Conflict Food

Pittsburgh’s high-concept, low-profile restaurant Conflict Kitchen serves sandwiches with an agenda

By Amy Strauss
Published: February 2nd, 2011 | 12:00am

In Pittsburgh, a city where hungry crusaders typically are on the prowl for Primanti Brothers’ piled-high-with-fries concoctions, there’s a new sandwich in town.

Meet the kubideh—constructed on homemade Barbari bread and topped with grilled spicy beef, sumac, parsley, basil, mint and onion—the sole offering of Conflict Kitchen, a provocative takeout cafe in the East Liberty district that dishes out the ubiquitous street food of Iran in exchange for conversations on international affairs, clarifications on cultural misconceptions, and promotions of foreign tolerance.

Serving only edibles from countries that are in unsavory entanglements with the United States, Conflict Kitchen—founded by multidisciplinary artists Jon Rubin, Dawn Weleski and John Pena—began to hawk their socially political eats in May 2010, featuring first an Iranian storefront named Kubideh Kitchen. “Our plan is to go out of business every few months and change our identities in order to highlight and provoke other cultures,” says Rubin, who also acts as an assistant professor of art at Carnegie Melon University.

Correctly portraying the authenticity of a country’s traditional grub is important, too, and in order for the artists to concoct the sandwich in question, they did not skim over the research. As schooled for the first installment by Illah Nourbakhsh, an Iranian-born robotics professor at Carnegie Mellon, the public-work artists not only parlayed the handheld kubideh for locals, but also produced eye-catching, custom-made wrappers that swim in text from native interviews on nuclear power, Israel, women’s rights, youth and revolution.

The second iteration, the Afghan Bolani Pazi (bolanipazi.com), opened in November 2010 and continues organizers’ delicious tradition of using food as a forum for cultural conversations. Other countries on the docket for the next incarnation come spring 2011 include Venezuela, North Korea, Myanmar and Cuba. “We’re constantly thinking of new ways to be more dynamic with our customers,” says Rubin. “We’re considering a music exchange where people upload music they are listening to right at our storefront, and then walk away with music downloaded from countries like Afghanistan.”

For more information on the Conflict Kitchen, visit conflictkitchen.org

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