Hunley: Azra against the grain

If you think of prejudice as skewering its targets, then it's appropriate for a kabob house to be the place where that foul way of thinking dies a little more each day.

And at Al-Zaytoun Kabob and Grill in Woodbridge, several kinds of intolerance seem to melt away amid the spicy recipes.

First, there was sex discrimination.

When Azra Hafiz opened her restaurant two years ago this week, others in the industry weren't happy. And by "others," I mean men. Seems they took none too kindly to a woman having the audacity to own a kabob shop.

But Hafiz, who retired early from financial giant HSBC to open the restaurant, didn't fret. She took the ridicule as a challenge.

"Maybe I paid attention to it for all of 15 minutes," she told me last week.

Food has always been a passion for the Montclair resident, so she did what she had to do to get rolling in those first days—no matter how many hours it took.

Early on, she said, if she didn't have time to go home at night, "I would just sleep here."

Nowadays, several customers have become regulars at the eatery, sandwiched between a dance studio and a pawn shop in a strip mall on Smoketown Road.

But her staff is still mainly her two sons, and she said the recession has caused food costs to quadruple.

Fortunately for her, patrons are continuing to gobble kabobs as the nearby Prince William Parkway and other roads bring them to the restaurant whose name means "the olive" in Arabic. Though not to the same scale, Hafiz even serves her share of tourists like her neighbor, Potomac Mills mall.

She delights in the notion that her food brings people together.

Maybe a passer-by at the mall wouldn't have had any reason to speak to her in the past, but when they meet over a lamb kabob or a cup of her mint lemonade, they talk as if old friends.

"We try to solve the world problems," Hafiz joked.

The sharing of a meal brings a common experience that eliminates differences based on cultural heritage or religion.

And there's no lack of diversity when bread is broken at Al-Zaytoun. Hafiz' grandfather was born in India, but she's a Muslim who was born in Kenya and raised in England. Her menu comprises Afghan and Pakistani cuisine.

She's also developed a relationship with the folks at the neighboring DeGrasse Dance Studio.

"They have been a blessing for us," she said.

Students, their parents and instructors eat at Al-Zaytoun, some of the kids downing fare they turn down at home.

"It's not just like fast food," said dance instructor Wendy Richards, who added that all four of her children have sampled Hafiz' cooking.

Cyndi Murphy, whose 8-year-old daughter, Lauren, takes classes at DeGrasse, said she'd been to Al-Zaytoun only once.

But Murphy, who lives in Dale City, agreed that the mere presence of a kabob house near the studio breaks down "cultural barriers" to an extent.

That's good. Lots of people talk about how corporate businesses are the devil, and sometimes that's right on.

Other times, not so much. I've had as many cups of coffee as I could hold since age 15, and the ones at Starbucks were almost always better than those at small, independent coffee shops.

But Hafiz has created a place where patrons can feel good about spending their money locally and learn something, too.

That notion is even more satisfying than the kabobs for which I plunked down my money last week.

Jonathan Hunley is a staff writer at the News & Messenger. Contact him at 703-369-5738 or at .