Sabrina’s Cafe & Deli, in the East African enclave of St. Paul’s University and Snelling neighborhood is the kind of place where someone is always coming and going. A trio of radio producers with recorders rolling interview does not stop the real business at hand, serving customers who come and go at brisk intervals mostly in search of something fast — and delicious.
And Karima Omer, who named the restaurant’s for her daughter Sabrina, has the goods.
The tiny storefront is modest and unassuming. A few sweets are on display in the bakery case, and the sound of the espresso machine fills the air. But more importantly the sizzle of Karima’s flat top grill is almost constant.
The specialty of the house is Karima’s fresh chapati wraps. While chapati is an everyday food in East Africa, Omer’s scratch chapati more closely resembles the special occasion bread that people get in she learned to make in her hometown of Harar, Ethiopia about 150 miles east of the capital Addis Ababa.
Like a good pie or slice of pizza, Omer’s creation is all about the foundation. The warm chapati bread has a pleasant, dense chew, with a freshly baked fragrance. This is no ordinary bread, and no ordinary sandwich. It’s all in the details.
“Most restaurants don’t make it fresh,” said Omer. “If I tried to buy it from outside, people would know.”
Standing at the grill, dressed in an apron over a dark abaya, she watched a small mountain of steak and onions sizzle as it absorbed her own mix of East African spices. When it was just about done she laid an uncooked chapati, about the size and thickness of a piece of copy paper beside it on the grill. The dough quickly rose and browned.
Omar said she stumbled on her signature dish creation by accident one day as she made lunch for herself. Short on time, she wrapped her steak mixture in a chapati warm off the grill.
“A customer walked in and said to me, ‘What are you eating? What is that?’”
She told the guy it didn’t have a name. She laughed as she told the story, and about how she just came up with something.
“‘It’s a chapati wrap!’ And he said, ‘Can you do it for me?’ So now it’s popular and everybody knows now” she said.
Karima arrived in Minnesota in the year 2000, escaping the border war fare between Ethiopia and Eritrea. She said there had been war that in her country there was always war for as long as she could remember. Her family was unable to safely stay in one place when she was a child.
