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The child of a midwestern American mother and Iranian father, Nooshâ was well acquainted with ingredients and dishes that were alien to childhood contemporaries in her hometown of Grosse Point, Michigan. Both sides of her family had an affinity for Persian food, prompting cameos by pomegranate seeds and tahdig (buttery pan-fried rice) at their otherwise traditional American Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts. She herself also cooked: Her grandmother gifted her recipe books and a subscription to Taste of Home, which Nooshâ recalls as "the most Midwest cooking magazine you could ever get." At twelve, she made her first foray to the stove, emerging an hour later with chicken cacciatore. It took; thereafter, she seized every opportunity to prepare food for friends, at her home or theirs. As an adult living on her own, she throws frequent dinner parties and produces Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings.

These joyous moments stand out in an otherwise pained adolescence: As a young child, Nooshâ moved with her family to Mattawan, Michigan, a small village southwest of Kalamazoo. There she experienced her first brush with racism, which intensified incalculably after Al-Qaeda's September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon. Being of Iranian descent, with brown skin and an otherly name, she bore the local brunt of tribal antipathy toward anyone of Middle Eastern heritage that infected the United States that fall. Her eighth-grade classmates launched an Anti-Nooshâ Club; their secret hand gestures and explicit AIM messages conveyed the same grisly wish: Nooshâ Elami should kill herself. Not one classmate broke ranks to befriend—or even defend—her, and her appeals to the school administration drew limp platitudes. "I am being truly bullied by hundreds of kids every single day," Nooshâ pleaded. "Kids will be kids," shrugged the authorities.

For years, she passed weekday afternoons in self-imposed house arrest—a cruel sentence for a girl who, in her own words, was addicted to attention and had once been a class clown, in part to offset a tumultuous home life. (She unhesitatingly describes her mother and father as "bad parents," though doesn't volunteer details.) And here she was deprived of any positive regard. She claims a thick skin and innate self-confidence and resilience, capable of brushing off any rejection as "their loss." But what defenses wouldn't be worn thin by such unmerited and absolute antipathy?

"I don't want to say it didn't affect me," she says. "Obviously, it did. I was very depressed, and it was really difficult."

This might explain a dichotomy Nooshâ displays. She can come off as hard-shelled and coiled, someone on whose bad side you wouldn't want to find yourself. But she's also a softie. During the restaurant's COVID- driven temporary closure, she kept in touch with fellow women of Wherewithall via group text, expressing how much she missed work with messages like, "I honestly would love to be at preshift* right now."

* a restaurant's nightly pre-service meeting

After high school came Hope College, a small, private Christian liberal arts school, to which she was awarded a creative writing scholarship on the strength of her poetry and short stories. She felt no affinity for Hope, matriculating there only because her parents were alumni—an educational arranged marriage. She dropped out after a year and a half, then tried community college.

She didn't finish. But during those same years, she did flourish off the academic grid working in foodservice. As a teen, she had staffed the counter at a Marble Slab Creamery (a predecessor to the similar Cold Stone Creamery) franchise and in 2012, during a brief post-college term of residency in Boston, took her first bona fide restaurant job, as a host at a steakhouse, before returning to the Midwest and settling in Chicago.

Seven years and countless gigs later, Nooshâ started at Wherewithall in late summer 2019, right after the restaurant's debut that July. She came to the job following a sting of others that began after Moto, a prominent modernist cuisine outpost where she'd waited tables, closed in 2016, following the suicide by hanging of its chef, Homaro Cantu. Nooshâ had flourished there, delivering cutting-edge food to the culinarily curious, many of whom treated their visits with reverence of churchgoers.

"It was kind of similar to here where all the guests who came in knew what they were coming in for, so they were really excited," she says. "It was really easy to get along with them, and I loved talking to them about the food and the wine."

She found Wherewithall "calming," and the bright, airy space was a salve after her most recent short-lived assignment—a hipster bar in an unfailingly dark lair where it always felt like two A.M. She also appreciated Beverly and Johnny's progressive proprietorship: The couple voluntarily provide what they can to their employees, including offering health insurance—by no means a given in the hospitality trade.


This excerpt is from the eBook edition.

Monday we begin the book Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet by Taylor Lorenz.
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