Santo Domingo

Diala’s story begins in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, where she - a single child - was born and raised. Her mother studied agricultural engineering and comes from a farming family. Her father, a doctor, is a lifelong vegetarian who practices both traditional and alternative medicine. Their impact on her approach to food are discernable throughout the pages of her cookbook, which celebrate the beauty of fresh local produce, embrace the simplicity in heightening natural flavours over heavy embellishments, and support the belief that what’s good for the body can equally be good for the soul. 

It’s between the ages of seven and eleven, while living at her grandparents’ home with her mother, however, that she learned the most valuable lesson about food. Sharing meals around a multigenerational table, Diala gleaned at a very young age that eating together connects us in ways that very little else does, by cultivating a sense of family, community, and tradition.

“Because my mom was working a lot, my grandma was the one cooking every meal - breakfast, lunch, dinner, waking me up and dragging me to the table,” Diala recalls. “And she always had this amazing hot chocolate. I have so many vivid memories of her cooking. [...] Everything was fresh, because my grandfather had a bunch of farms. He would come home every day [with] rice, beans, fresh vegetables. We always had food at the table; I didn't grow up in a culture of people eating in front of a TV. We always had those meals either with my grandparents or with my uncles. [...] So, for me, food and family - or food and loved ones - have always gone hand in hand. That's what I do with my girls, and with my partner, and with my friends. It’s about sharing.”

Growing up, Diala wanted to be a fashion designer, spending hours sketching away, filling up notebooks with her creations. But societal pressures to choose a more practical vocation and a consciousness of the uphill battle to success veered her toward advertising instead. After spending a couple of years in advertising working at an agency, Diala decided that it wasn’t for her. That’s when she went to work at her dad’s clinic and developed a keen interest in food and nutrition. She enrolled at McGill University to study Nutrition and Dietetics, and left home for Montreal.

Montreal

Montreal in all its splendour, culture, diversity, and ...winter ... provided a different education from what Diala anticipated. What drove her to this magical city was a curiosity for the health aspects of food, but what she found was an introduction to its soul.

She reveled in the discovery of different cuisines - Lebanese, Ethiopian, Japanese - all at a stone’s throw from one another. She began collecting cookbooks and magazines, cooking as soon as she got home from school. She spent weekends scouring the vibrant stalls of Atwater Market or Jean Talon Market in the summertime. Montreal is where Diala’s love of markets began.

“I realized the importance [...] of connecting with the people in the markets and learning where your food is coming from, and having those conversations with people. [...] That's my happy place: markets. And that's why as soon as I go to a country, the first stop I make is at a market. Right away. For me that's how you find the soul of a city, it's right there. Those people that have been working those stalls for years, that have 103 stories to tell you.”

“The moment that I'm baking, I am not thinking about anything else at any given time. I just enjoy the process. It's like such a beautiful dance and, yeah, it's my passion. It's my true passion.”

In the frigidity of Montreal winters, Diala found comfort in baking. She started with recipes from Chatelaine, from old cookbooks she’d inherited from family, or by watching Ricardo - Québec’s Food Network darling known for his charismatic positivity and glowing pearly whites. As her aptitude and passion for baking grew, Diala began dreaming about pastry school.

While attending McGill, Diala gave birth to her first daughter, Isabella. Graduating as a new mother, she needed a break, and Isabella’s father felt it was time to move back to Ontario where his family is from.

One day, while leafing through the newspaper, Diala found an ad calling for flight attendants for Air Canada. She responded to the ad with the intention to pursue flying temporarily, something to keep her occupied and employed over the next six months or so. She soon fell in love with flying, and a six-month stint became a near-20-year career that she’s still in love with to this day.

Mexico City

As years went by, Diala married and had her second daughter, Gabriela. When her husband at the time was transferred to Mexico City, she stopped flying and the family followed him for what would be a three-year post. Diala needed something to do and, in what she describes as pure serendipity, was delighted to discover that Le Cordon Bleu had a school in Mexico City. She would realize her dream of going to pastry school. 

Diala attended Le Cordon Bleu’s pastry and bread programs for two and a half years. She recounts the experience as a gruelling challenge of perfectionist expectations, where recipes were learned by rote, memorized and executed the following day. 

“If you had to bake a tray of croissants 73 times, you had to do it [...]. I don't believe in perfection, but I believe that you need to have certain standards for what you do, and that I have to make that for myself. And I think that came from going to pastry school. It gives you a lot of structure. [...] Because they didn't expect anything less than perfect, every weekend it was practice, after practice, after practice [...] But yeah, I wish I could go back and do it all over again.” 

Mexico City also ignited a passion for photography. It was in these early days of Instagram, when the platform was dedicated to artful photo-sharing, that Diala’s Kitchen began - as a way to share photos of her pastry school projects and the city’s stunning architecture with her friends and family. 

Toronto

The plan was to return to Toronto to pursue a career in baking, potentially opening a bakery. But as with many dreams, the sacrifices can often prove to be unforgiving. Diala had many friends who owned bakeries - friends with families they seldom had time for: “This is a very romantic idea, but on paper,” she reckoned. “In real life, these people were not spending time with their kids. My daughters, to this day, are my everything. So, there's no way that I was just going to give more time to a business than to my daughters.”

To complicate matters, at the end of their three years in Mexico City, Diala and her husband had separated. She returned to Toronto with her daughters, without a job, and just enough money to find a home.

“I owe everything to travel. It has enriched my life in every way. Not only the way I cook, but the way I live and the interactions that I see happening across the world, sitting at a table, and how precious those moments are.”

After a few months, an opportunity to work for Air Canada Rouge enabled Diala to return to flying. Her trips opened up a world of destinations that inspired her recipes. She visited her beloved markets, immersed herself in the culture of the cities, and brought back countless spices to recreate her own version of her favourite dishes, which she shared on her Instagram account. Diala’s followers began encouraging her to publish her recipes on a blog, and after finally finding her footing in Toronto and settling in, she launched her blog in 2014 with her Maple Cinnamon Granola recipe - one that is also among the first recipes in her cookbook.

The World

After years of balancing what became two jobs and her family, Diala received the most fitting symbol of validation - an email from Random House expressing their interest in her writing a cookbook. 

“Imagine! I jumped from my seat because that's another thing - I never thought, even owning all these cookbooks, I never thought: one day, I'm gonna have a cookbook. No! I was just an avid collector of cookbooks. And I love to cook, but I never thought that that was a possibility.”

Diala’s own cookbook collection had grown to an impressive 600 titles. Alice Waters, Marcella Hazan, Enrique Olvera, and her favourite, Yotam Ottolenghi were among those she treasured most. And her name was about to sit on shelves everywhere among the greats. “Cookbooks are just a thing of beauty,” she shared. “I sit with them in bed at night going through...inspiration and reading the stories, and it's not something that you just go for a recipe; I love head notes. I think they're very important.”

She described her meeting with Random House as a surreal experience, noting the details of the office on Front Street and the astounding grandeur of the CN Tower as seen through their glass walls. The editors liked Diala’s approach to food and requested she submit a book proposal. 

“Even coming out of it, I don't know if it was imposter syndrome or what,” she confessed. “But I sat on that, I want to say, close to eight to nine months. [...] Why me? I didn't have a clear path. And then one day, I was actually having a conversation with my friend, Lauren. And she was like, ‘what are you waiting for?’” 

With the support of her friend, Diala found the courage to submit her book proposal. It was immediately accepted, launching her into the two-and-a-half-year process of writing the cookbook all by herself - an unusual and arduous feat. In addition to the writing (which she admitted brought its own challenges as an ESL), Diala did all the recipe testing, the photography, the food and prop styling...everything but the indexing. As her years in pastry school taught her, there were personal standards that she felt important to uphold. “I wanted every head note to reflect why that recipe was important to me and what inspired it,” she said. She also wanted every recipe to have a photograph, a process that can take up to fifty takes to get just right.

Diala’s labour of love yielded a singular collection of recipes; equal parts wholesome, simple, and soulful, filled with stunning photographs and lovingly-written essays of the places that inspired her. It’s the first cookbook that I’ve ever read cover to cover, each page transporting me vicariously to the sights, sounds, and heart of every city. If there’s ever been a cookbook that could take you on an adventure, as well as to the depths of a person’s soul, this is it. The pages are bursting with love and reverence for the places and the people that have shaped Diala throughout her journey.

As Diala reflected on what it has meant to her to publish this book, I bit my tongue and held my breath as her words engulfed me with emotion: “I think I've lived a very interesting life, but I think that if people could see the amount of pain that I went through to get here, it was also a lot. Nobody wants to go through a divorce with two kids and wonder how am I gonna like... what's going to happen to me? But, here we are. So yeah, I'm grateful. I'm grateful for the experiences. I think that what it does is it makes you really grateful for where you are. The day of my book launch was here and when I was giving thanks, I was just like, bawling my eyes out and crying so much for many reasons. But one of the reasons was that: the journey of these seven years. It wasn't all pretty and beautiful, and like everything was handed to me. It was a lot of work and trying to be a mom, and having two jobs and yeah...So, for me, the whole thing with the book is more than a book. Yes, it's a collection of stories and recipes, but it’s how things can change for you for the better.”

Beyond

Diala was laid off from Rouge due to COVID, but she hopes that in time, she can go back to flying. With the success of Diala’s Kitchen - the Instagram account, the blog, and now the book - Diala could devote herself entirely to blogging full time. But the world and its markets beckon, and the glimmer in her eyes at the thought of seeing them again conveys her sheer excitement. 

“I love flying. I love what I do. I love the jetlag. I love it. You live with it. Like you're so used to it that you live with it. I get to a city, have a nap for three hours, get up and go. And I've met so many wonderful people doing these trips. So, it's what fuels me, and excites me, and gives me the inspiration for everything.”

We spoke for close to two hours about enough things to fill a book, if not another article. We spoke of everything from our favourite things to eat, to plant-based diets, to the Black Lives Matter movement and cultural appropriation. Diala spoke of Isabella and Gabriela, now 22 and 16 respectively, with the incomparable glow of a proud mom: “'I'm super proud of them, proud of the way that they see the world and how they care about things that matter. [...] They care about politics, they care about human rights, they care about the LGBTQ movement, they care about things that, you know, we're passionate for at home, and they love food and they have a very global vision of the world [...]. I know that I'm very biased but I am so proud of them. I can’t wait to see what both of them do later on in their lives.”

For days following our meeting, I was left with a sense of fullness, gratitude, and hope. Diala, her story, and her book are exactly what I needed. It’s what we all do right now. At the very least, we can all stand to eat better, to be more inspired, or to imagine the places we’ll discover or go back to one day when it’s safe again. But for those of us who have found ourselves in a place of doubt, where we’ve had to rethink our lives and what truly matters, Diala’s story is a reminder that life has a beautiful way of giving you what you need when you dedicate yourself to what you love - even when it might not seem like it. That if you commit to authenticity and continue moving forward no matter where the road leads to, anything can happen beyond your wildest dreams. 

And, in Diala’s own words, “there is such beauty in dreams coming true.”

Words by Kimberley Kwo. Photos by Abhishek Dekate.

Get your copy of Diala’s Kitchen: Plant-Forward and Pescatarian Recipes Inspired by Home and Travel at Indigo.ca or Amazon.ca.