There’s a problem with German bread. It crumbles when you use it to mop up fried eggplant or bulgur salad from a plate. It’s also difficult to fill with meat, hummus and sauces. Traditional German baking can do a lot, but it can’t do everything. It’s no surprise, then, that when asked what the most popular item in his grocery store is, Mohammad Hanawi, 20, immediately answers with "chubs arabi,” the Arab pita bread. It is well-suited for dipping, and Syrians eat it with almost every dish. Some even revere it so much that a piece that falls to the floor isn’t thrown out, but rather picked up and kissed and then eaten.
On a Monday in February, Hanawi is sitting behind the counter in a sporty blue and white jacket. At this point in time, COVID-19 still seems like a faraway problem. Next to him, his father is weighing olives for a customer. Hanawi writes down orders for the store in Arabic. He opened the family business in January. He says it’s going great, and that beans, sausages and pickled grape leaves were also popular. "Syrian things. That’s what people were missing here.”
By "here,” he means Uetersen, in the Pinneberg district near Hamburg, in northwest Germany. The city has about 19,000 inhabitants, and until 2015, almost none of them had a Middle Eastern background. Hanwai says his family was one of the first to move to the city. Today, around 300 Syrians live in Uetersen.
New arrivals frequently asked where they could buy the best Arab groceries, he says. "In Uetersen, that didn’t exist.” Hanawi decided to fill the gap in the market. As the family discovered in recent months, this was a pretty crisis-proof decision. Unlike many stores in other sectors, Hanawi didn’t have to close his doors during the lockdown, and the demand for chubs arabi continued, uninterrupted.
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