Gold Star Chili: Cincinnati chili with a Jordanian accent

When Frank Daoud arrived in Cincinnati in 1957, having come by boat from a village in Jordan, he immediately set out to make enough money to go to college. He and his brothers tried all kinds of things: selling orange juice, going door to door in poor neighborhoods selling old clothes as fabric, hawking newspaper subscriptions. 

He wasn't very good at selling subscriptions because his English wasn't quite good enough to make the pitch. But he had nice co-workers. They felt bad that he couldn't find the kind of food he was used to, so they let him pick where to have lunch. "I would order goulash if I could," he said. "That was familiar. And I would have the Cincinnati chili." It wasn't exactly like anything he'd ever had, but it had some kind of similarity in spicing to Jordanian dishes like the tomato-based stew galayet.   

He had no idea then how important that chili was going to become to him and his family, that Gold Star Chili, founded by him and his brothers, would become one of the most recognizable brand names in Cincinnati, that a small community of Jordanians would form here, most of them in the chili business.

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In the Sunday series I've been writing this year, "Cincinnati's Food Roots," I've highlighted the culinary contributions of groups who have immigrated to Cincinnati over the years. Putting "Jordanians" on the list seems a stretch, since statistically there are few Jordanians here and no Jordanian restaurants.  

But it's not just a cuisine that immigrant groups bring to the culture. It's the mindset of "Knowing they had an amazing opportunity," as Frank's niece Dena Cranley put it, "and being hungry to succeed." Immigrants also bring specific cultural truths with them when they immigrate.

One trait that all Arabs feel deep down is hospitality. 

Shakir Daoud was the most important person in a small Christian village in Jordan. Though the country is majority Muslim, there have been Christians there since ancient times, belonging now to the Greek Orthodox Church. All Arabs of any religion share the duty of hospitality: in a culture that grew in a hostile desert environment, it is mandatory to help a traveler, to welcome others to your home and provide for them.  

The Daouds weren't especially rich, and they had 10 children, but as the member of parliament from their village, Shakir and his wife Nora had more obligations than most to offer food and drink to visitors, even if they had to ration food for the family.  

"Jordan was like a third-world country then," said Frank Daoud. There were few economic opportunities. The Daouds, who put a high value on education, sent their boys to high school, but college was out of reach. 

Then Uncle Toufig showed up. 

"We didn't hear from him for 25 years," said Frank. Shakir's brother Toufig had left the village in 1919, and no one knew where he went. He had spent the years moving around in the big cities of the United States. He didn't settle down until he got to Cincinnati. He told his family they might want to make it in Cincinnati, too.

More:Gold Star's vegetarian chili is here to stay

So they came. Basheer in 1951, Charlie and Dave followed in 1952, Frank in '57, Dave in 1958.  Fuhied came and studied to be a doctor (he still practices as a cardiologist). Eventually, all but one of the Daoud siblings immigrated here. Frank earned enough money to go to school at the University of Cincinnati, switched to night school at Xavier, and graduated with a business degree. Basheer became an accountant. Dave worked at Spring Grove Cemetery. (Most of them changed their Arabic names to more American ones, and some changed Daoud to David, the English equivalent.) They helped each other out, lived together, ran little business schemes together. 

Many of these are things they would not have done in Jordan, where, though they were poor, they had social standing. But they were strivers. "None of us who came here had any money, but we worked and became the owners of a successful business. This is something you only see in this country," said Frank.

In 1963, Basheer, Dave, Charlie and Frank put together $12,000 to buy a business. Hamburger Heaven was a lunch counter in Mount Washington, with burgers, breakfast and chili on the menu. They financed some of the purchase with a loan from the company that owned the cigarette machines and jukebox. Dave and Charlie moved into the house next to the shop and ran the place together.  

By 1965, they were only selling chili. 

Roger David, Charlie's son, who is now the CEO of Gold Star, said this is the part of the story he'd always heard and never questioned. "They had just put their life savings into a place with a reputation for good hamburgers," he said. "Why would they suddenly give it up and switch to just making chili? What was the conversation about that?" 

It might have been because of a Jordanian way with spices. They had inherited the chili recipe when they bought the restaurant. Like all Cincinnati chili recipes, it stemmed from the original Greek-created Empress recipe. But Dave, who was in charge of the kitchen, had tinkered with it, changing the recipe, shopping for the right kind of spices, evaluating each spice the way his mother might have back in Fuheis.

It started out-selling everything else. So they specialized, realizing it was more efficient to just make chili. They put effort into buying high-quality ingredients, including good spices from around the world. "You know how you evaluate spices? By picking up a handful and seeing if it sticks together in a ball," said Frank. "That's how spices are still sold, by taste and feel and scent," said Roger. 

Roger David, who is CEO after non-family members were in the position for years, has been thinking about Gold Star's history and how to stay true to it while growing. The moment when Hamburger Heaven lost its hamburgers was a pivotal one. Gold Star didn't invent Cincinnati chili. It had been around for decades before the Daouds got into the business. But this was when they made it their own.  

And it took off from there. Gold Star was the pioneer of chili on the east side. They franchised. More relatives came over and worked for them. Some became franchisees, along with other non-Jordanian employees. Gold Star was the first chili restaurant to have a drive-through, and to create a prototype for a store.

The Shtiewi family, cousins of the Davids from the same town in Jordan, immigrated here and worked in the existing Gold Stars, then ran their own franchises.

The second generation of the Gold Star families remember their upbringing in the Jordanian community with appreciation, some not gained until they were older. 

Lana Shtiewi Wright, who owns Senate and Abigail Street with her husband Daniel Wright, said she used to ask her parents, who came in the '70s, why they came to Ohio instead of, say, somewhere cool, like California. "But, no, it was family for them," she said. "I really admire the way they stuck together and supported each other."

"My father used to always tell me about how he had to sell eggs to buy pencils for school when he was a kid," said Wright. "And he kept that amazing work ethic." 

Dena Cranley, daughter of Charlie and wife of Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley, remembers speaking Arabic at home, and she still has to explain sometimes that her family is Arabic, but not Muslim. She grew up with lots of relatives in the same neighborhood, with za'atar and olive oil on the table, thick Turkish coffee, and hummus for breakfast, friends coming over and discovering foods they'd never seen before. "You were going to get seconds, whether you liked it or not," said her brother Roger. 

He said that, despite their family being different from other kids' families, being from the family that owned Gold Star was more important than their ethnicity, making this 

Cincinnati chili, a food invented by other immigrants and embraced by the American mainstream of Cincinnati, was their passport to a family's new life, their route from a mountain village to American success.