A James Beard Award-winning author who was raised between Cleveland and Karachi, Pakistan, is coming back to his old stomping grounds next month for a dinner and talk that ties his globe-spanning reporting on food and war to a Playhouse Square restaurant built to give displaced people a second chance. Michael Shaikh will host a dinner talk and question-and-answer session at The Friars' Table at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 22, discussing food, cultural evolution and societal upheaval.
The connection runs deeper than a book tour stop. As Cleveland.com reports, Shaikh was a student of Br. Phil Bernier at St. Luke School — the same Capuchin Franciscan friar who first envisioned The Friars' Table concept back in 2018, according to The Friars' Table. Bernier later partnered with EDWINS Leadership and Restaurant Institute founder Brandon Chrostowski in October 2020, using a major gift given to Cleveland Capuchin Ministries to get the project off the ground.
Shaikh's debut book, “The Last Sweet Bite: Stories and Recipes of Culinary Heritage Lost and Found,” published by Crown in June 2025, won a James Beard Award for its exploration of how communities preserve their culinary traditions across conflict zones including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and the Andes, according to Penguin Random House. Copies of the book will be available at the Sept. 22 event, which also includes a signing.
A Human Rights Career Turned Toward the Table
Before he was writing about food, Shaikh spent more than two decades as a human rights investigator documenting war crimes and civilian harm for organizations including Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group, and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, per Guernica Magazine. That career gave him a front-row view of how war and displacement force people to fight to protect their food culture — a struggle he explores directly in the book and will bring to the Cleveland stage.
Shaikh's fascination with the subject has personal roots as well. The 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan disrupted his own family's Sindhi cultural traditions and language transmission, as he told the NYC Food Policy Center. That upheaval, echoing through generations, is part of what pushed him to document how cuisine survives — or doesn't — when conflict tears communities apart.
Dinner Traces Thomas Aquinas From Sicily to Paris
The evening's $50 ticket includes dinner built around a menu tracing the life of St. Thomas Aquinas from Sicily to Paris, tying the historical theme to the venue's own culinary identity. The Friars' Table draws its menu from monastic cuisine, blending Middle Eastern spices, Eastern European flavors, and classical French technique inspired by historical monk and friar recipes, according to reporting from Cleveland Magazine. Seating for the evening is limited, and those interested can reach the restaurant directly at 216-230-2017.
The Friars' Table itself opened December 6, 2024, inside the Playhouse Square district as a non-profit collaboration providing full-time employment and hospitality skills training to refugees and people coming from nearby shelters, as WKYC reported at the time. Playhouse Square owns the building at 1305 Euclid Ave., while Capuchin Ministries LLC, a subsidiary of the Capuchin order, holds the lease. Chrostowski serves as consultant-operator of the restaurant.
A Building With Its Own Layered History
The dining room carries its own story of salvage and reuse. Interior features include a confessional door, arched wooden doors, and stained glass rescued from the former St. Vincent Charity Hospital, according to the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland. The address itself has a long commercial pedigree in the city: 1305 Euclid Ave. was originally home to the Cowell & Hubbard jewelry company, founded in Cleveland in 1861, and later became the site of restaurateur Zack Bruell's French bistro of the same name — a stretch of downtown dining history Hoodline has covered before.
Chrostowski's involvement brings his own résumé to the project. He founded EDWINS Leadership and Restaurant Institute in 2007 to offer culinary training and reentry support to formerly incarcerated individuals, graduating between 75 and 100 students a year with a reported 97% employment rate, per EDWINS' own account of its mission. The program's profile grew nationally after it was featured in “Knife Skills,” a 2017 documentary that earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Short Subject.
For Cleveland, the Sept. 22 event folds together several threads: a former Clevelander turned globally recognized author, a restaurant built explicitly to rebuild lives through hospitality work, and a historical dinner menu that echoes the same themes of migration and survival that run through Shaikh's reporting. Those wanting to attend are encouraged to call ahead, given the limited number of seats.
