When Ahmad Suliman dropped out of college in his final semester to work in restaurants, his parents were not exactly thrilled. “You know, immigrant parents, gonna be like, oh, you’re gonna drop out of school to work at a restaurant,” he says with a laugh. But Suliman had made up his mind, and he felt the pressure of that decision acutely. “I had no room for error.”
More than a decade later, that bet on himself has paid off. Café Suliman, the intimate 24-seat Arabic restaurant Suliman opened in 2023 in the Melrose Market complex on Capitol Hill, has been nominated for a James Beard Award for Suliman’s work as an “emerging chef,” one of the most prestigious honors in American food. For a first-time restaurateur who taught himself to cook on the fly while running the front and back of house simultaneously, the recognition is a lot to take in.
“It means that it’s like vindicating,” Suliman said. “It’s nice to see that the work that we’ve done, you know, immigrating here 20 years ago, and getting into an industry that has a lot of egos and a lot of imposter syndrome, it’s nice to get that.”
Suliman grew up in Abu Dhabi, the son of Sudanese parents, and moved to Seattle in 2005 to attend college. He never finished. Instead, he fell into the city’s restaurant world, starting as a server at Sitka & Spruce in the Melrose Market building where Café Suliman is today, and picking up shifts at the market’s butcher shop. He later spent time selling wine for local importers, watching Seattle’s wine scene expand rapidly before the first round of Trump-era tariffs made things, as he put it, “a little more expensive.”
The path to opening his own place was similarly winding. During the pandemic, Suliman began hosting cocktail pop-ups, then pivoted to food when he was no longer working bar shifts. He teamed up with a chef friend and started doing Sunday brunches out of a neighboring kitchen. They sold out immediately, twice. That momentum, combined with a chance encounter at a Glass Wing warehouse sale in the Melrose Market space, led to a conversation with the landlord. A short-term lease followed, and Café Suliman opened to the world in 2023 in a pairing and partnership with natural wine purveyor Cantina Sauvage.
“This kind of fell on our lap,” Suliman said.
The restaurant’s menu draws from across the Arab world, Sudan, Morocco, Syria, the Gulf, filtered through Suliman’s obsession with Pacific Northwest produce and the farm-to-table ethos he absorbed working in the Melrose Market ecosystem. He described working backwards from ingredients or condiments he wanted to make, letting dishes emerge from that process rather than engineering them to fit a predetermined concept. A cauliflower dish famously originated from a broken aioli he didn’t want to throw away. He dunked roasted cabbage in it, threw it in the oven, and liked what happened.
The menu is pointedly free of falafel and shawarma, not because Suliman doesn’t respect those dishes, but because he says the restaurant can’t do them justice, and more importantly, because they’re exactly what people expect an Arabic restaurant to serve. “As an Arab, you’re tired of people telling you what to do,” he said. “You just do what you want to do.”
What Suliman does instead is serve dishes like his hummus topped with wood-braised lamb shoulder, a riff on a traditional preparation where whole animals are buried in sand beneath an open fire and slow-cooked for hours. Here it becomes a braise, seasoned with black lime, dried limes that develop an intensely concentrated citrusy-umami flavor, and finished with whey for brightness. “The black lime gives it that final brightness and cuts through the lamb,” he explained, adding that it’s an ingredient he thinks is wildly underused in Middle Eastern cooking.
The nomination, Suliman said, has prompted some internal reflection about what not to change. He and his business partner Mark had a frank conversation about staying grounded. A friend’s advice has stuck with him: “Remember that you are doing what you’re doing, and they called you in the first place because of what you’re doing. So stick to it.”
That means no new systems, no scripted steps of service, no sudden pivots to please a wave of first-time visitors drawn in by the buzz. “We’re not gonna have a system for everything,” Suliman said. “When it comes to service, you want people to be people.”
Café Suliman also received a community award from StarChefs, the New York-based culinary publication that recognizes top talent in major cities, recognition Suliman said feels particularly meaningful given the restaurant’s origins as a gathering place more than a dining destination. He hopes the James Beard nomination sends a signal beyond Capitol Hill. “I feel like maybe other Sudanese people or other Arabs will take this industry seriously and push the Arabic cuisine even further.”
For now, Suliman is also preparing to open a cocktail bar called Shib Shib, Arabic for “flip flops”, in a Chinatown-International District alleyway off Maynard Avenue. He describes it as a comfortable, slightly divey bar built around Arabic ingredients, with no cocktail over $16. It is planned to open in March.
As for Café Suliman itself, Suliman has no interest in moving to a bigger space. He’s 40, back in the building where he got his start, and content with 24 seats and a packed house most weekends.
“I like being a community like this,” he said. “Coming back home.”
Café Suliman is located at 1531 Melrose Ave in the Melrose Market. Learn more at cafesuliman.com.
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