In 2004, in the town of Kahramanmaraş, Türkiye, Meral Embel picked up Pour Your Heart Into It, by former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. The book centered on two things she loved, business and coffee, and it rekindled a long-held dream. Fourteen years later, that fantasy became reality when she opened her own Turkish café just blocks from the Starbucks where Schultz himself took his first sip of Sumatra.

At Miss Café in the Pike Place Market, Embel uses coffee beans imported from Türkiye and offers coffee served in tulip-patterned red and white cups representing the country’s national flower and colors. She brings out metallic tea sets with pointed, Ottoman-style dome-shaped lids and recommends knafeh, a crispy shredded pastry filled with sweet cheese and soaked in syrup, to complement the drinks. With each sip and bite her customers take, they get a flavor of Embel’s homeland.

Embel often sits with customers on the traditional Turkish cross-patterned handwoven chairs, sometimes explaining the bilingual meaning of the restaurant’s name. Pronouncing “Miss” with an added emphasis on the s is a Turkish exclamation used when tasting something delicious. “You will miss this place when you leave, and you will be making a lot of ‘miss’ sounds when you are here!”

Or she might share the improbable story of her journey from rural Türkiye, where she grew up in a mud-brick house her father, a teacher, repaired section by section. As a kid, she would imagine that she was in a fairy tale, and the house was transforming by magic. Embel’s real fairy-tale moment came in 2011, when she won a green card lottery allowing her family to move to the US, ending up in Seattle in 2015. 

She and her daughter visited Pike Place Market and, on a whim, found the management office. “My mom has a dream of opening a place here. She loves to cook,” her daughter explained. The manager’s willingness to listen and the interest she showed became a turning point for Embel.

Embel had learned her way around Turkish cuisine from cookbooks passed down by generations of family. As a young adult, she had started making flatbreads, dumplings, and a traditional dessert called kadayif in a small workshop. Word got out, and she soon cooked for thousands of people each day.

In Seattle, she banked on her cheese-stuffed pides and meat-topped lahmacun to again build her business, even as she struggled with adapting to a new culture, rules, laws, health department permits, and English. Seven years in, she has succeeded enough to hire staff to run the café, allowing her to focus on developing new recipes in the kitchen.

Embel journals regularly about her path from schoolteacher’s daughter in southeastern Anatolia to a businesswoman sharing her culture through food in the heart of Seattle’s famous market. It’s a little different than Schultz’s story, but she hopes to have her own book one day, too.