When you walk into Oasis Jimma Juice Bar, a sliver of a storefront tucked under the 125th Street subway station in N.Y.C., you’ll probably notice the lime-green color of the walls. You’ll see the printed signs with quotes from Mahatma Gandhi like “It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver” and advisories on why guacamole is good for diabetes or how onions stimulate hair growth. You’ll wonder why what appears to be every country’s currency is pasted to a giant map of the world, with a big arrow pointed to Ethiopia that reads, “WE START FROM HERE!!!”
Oasis is a juice bar where the bottles aren’t branded with minimalist-chic labels, the owner is not a former yoga instructor, and there’s not an acaí bowl or activated charcoal shot in sight. It’s just very fresh juices accompanied by very tasty Ethiopian food. And, at the risk of sounding too much like a BuzzFeed headline, it’s the juice bar you’ve been missing your whole life.
When I get up to the counter to place an order, Abdulsalam Abujebel, the Ethiopian-born owner, is already emerging from the kitchen with a tray of things for me to try: almond milk oatmeal topped with mangoes, strawberries, and nuts; sambusas (Ethiopian fried pastries) filled with lentils; sweet potato soup with ginger and garlic; and a beautiful three-layered smoothie, one section a blend of almond butter, coconut milk, mango, and avocado; another with passion fruit and peach; and the last with blueberry, peach, mango, and banana. The food is refreshing and bright, but more than that, it makes you feel good, from the jolt of ginger in the soup to the impossible creaminess of the mangoes. It’s the same feeling I get when I’m back home in Dallas, eating food from my mother’s kitchen.
I ask Abujebel, in between bites, how he got here. The story starts in his hometown of Jimma, Ethiopia: “The birthplace of coffee!” he says, proudly. His father was the local holistic doctor, “like a dad for all of humanity in the area.” But he died in a car accident while returning from the Hajj, the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, leaving Abujebel pretty much on his own by age 11. Abujebel spent his teenage years wandering on foot between villages in Ethiopia and Kenya, working as a doctor in a neighboring town, as a cook in a mining village, and as a fruit-cart vendor in a Kenyan refugee camp. But it seemed impossible to get ahead: He was thrown in jail for not having a vendor’s license, regularly threatened by police who thought he was part of an anti-governmental group, and, whenever he’d finally cobbled together a reasonable amount of money, he’d get robbed. One bright spot: He met and married an aspiring doctor.
After applying for refugee status multiple times, Abujebel immigrated to New York in 2012—his wife followed soon after. He was working three jobs at Newark Airport and hoping to become a community organizer. Then he found out he was diabetic. Between shifts, he started learning about holistic nutrition, building on the lessons he’d picked up from his father. The idea to open a juice bar was born. “I always wanted to do what my daddy used to do, and juice is a form of natural medicine,” Abujebel says. “A juice bar, in a way, is like a clinic.”
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