of food there. Lebanese food is just a regular thing that you can get just about anywhere. What did visiting Detroit as a kid mean to you? Oh, well, you know, I mean, it was so fun because all our cousins were there. So there was cooking, there was family, and then there was the stocking up because we lived a little bit farther away. For my mom to keep catering and keep Lebanese

food on our table, we had to go to all the stores in Detroit and also in Toledo. And I was shocked when I got to D.C. and I couldn't find the Lebanese stores that seemed so prevalent in, you know, Toledo and in Detroit. So those little trips were like a huge part of my upbringing and such a fun, fun part of it. Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest today is restaurateur Rose Previtt. She has a new cookbook called Maidan, Recipes from Lebanon and Beyond. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is Fresh Air. So I want to talk just a little bit about some of the dishes in the cookbook and some of the things you discovered just through your travels. Like

there's a recipe in your book for something really simple, tomato cucumber salad, but you write how you don't know if there's a country in the world that does not have a version of this salad. Did you start to see patterns or similarities like this as you move through these different regions? I'm thinking about the bread, too. The bread, the kebabs, the tomato cucumber salad was just on repeat with slightly different spices or oils. You know, the Georgians put walnuts in it. Lebanese put mint in it. You know, it was just like places that seemed very different, but did have a similar dish. In fact, our bread in the recipes in the book, but is the flatbread that we use at Maidan. People always try to call it like pita or naan. And I'm like, no, no, no,

no. Those are different. And we actually don't title it. We just call it flatbread because the recipe was inspired by multiple places and even the journey of bread that's made in a tandoori style oven. So we use a clay oven that's fueled by fire. We don't use a commercial oven. It's kind of crazy actually, but it works. Do you have a favorite dish that your mom would make for you when you were a child? I mean, the kibinaje, it's basically a lamb tartare in more common terms. And how do you make it? You have to go to, in my world, the Lebanese butcher or a halal or Middle Eastern butcher to get a very fat-free grade of finely ground lamb. So the fat content is basically important. You got to take most of it out. So it's like a very pure, very lean lamb that's cut with a certain dye. And then bulgur, which is the basically, you know, a wheat germ as it's referred to. That's

basically what makes kibbe kibbe. You can put bulgur in potatoes. That recipe is in the cookbook in pumpkin. As long as there's bulgur in Lebanese cooking, it is at that point kibbe. So kibbe naye is raw lamb. Our recipe is very basic. It has ground onion in it, salt and pepper. It's served with olive oil. It's served with raw onions and pita.

It's called pita bread. We called it Syrian bread growing up, but Lebanese flatbread. And you make a bite with the onion and the oil and the ground lamb. And it's a beautiful dish, which my family is Syrian Orthodox. So as a Christian family, we also put a cross. We make a cross in the middle because my mom always told me it was to pray that no one got sick on the raw meat. So you pray and you put a cross, and that's how it's presented to you. Sounds a little weird, but I think the nostalgia of it and just the flavor is super unique. And we only did it for special occasions. You know,

it wasn't an everyday dish. And so I also associate it with really special holidays. And when I traveled in Lebanon, though, I'll tell you, I went to both my grandfather's village and my grandmother's village. They actually make this dish very differently. Does it taste different? I acknowledge that in the book, actually. There's the recipe from Bishmazine, which is northern Lebanon where my grandfather's from. They use a lot more spice, and they serve it with a pepper sauce that's almost like a harissa. So different than the way my mom's family does it, which is just way more flavor of the ingredients and the raw meat not covered up by any spices. And the harissa was just like a mind-blowing to me. We never did that. But my grandfather's family did. And probably someone from North Africa who

immigrated at some point to Lebanon brought that to this village. And everyone just from this village makes it that way. You have a section in the book where it's like a list of maybe a dozen things that we should all have in our pantry if we want to delve into these recipes. Can you give us a simple recipe to use for something like za'atar, which is an ingredient that is typical in Lebanese food? I mean, the most simple is just what we call talami bread, which is just dough that has some olive oil on top of it and then sprinkle with za'atar. So I'm not pushing you in the book to make your own za'atar blend. That would be hardcore and you can do it if you want, but there are amazing mixes available in a lot of stores now, even in not specialty Middle Eastern stores. Zatar is a plant. It's

in itself is an herb, but it's blended with a bunch of other herbs. And that is, you know, the beauty of the region too. It's the same name, but different regions have different ones. Like there's Lebanese, Palestinian, there's even Aleppo blend. So specifically from Aleppo, not just from Syria, but from Aleppo. So it's a very, like, regional specialty that families are very proud of. So don't go making your own. You can buy a lot of really good ones. And all I have to do, and I just did it at Christmas with my mom, is she had bought some pita that she decided was not acceptable at the local grocery store.

So we cut it up. We put olive oil on it. We spread za'atar. We mixed it with olive oil and za'atar, threw it in the oven and made za'atar chips. And then you can use those for any of the dips. It makes your hummus a hundred times more exciting. You can just put some olive oil, I recommend unfiltered Lebanese olive oil on top, and then you sprinkle za'atar on your everyday grocery store hummus. And it just makes it so much more exciting. I hope you use our recipe to make your own, but za'atar changes everything. And so I

think keep it in your pantry. Even if you're not making an elaborate recipe, you have old dough that you had leftover from the bread recipe or you made homemade pizza and you had some leftover, use that za'atar, throw it over olive oil, stick it in the oven, and it will taste like you spent hours making it. Food is political. What we choose to eat, who has access to it. I mean, it's a story shaped by economics and geography and immigration. These are all things you're thinking about. All of the time. And I think, you know, the moment it all collided was in my realization living in Russia that I couldn't actually get Georgian wine at the time. It was embargoed.

At the time, Russia was punishing Georgia for a skirmish that they had had a few years before we got there. So all the expats are like, you got to have the Georgian wine. It's the cheapest, highest quality wine you'll ever have. But, oh, sorry, you can't actually get it here right now. And once I dug into like the politics of it, I'm like, this is crazy. But then I thought for the first time after policy school, oh my God, wine is geopolitical. This is all my world's crashing together. You're punishing this country because the only people buying Georgian wine back then were Russia and it really affected the economy. The bright side is it caused Georgia to have to start selling to other countries, which is now why we can get it

so easily. And a lot of people in Europe can get it so easily. But that was a shift out of necessity because they were decimated. The wine industry was decimated once Russia did that. But then I said to myself, that's where the policy person came in and thought, well, when I open this restaurant, I'm going to sell as much Georgian wine as humanly possible. It's my Putin protest. And, you know, I have to say I was very proud Compass Rose for the first few years did sell more Georgian wine as humanly possible. It's my Putin protest. And, you know, I have to say I was very proud. Compass Rose, for the first few years, did sell more Georgian wine than any other restaurant in America. But then as we traveled, I realized Georgia's not the only place. They have this 8,000 years of winemaking that nobody knows about.

Because in the U.S. and the Western markets, we're always like, France and Spain. There's a certain place. In Italy, that's it. There's like three European countries. That's it. There's like three European countries. That's it. And it's like, wait a second, Lebanon, my ancestral homeland, full of amazing wine that is very hard to access in the United States. And so I realized this is a political problem.

Because why don't we? Because of geography, because of politics, because of socioeconomic reasons, because of war. That's the only reason we don't know about Jordan wine or Lebanese wine. And so, yes, I've made it partially my mission to combine my, you know, policy, combine my food and policy background in this way. There's so much conflict happening in these regions at this very moment. I'm thinking about the origin of Maidan for you came from a visit to Ukraine and you hearing that term. How do you reconcile all of that as you're trying to provide joy, a space where people are consuming food that comes from these places,

while also holding space for people who are really dealing with terrible things? No, from day one of opening Maidan, my hope was to welcome people into the space the way people had in the countries that we visited. So our opening team went to Tunisia, Morocco, Lebanon, the Republic of Georgia, and Turkey. Those were the five countries where we did a research trip. A lot of countries you do associate with conflict, And we had the absolute opposite experience, right? We could not have felt safer. We could not have felt more welcomed. And so Maidan's intention from day one

was to extend that hospitality and again, inform people that the places that they only associate with things like the Arab Spring or communism actually have people just like us trying to be just like us, which is safe and care for their families and feed their families. And, you know, food to me has always been that equalizer, the thing we all need. And what we hope with the cookbook and what the restaurants are always, you know, trying to do, even in the hardest of times like we're in right now, is to continue that message of like, again, back to the obligation that I have to keep telling people, you know, about these beautiful places I was fortunate enough to see and to try to make them seem more approachable through the food.

Rose Previtt, thank you so much for this conversation and this cookbook. No, I appreciate you letting me have it. Thank you for listening. Rose Previtt's new cookbook is called My Dawn, Recipes from Lebanon and Beyond. Coming up, we remember actor Tom Wilkinson, who died on Saturday at the age of 75. This is Fresh Air. Actor Tom Wilkinson died on Saturday at the age of 75. He caught the eye of American movie audiences in the 1997 film The Full Monty, where he played a laid-off factory manager who joins a ragged band of male strippers.

Wilkinson was born in Yorkshire, England, and was familiar to British TV and stage audiences for years, appearing with Helen Mirren in the Prime Suspect series and in many other roles. In the 90s, he turned his focus to movies with roles in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Shakespeare in Love, Batman Begins, and Selma. He earned two Oscar nominations, one for his performance in the 2001 movie In the Bedroom, where he and Sissy Spacek starred as a couple dealing with the murder of their only son. His second Oscar nomination was for his role in the movie Michael Clayton. Dave Davies spoke with

Tom Wilkinson in 2005 when he was starring in the movie Separate Lies. He played a high-powered British lawyer whose well-ordered life is shattered when he learns about his wife's infidelity. In Separate Lies, you play a powerful lawyer in a seemingly happy marriage, but who discovers all kinds of problems. What drew you to this role? I like the idea of playing somebody

from the upper middle class because it's not something I do. It's not a class that I am. My background is much more sort of blue collar. So I thought it was a wonderful opportunity to play somebody from the upper middle class. One of the characteristics of that class, I am led to believe, is that they believe in continuity, but the continuity is not the continuity between now and the future. It's a continuity between the past and the future. They want things to be like they always have been. If it was good enough for my father and my grandfather, it's certainly good enough for me and good enough for my children. You know, in a certain sense, they lead a rather unexamined life.

And that's the sort of penalty that poor old James Manning pays when he realizes that his wife is being unfaithful to him. Because, of course, his first response would be, but why? She's got everything she needs. What could possibly motivate her to have an affair with this fellow? And so on and so forth. So it's that sort of, you know, the more you can establish somebody reveling

in the things of his power and wealth and so on, the more fun the audience will have watching him sort of looking again at his job and thinking, was this the best job I should be doing? Shouldn't I be doing something else? Was this the right house to be living in or should I have lived in something? You know, seeing somebody sort of rebuild the sort of moral universe that has been shattered. You were born in England. Your dad was a farmer when you were young and then you moved to Canada, I think from ages 5 to 11, right? And then back to England where your father pursued a number of different activities. And I'm wondering, it's a pretty varied background,

kind of what those travels might have exposed you to or, I mean, did that affect the kind of creative insight that you drew on in your career? I'm not sure. The thing, what it created, here's the situation. As far as my family is concerned, from my father's family and indeed my mother's, but my father's particularly, they were farmers in the same bit of England

for a thousand years. There is just no evidence that any member of my family was anything other than a farmer. My grandfather was a farmer, my father was a farmer, and to all intents and purposes, had things turned out differently, I would have been a farmer and my brothers would have been farmers at the point. But what happened, of course, that this was kind of shattered. This sense of continuity was shattered completely. For one reason or another, the farm went

and there was never any question that I was going to follow in my father's footsteps. So this sort of, as it were, discontinuity perhaps gave me a kind of rootlessness. There was no home. There was nothing I could sort of return to, nothing I could say, you know, that's the real me there. You know, I should be running the farm, but my brother is running the farm. There was no farm. There was nothing of that. So, and I think in a certain sense,

rootlessness in that sense is quite good for an actor. It's not necessarily going to make an actor, but it means they are much more wide-ranging in the things that they will allow themselves to be influenced by, that they're perhaps not as set in their cultural ways as perhaps they could be if they had that thing which we crudely call a strong sense of themselves. An actor probably doesn't have a strong sense of himself in that sense, and I think probably that's one of the reasons. Reinventing yourself, in effect, in life and on the stage, right?

Yes. You were introduced to a much wider audience with the film The Full Monty. And to remind our audience, this is the story of a group of men who lose their jobs when their Sheffield steel plant closes. And one of them hatches upon this idea of creating a male strip team. This is a remarkable film, and it was hugely successful. But I can imagine when you looked at the script, you must have thought, my heavens, what is this? What was your reaction? I had no hesitation whatsoever in doing this film. I read it, and the first time I read it, I thought, this is good. And I went to get it made.

And it was a point in my career where I decided I'm going to stick with films. I'm not going to do any more television or theater. I'm going to stick with films until I find out whether it's going to work for me or not. But with this one, I just simply had no faintest hesitation in doing it. What told you it was going to work? Because it seems to me so much of what works here is, I don't know, the chemistry, these guys, the way you all do it. Yeah, well, I thought the writing was wonderful and worked perfectly. But added to that,

I thought it was one of the most brilliantly cast movies that I've ever seen. You know, there were lots of actors in it, none of whom I'd ever heard. Robert Carlyle I knew, but the rest of them I'd never heard of, and they turned out that they were just perfect for it. And that, together with, you know, all the rest of the kind of imponderables that go to making a film

it absolutely achieved what it set out to do how do you how do you decide which roles you will take you're drawn to simple Dave you just you just follow your nose. You ask those simple, really instinctive questions like, you know, can I shine in this role? Can I do this role better than anybody in the world? Is there something in it that I recognize? Nothing, you know, it's really not to do with the money or the director or the other members of the cast.

The first simple thing is, am I going to enjoy playing this character? And it's childish, I know. And I shouldn't, from my great age, be admitting to something so sort of, you know, do I like the look of this toy? Or am I going to wait to the next toy shop and see if there's something even cuddlier? No. That's how it works. It's a purely instinctive decision. Well, Tom Wilkinson, thanks so much for speaking with us. Thank you, Dave. It's been a pleasure. Dave Davies speaking with Tom Wilkinson in 2005. He died on Saturday at the age of 75.

Tomorrow on Fresh Air, we talk to Bloomberg reporter Emma Cort about Ozempic and the new class of medications revolutionizing the medical treatment for people with obesity. She'll share more about how they work, the latest research on the long-term impacts, and explain how and why the shortages and high costs has widened the divide on who has access. I hope you'll join us. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salad, Phyllis Myers, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Teresa Madden,

Anne-Marie Baldonado, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelly, and Susan Nyakundi. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.