Leena’s owner an Oakland icon

When Mohammed Issa’s mother departed Pittsburgh for Palestine after visiting her son, among… When Mohammed Issa’s mother departed Pittsburgh for Palestine after visiting her son, among her clothes, passport and essentials she left with a large jar of hot peppers.

“From here all the way to Palestine. That is how much she likes my hot peppers,” Issa recalled while grinning from one side of his crinkled face to the other.

Issa sat down to tell this story in his small restaurant on Oakland Avenue — Leena’s Food. The inside of his modest establishment is a testament to Issa’s changing life over the past 30 years. The hanging houseplants and Persian music are typical of most Middle-Eastern restaurants, but the pictures hanging on the tan walls tell a lot about Issa. The inside of the restaurant reveals the unique mix of Issa’s Palestinian ties at home and his integration into American culture.

Leena’s, named after one of Issa’s six daughters, is what you would expect a small dive on a college campus to look like. It isn’t the type of place you go for the atmosphere. Its tables are wobbly and the walls are decorated with his niece’s and daughters’ art projects. It’s the award-winning fresh falafel, authentic spinach pies and hot greasy gyros — as well as conversation with Issa —that draw people into Leena’s.

Customers pass in and out of the restaurant laughing and talking with Issa. Standing behind the small counter, Issa wears a baggy sweater on his rail-thin frame and a thick mustache across his ever-grinning face. He sends off a regular customer with an “I love you baby!” and checks on unrecognized patrons, walking up to their table to ask, “How you like that?”

One man asks Issa if the gyro he ordered was “the real deal.”

Issa stopped the interview.

“This is my recipe. This is my homemade recipe, my wife’s recipe!” he said proudly.

The man finished his meal, shook Issa’s hand and assured him he’ll be back before walking out the door.

Through daily interactions like this, Issa has become a sort of local celebrity on Pitt’s campus. Whether it’s the dirty jokes he’s telling or the interrogations about why you don’t want tomatoes on your gyro (“They are maybe the best part!”), most people walk out of Leena’s with some sort of friendly or funny interaction.

“I’m a very friendly person,” Issa said. “It makes the days go fast.”

Issa came to Pittsburgh from Palestine in 1979.

He came as a part of a surge of immigrants who moved to the United States between the mid-1960s and early 1980s, after changes were made to the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965, according to a Migration Policy Institute report.

Issa said that education and employment weren’t easily found in the West Bank — where his family lives in Palestine.

He says he was “very bored — no money, no jobs, no work.”

After attending Point Park University, Issa transferred to the Community College of Allegheny County and then again to Pitt and eventually ended up working for his brother’s plastering company before getting into the food business. He said the transition was a natural one.

“I just added this and this and this, and it’s good. Now here I am,” he said.

Leena’s started as a cart that sat outside of the Hillman Library from 1998 until 2004, when the carts were forced to move with the opening of Schenley Plaza. Issa made the best of the situation and used it as an opportunity to open a more permanent establishment. Even now, Issa still makes sacrifices to make ends meet.

Because of his financial troubles, he recently extended his weekend hours to 3:30 a.m. to serve the late-night college crowd. On nights Leena’s stays open late, he sleeps on the floor in a small room above the restaurant rather than driving all the way back to his home in Murrysville twice in a four-hour period — the restaurant opens at 10 a.m.

Despite the sacrifices, it’s still all a part of what he believes to be the American dream.

“Since I was a kid, I always wanted to come to America, and I finally did it,” he said. “Coming here, it’s like walking in a dark room with a flashlight. You only see two or three steps in front of you, but the longer I’m here, the more light I see.”

After 30 years working in the United States, the country’s appeal has not faded for Issa.

“America has a magnet in the center of it and it draws people in,” he said. “It’s such a good country. The people in America are wonderful, with some exceptions, of course. Very friendly people.”

Issa believes that the friendliness he sees in other people is a reflection of his own outgoing nature, which saves him from the harsh prejudices some Americans harbor against Middle-Eastern immigrants. Issa said he’s never had a problem.

“I’m a nice person that people will feel horrible for calling names. Plus I make their food. They trust me that far,” he said.

On one wall of his shop, just across from hanging Qur’an scrolls, is an ornamental plate with Hebrew letters on it and the world Shalom printed on it — not the usual décor in Islamic and Palestinian establishments. Issa, though, feels fairly removed from the ongoing Israeli and Palestinian conflict in the Middle East — even with family living in the West Bank.

“I’m a little different than people who live over there. I’ve been here for 30 years, and I always wanted peace,” he said. “To me it doesn’t matter between nationalities — if you are a nice person, you are a nice person. If you are not a nice person, you are hard.”

Issa admitted that he is not the perfect Muslim, but he prays and believes in God. He sees religion more abstractly.

“Religion is about being good to people. It’s how you treat them, you respect them, you listen to them, you never hurt them, you find compromise,” he said, trying to explain his own personal philosophy.

The Americanization of Issa’s life is also pretty clear in his restaurant. Up with a huge poster of Jerusalem and Qur’an scrolls, a Coca-Cola clock keeps the time and a Coke refrigerator holds all of his bottled drinks for sale. Seven framed photos of his children adorn the restaurant’s walls and surfaces.

One aspect of Palestinian culture that Issa has really clung onto is the importance of family.

“I have six daughters and a son,” Issa said proudly. “[My daughters] boss me around, and I can’t say no. They just say ‘Baba please?’ And I say ‘can’t say no!’”

Issa returned to Palestine to marry his wife in a family-arranged engagement before the two of them moved back to the United States.

They met traditionally in the homes of their parents and had a very formal engagement process. Despite their cultural transition to the United States, the traditional groundwork for their marriage serves them very well, he said.

“I have a very, very, very, very, very, very, good wife,” he said.

According to Issa, the real conflict between American and Palestinian values shows with his American-born children.

“In certain ways I’m Americanized, but the roots of my culture are [still here,]” he said. “My children always tell me, ‘This isn’t Palestine, Baba.’”

Even with the clash of culture, the daily struggles of running a restaurant and caring for seven kids, Issa considered himself a lucky man.

“God must love me. I’m telling you. I think he does. I’m sure he does, because I got a few tough ones, and I came through it,” he said.