A Restaurant Without Walls: Love, Legacy, and Palestine in the Heart of D.C

"Every keffiyeh color is welcome here. Black-and-white, red, rainbow — it doesn't matter. I care about people's hearts, not their labels." -- Nesrin Abaza

WASHINGTON - March 24, 2025 - PRLog -- On a busy stretch of Washington's U Street, diners at a small restaurant called Nabiha are greeted with warm plates of maqlubah, fattet jaj, and sea bass — and often leave with hugs from chef and co-owner Nesrin Abaza and her husband and business partner of three and a half decades, Mauricio Fraga-Rosenfeld.

Named after Abaza's late mother, Nabiha is more than a restaurant — it's a sanctuary. Inside, flavors, friends and families come together in a space the owners call a "restaurant without walls."

"This place is for everyone — not just Arabs or Palestinians," Abaza said. "We want people to sit, eat, talk, and remember that Palestinians are human beings. We have a history, a culture, a cuisine. We're not just numbers on a screen."

"We built this place to serve love, memory, and humanity," added Fraga-Rosenfeld.

Together, Fraga-Rosenfeld and Abaza have built a life and a business that reflect their complex backgrounds and the shared values that brought them together — bridging religious, cultural, and geopolitical divides. Their partnership is as seamless as it is strategic, with Fraga-Rosenfeld overseeing restaurant operations while Abaza manages the administrative side of their increasingly complex and quietly formidable culinary empire.

Their story reads like a cross-cultural fable: a Palestinian-Jordanian woman and a Jewish-Ecuadorian man meet in Washington in the early 1990s, fall in love, navigate religious and familial pushback, and eventually open more than a dozen restaurants across the city. Their current ventures -- Nabiha, and right next door, El Secreto de Rosita -- are perhaps their most personal efforts yet.

Abaza, a Muslim woman, and Fraga-Rosenfeld, an Ecuadorian entrepreneur whose grandfather survived the Holocaust, have defied stereotypes and cultural divisions since the beginning of their relationship.

"My father taught me to look for character, not background," Abaza said. "I found everything they taught me in one person — he just happened to be from another religion and another country."

Their union wasn't welcomed by everyone. Abaza was disowned by her family for three years before being allowed to return after the birth of her first child. Despite the hardship, the couple went on to become culinary trailblazers in Washington D.C., launching—among other things—the city's first cigar and martini lounge and, later, its first hookah lounge.

This project, however, is a little different. Though she had never cooked in a commercial kitchen, the events of the past year compelled Abaza to act — pushing her beyond her comfort zone to open a restaurant that challenges stereotypes and humanizes a narrative too often reduced to tragic, impersonal numbers.

At her husband's urging while visiting his family in Ecuador, Abaza tested a full menu by hosting a 40-person dinner party before returning to Washington. The recipes came from memory — and from Nabiha, her mother.

"If it's not authentic Palestinian, I don't serve it," Abaza said. "Even the wine we serve is made by Palestinians in Palestine."

While the restaurant's name honors Nesrin's mother, Nabiha, right next door is El Secreto de Rosita, named after Fraga-Rosenfeld's grandmother and her beloved ceviche recipe. Together, the two restaurants stand as tributes to the matriarchs who shaped their lives and inspired their values.

Both women left lasting impressions. In one poignant story, Abaza recalled meeting her husband's devout Catholic grandmother during an early visit to Ecuador. Unsure how she would be received, they had planned not to reveal that she was Muslim. But Fraga-Rosenfeld couldn't hold the secret for long — and when the truth came out, the response was nothing they had expected.

"She gave me a hug and said, 'There's only one God — and God doesn't build walls. Humans build walls,'" Abaza said. "She told me, 'You're the woman for Mauricio.'"

That message now hangs in spirit throughout Nabiha's dining room, where Palestinian decor meets an openhearted philosophy of inclusion. The restaurant draws an eclectic crowd — from European Parliament visitors to LGBTQ patrons, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists alike.

"Every keffiyeh color is welcome here," Abaza said. "Black-and-white, red, rainbow — it doesn't matter. I care about people's hearts, not their labels."