Growing up, my family’s house was always open

-- every night of the week, friends new and old would gather. My mother, like any Middle Eastern mother, delighted in making sure everyone who came to our home left with a full stomach.  It was a place that everyone could call home — where everyone could feel safe and welcome. 

As my two younger siblings and I grew older and left home or went off to college, things started to change. A few years later, my dad passed. Suddenly, my mom found herself without anyone to cook for. I noticed a certain gap -- it felt like she had lost her purpose. 

That all changed one fateful day. I organized a dinner and invited 20 friends to our home. 60 showed up. I realized we hadn’t ordered nearly enough food. My mom saw this and immediately sprung into action -- she rolled up her sleeves and got to cooking. 

An hour later, she emerged from the kitchen carrying a beautiful, giant golden rice dish — despite being visually stunning, it was made with simple ingredients that she had on hand: rice, saffron, yogurt, and eggs. All of our guests were floored. It was unlike anything that they had ever seen.  That dish became the main event for every dinner we hosted thereafter, and is Golden Rice’s signature dish: tachin. 

And I saw my mom light up in a way that I hadn’t in years -- that sparkle was back. 

That night, our house became a home again. The dinners were a hit — and I continued to host them for another 5 years -- until this April, when COVID-19 hit.  The first thing my mom said was, “What’s going to happen to my cooking?”  She was most saddened by the idea of not being able to share her food with our community anymore. 

So, we got to thinking -- how could we continue to feed LA with mom’s cooking?  We knew that even the pandemic wasn’t going to stop mom this time from doing what she loved: feeding people’s soul.  It was from that thought that Golden Rice Co was born. It started out as a simple Instagram-only pop-up. People would DM us to order, and my mom, siblings and I would literally prepare the food at our house, and people could swing by to pick it up. 

We gave out 10 rice dishes the first week to our friends. They posted about it on social, started talking about it with their friends... And then the next week, 22 people ordered. And then 55, and then 100, and then.. It snowballed until it got picked up by the people at The Infatuation. Then the LA Times came across it -- when Bill Addison, one of the biggest restaurant critics in town anonymously ordered it. 

Today, what started out in our family’s kitchen has become a real business-- we’ve expanded into the kitchen at local restaurant Bootsy Bellows, hired staff, and drivers to scale.  We’re thinking thoughtfully now about what the next chapter of Golden Rice Co holds — always with the guiding thought in mind: how do we bring mom’s cooking to more people?

In a city of transplants like LA, where people move from all around the country, or even the world, they’re often physically distant from their families, from the people they love. We want to create a sense of home away from home.