Who is “Omar, the noodle master?”
His portrait hangs on the wall, above the heads of hungry customers at Ramen Best Option in an Algiers suburb.
“Omar” is Chinese.
Why We Wrote This
The ebb and flow of the global economy brings cultural forces in its wake. This is how a Chinese cook going by an Arabic name comes to be serving hand-pulled noodles in Algiers to Algerians.
His real name is Zhao Jun, and he is a Muslim Chinese immigrant from Lanzhou, in northwestern China, who came to Algeria in 2022 and opened a halal ramen restaurant two years later.
“I found there were no Chinese halal stretched noodles restaurants in Algiers,” Mr. Zhao says. “I wanted to open a ramen shop so Chinese people living in Algeria could have a place to eat Chinese food.”
But now, more than half of Mr. Zhao’s customers – and staff – are Algerian.
For decades, waves of Chinese workers and entrepreneurs have reshaped the infrastructure and economy in Algeria. Now they are increasingly influencing the North African country’s food scene. Whether through bowls of ramen, locally grown Chinese produce, or freshly made tofu, the Sino-Algerian culinary relationship is having an impact on Algiers.
In kitchens and markets across the capital city, Algerians and Chinese work, eat, and speak in broken versions of each other’s languages – a rare cultural exchange in a country where foreign communities remain relatively small.
China recently surpassed France as Algeria’s biggest source of imports, worth more than $9.45 billion in 2023. And Chinese laborers have changed the skyline in the capital, Algiers. They have built many landmark projects here, including President Abdelmadjid Tebboune’s $898 million Great Mosque of Algiers, completed in 2019; the Nelson Mandela Stadium completed in 2023; and the 750-mile East-West six-lane coastal highway, completed in 2023.
Audrey Thibert/The Christian Science Monitor
The COVID-19 pandemic halted or stalled most Chinese-Algerian construction projects, sending the majority of Chinese laborers home. Their numbers dropped from more than 91,000 in 2016 to just 7,000 in 2022, but the numbers are rising again. Today, there are about 35,000 Chinese migrant workers in Algeria – making the group among the largest foreign populations in Algeria. Most work for one of the 1,300 Chinese companies operating across the country.
More than just restaurants
In an open-air food market near the center of Algiers, packs of uncooked noodles and rice paper wrappers hang from the roof. They are decorations for Mohammed Nedjar’s stall, where he sells a wide variety of Asian food products.
Audrey Thibert/The Christian Science Monitor
Mr. Nedjar opened his store with his two brothers in 2012 after noticing the influx of Chinese laborers into the capital. It was the first stall at the market to sell Asian food products.
“My customers are mostly Chinese, but more and more Algerians are starting to buy Chinese products,” Mr. Nedjar says.
He uses his limited Mandarin vocabulary to sell fresh, locally produced tofu to his Chinese customers, as well as products like soy sauce and fresh ginger imported from China or France.
Mr. Nedjar is the first, but not the only, Algerian in this business. A number of stalls near his sell Chinese vegetables such as long bean, bitter melon, and daikon radish – which are not found in traditional Algerian cuisine. Many Algerian stallholders, like Mr. Nedjar, speak to their Chinese customers in Mandarin, to other foreign customers in English or French, and to Algerian customers in Darija – the Algerian Arabic dialect.
A similar mix of languages can be heard at Ramen Best Option.
A shared language of food
At Mr. Zhao’s restaurant, Algerian waiters speak broken Mandarin to Chinese cooks who respond in broken Darija. Many of his Algerian staff applied to work at Ramen Best Option as a way to improve their Mandarin so that they can communicate better with Chinese people in Algiers and eventually, perhaps, travel to China, Mr. Zhao says.
“The staff from our two countries working together is great,” Mr. Zhao says. “It is very important to open a restaurant like this in Algeria to teach people more about Chinese food, and also help me promote my hometown. It is a kind of contribution to my country. And it teaches [Algerians] more about us Chinese.”
Flexing his language skills, Mr. Zhao makes promotional videos on Instagram speaking in Darija. Devin Hou, a Chinese customer at Ramen Best Option who has lived in Algiers for five years, says these videos bring in Algerians from across the country – even the Sahara desert.
Mr. Hou says that Algerians frequent the restaurant because noodles, in the form of semolina pasta, are more familiar to them than traditional Chinese rice dishes.
Ramen Best Option also serves as a place where the Chinese can indulge their taste for familiar dishes, he says.
“Chinese people prefer to eat noodles or rice, and here in Algeria, the rice is totally different from what we eat in China,” Mr. Hou says. “And before [Mr. Zhao’s] restaurant, there weren’t any restaurants serving Chinese noodles.”
Mr. Hou says the noodles at Ramen Best Option taste like authentic noodles from the kinds of restaurants common in northwestern China. They are also inexpensive, which encourages Algerians to try them.
“Maybe in the future, they will also add more rice options beyond noodles and dumplings,” Mr. Hou suggests.
The success of Mr. Zhao’s ramen shop is contagious, and it has created competition. In the year since he opened his doors, another two Chinese restaurants have sprung up in the neighborhood, along with an Asian grocer.
