Parwana Afghan Kitchen: What Durkhanai Ayubi witnesses behind this restaurant’s blue façade is bridging Australian and Afghan cultures

Tucked between a barber and a tiny car park in Adelaide, Parwana Afghan Kitchen’s pale blue façade hides an incredible secret you’d never guess walking by.

Multi-coloured lanterns drip from the ceiling inside, where framed newspaper clippings and family photos line the colourful walls.

This is where Durkhanai Ayubi, whose parents run the restaurant, witnesses incredible transformations every day over plates of palaw, ashak and dahl.

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“People come in with a mum or a dad or a grandparent who’s very… reluctant or hesitant, shall we say, to try this food that they’ve never heard of,” she tells 9honey.

“The body language is quite defensive.”

That all changes the minute they start to eat.

Through delicious Afghan food, reluctant diners are given a glimpse into the rich history and culture Ayubi and her family have cherished since they left Afghanistan more than 30 years ago.

By the time the plates are cleared away, there’s a visible shift in diners who came into the restaurant brimming with distrust and misconceptions.

“They will go out of their way to say, ‘I never knew […] I’ve only really understood [Afghanistan] through war and poverty and violence, but that is one of the most incredible meals I’ve had,'” Ayubi says.

That’s the power of food, of a meal shared from one culture to another, and it’s not lost on her.

A food expert, restaurateur, and prize-winning cookbook author, Ayubi has appreciated just how meaningful food can be since she was in the single digits.

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Just a baby when her family emigrated to Australia after being displaced by the Soviet-Afghan War, she grew up connecting to her culture over family meals made from recipes that had been passed down for generations.

Physically cut off from her homeland, food became a “tangible expression of home” for Ayubi, her parents and sisters.

“That natural inclination that we had as refugees and people who had lost so much to stay close to food was really powerful,” she says.

“The natural way I understood myself and my history […] and everything that has been lost was through food.”

While some refugee children recall being bullied on the playground for lunchboxes stuffed with food from their homeland, Ayubi had the opposite experience.

Instead of kids questioning her about the pita bread wraps in her bag, she was captivated by the sliced white bread and Kraft cheese slices in theirs.

The result was an exchange of culture through sticky-handed lunch trade and a sense of bonding over shared food that followed her from the playground into her career.

As a young woman, she recognised that most people saw her two cultures – Afghan through birth, Australian through immigration – as diametrically opposed, a binary of East and West.

But she found that, in practice, elements from both could coexist just fine.

“I could crystallise and choose a sense of myself from these different sets of cultural norms, it didn’t have to be either or,” she said.

“It was a chance for me to navigate and choose my own identity based on something that felt deeper and more universal.”

For years, she wanted to help other people see that too; to show them Afghan culture is not the militarised, violent scenes we’ve seen on news broadcasts and in the headlines for years, but something vast and varied and beautiful.

Her first book Parwana: Recipes and Stories from an Afghan Kitchen did just that through its award-winning exploration of Afghan food, culture and identity.

It helped bridge the cultural gap for millions of non-Afghan readers who picked it up, dismantling decades-old misconceptions often rooted in racism.

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Next week, Ayubi will take things a step further with what is sure to be an emotional event at the Sydney Writer’s Festival (SWF) centred on the book My Dear Kabul: A Year in the Life of an Afghan Women’s Writing Group.

Written by Afghan women who witnessed the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021, it brings together the experiences of 21 women to paint a far more honest picture of Afghanistan than many Australians have experienced before.

“The thing I’ve found missing when people are exposed to injustice and marginalisation, such as the story of Afghanistan and the story of lots of refugees in the world, comes down to narratives and who is telling our stories,” Ayubi says.

She will be joined by senior judge Shakila Abawi Shigarf and contributor Rana Zurmaty, both of whom were evacuated from Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover and have deeply personal stories to share.

Theirs are stories Ayubi believes everyday Australians need to hear.

“It’s important for us as Afghan people and the Afghan diaspora to be telling our own stories, and I think it’s important for the broader Australian community as well,” she says.

“Ordinarily, people rarely have a chance in the general public to hear about Afghan stories, especially from Afghan women.”

She also hopes to share more of her own perspective at SWF and in her next book, which is slated for release in 2026.

Ayubi was in her late 20s the first time she returned to Afghanistan and most recently visited in 2023, two years after the Taliban takeover.

It was an impromptu visit with her mother and while her home country bore the scars of the takeover, she could still see the beauty beneath.

It’s that beauty she wants to share with other Australians.

“It’s up to people like me or others from within that heritage to be able to start to share our own understanding of Afghanistan,” she said.

“I feel like it’s my responsibility as like the bridge between those cultures.”

It’s Ayubi’s hope that by sharing Afghan food, culture and stories she can help facilitate a better understanding of her birth country that doesn’t centre solely on war and violence.

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