The Influence of Arabian Food - Sufra Time at Mocha Box Coffeehouse

Think you've never eaten Arabian food? Think again.

Sugar. Syrup. Sherbet. Spinach. Artichokes. Saffron. Lemons. Coffee. Mocha.

The foods on our tables—and even the words we use for them—have been traveling between cultures for centuries. And Arabia sits at the crossroads of one of the greatest and most surprising culinary stories ever told.

Join us at MochaBox Coffeehouse for Sufra Time: The Influence of Arabian Food, an immersive evening of Arabian food, coffee, history, humor, and storytelling that may permanently change the way you look at your own kitchen.

Around a shared table, we'll eat our way through a story spanning more than a thousand years.

Discover why Arabic became the “shipping label” of the medieval world as foods, spices, and culinary ideas traveled across continents. Find out why sugar was once an extravagant luxury. Meet the legendary ninth-century celebrity tastemaker credited—perhaps a little too enthusiastically—with helping invent the way we eat dinner in courses.

And then there's your spaghetti.

Forget the old story about Marco Polo bringing pasta home from China. More than a century before he was born, an Arab geographer described dried pasta being produced commercially in Sicily and shipped throughout the Mediterranean.

Even the word “alcohol” has an Arabian plot twist you probably won't see coming.

And Arabia isn't the only mountain culture whose food tells the story of journeys, scarcity, ingenuity, family, and tradition. We'll follow some surprising roads all the way back to the American South and Appalachia—where even something as familiar as a peach cobbler has a passport stamped by cultures thousands of miles away.

But this isn't a history lecture.

You'll be eating Arabian food while discovering the remarkable stories behind the foods we all eat—with conversation, laughter, surprises, and the kind of storytelling that happens best around a shared table.

And we'll save one of the best stories for last: the remarkable journey of a chef whose life and food crossed cultures and continents.

We won't tell you who he is just yet.

Let's just say you'll already have eaten his cooking.

Come hungry. Come curious. And prepare to discover that the distance between Arabia and Appalachia may be a lot shorter than you thought.

Sufra Time: The Influence of Arabian Food
MochaBox Coffeehouse · Asheville, NC

One table. Two mountain cultures. A world of flavor between them.