“You have to give me a couple days,” says Ron Hermiz, sounding harried. “Everyone here is crying for the product.” A customer in Michigan is on the phone, wanting to place a large order of kubba, the dish of bulgur wheat and minced meat known more commonly as kibbeh.
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Kubba is a pan-Levantine dish that appears in many forms, though Iraqis will tell you they’re all derived from the one that comes from the northern city of Mosul. Kubba Mosul is a flat disc of cracked bulgur stuffed with spiced ground or pounded meat—in Hermiz’s case, beef—with perhaps some nuts or raisins thrown in. It’s eaten boiled, grilled, or fried, sliced into pie wedges and maybe squirted with a wedge of lemon.
Hermiz is Assyrian-Iraqi, and his large extended family comes from a village in northern Iraq called Dawoodia. Many of his clan immigrated here or to Michigan in the late 70s and early 80s, fleeing the Iran-Iraq war. That’s what his parents and aunt and uncle did in 1982, when Ron was six months old.
Hermiz employs four people full-time in the tiny storefront (plus extra help during the busy pre-Ramadan run-up), operating the mixers and a custom-made Japanese kubba machine he bought at the annual National Restaurant Association show at McCormick Place. His, he says, is only one of three in existence—the other two are in Saudi Arabia. He wouldn’t let me see it, nor would he allow me back in the plant.
