Diaspora Match Days: Food, Ritual and the World Cup

The shop itself remains modest: a narrow countertop above a refrigerated display case filled with fresh meats, Algerian soft drinks, pickles and sandwich condiments. Mekersi runs the restaurant his father opened after emigrating from Algeria over 20 years ago. The signature dish reflects the street food he grew up around—a fresh baguette packed with merguez sausages, fries and harissa, finished with mayonnaise and spicy aioli.

Mekersi grew up with both the food and the culture surrounding it. At home, his father cooked the street foods he remembered from Algeria, where football anchors everyday life. As Mekersi explains it, the two rarely separate. “Football is Algeria,” he says. “That’s how I would describe it.”

He remembers as a young child visiting family in Algiers, Algeria’s capital, and seeing the game everywhere: children improvising fields in narrow streets, playing without nets or equipment, simply wherever space allowed.

“The passion extends to stadiums as well,” Mekersi says. “I remember driving past the stadium and seeing the red flares and people in the streets. It was a big experience.”

In Astoria, echoes of that atmosphere appear during international matches. When Algeria plays, Steinway Street transforms. Coffee shops fill with fans, hookah lounges turn into viewing rooms, and entire sections of the street become informal gathering spaces. “The whole block will be filled with Algerians,” Mekersi says. “You would think it’s a parade—but we’re just watching a soccer game.”

But Astoria is only one example.

Several hundred kilometers northwest, Toronto too will host six World Cup matches, including games featuring West African teams such as Senegal, Ghana and Ivory Coast. Within Toronto’s Senegalese community, families are already preparing for gatherings that will accompany the tournament. Homes, restaurants and community spaces will fill with supporters watching matches together while sharing familiar foods.

Mamadou Ndaw, a project manager who moved to Canada in 2015 after growing up in Senegal, helps organize some of these gatherings through SenOntario, a group that supports Senegalese residents across Ontario. Founded in 2000, the organization helps connect a Senegalese community in the Greater Toronto Area with a growing Senegalese population. Although the community spreads across the region, football creates opportunities for people to come together.

“Football is one of the favorite sports in Senegal,” says Ndaw, the organization’s interim president. “It’s part of our culture.”

In Senegal, the sport extends far beyond professional leagues. Neighborhood tournaments known as navétane bring together local teams during school holidays, creating months of competition between districts and towns. Match days also carry their own food traditions. Vendors circulate through stadium crowds selling snacks that spectators share among friends and family—beignets, roasted groundnuts and chilled hibiscus juice known as bissap.

As the World Cup approaches, Senegalese families across Toronto plan similar gatherings. Yet some flavors remain difficult to re-create abroad. Ndaw points to roasted groundnuts prepared after the rainy season in Senegal, when the harvest produces a flavor difficult to replicate elsewhere.

“In Senegal, the groundnuts you get after a rainy season have a special taste,” he says. “They are just better.”

Meanwhile in Houston, the largest city in Texas and host to seven World Cup matches, families across Mexican American communities will gather around televisions to watch the same tournament. Match days often turn into communal events, with relatives and friends arriving throughout the game.

Chef Domenic Laurenzo, co-owner of the restaurant group LTO Cantina, grew up surrounded by Mexican American culinary history. His grandmother, the late Ninfa Laurenzo, opened the well-known Ninfa’s on Navigation restaurant in 1973 in Houston’s East End, a neighborhood historically rooted in Mexican influence. Demand from neighbors helped Mama Ninfa, as she was locally known, introduce fajitas to American diners.

Today, 44 percent of Houston’s population has Hispanic heritage, according to Data USA, and for Laurenzo football carries a similar significance as it does within Mexican communities as in Algerian and Senegalese ones.

“Soccer is critically important,” he says. “It brings a sense of national pride.”

During major matches, families gather in homes or restaurants, turning the game into a communal event. Someone grills outside, someone prepares tortillas in the kitchen, and the meal grows collectively as friends and relatives arrive. Match-day menus commonly include tacos, tamales, grilled meats and guacamole.

Even here, however, some culinary traditions remain tied to place. Laurenzo points to barbacoa, a dish traditionally prepared by burying meat in an underground pit lined with agave leaves and cooking it slowly for hours—a technique rarely permitted under US health regulations.

“You literally dig a hole in the dirt,” Laurenzo says. “You can’t do that here.”

During the World Cup, communities in New York, Toronto and Houston will gather around televisions and share meals, watching the same matches unfold far from the places that first shaped their traditions. In Queens, Algerian merguez sandwiches will fill tables along Steinway Street. In Toronto, Senegalese families will share beignets and roasted groundnuts while watching matches together. In Houston, tacos and tamales will accompany televised games.

Food helps re-create the atmosphere of home.

And when conversations with fans move beyond the menu, another theme emerges—one that has less to do with ingredients and more to do with memory.

For Mekersi, what immigrants miss most is not only the food but the neighborhood itself.

“If I came thousands of miles away from my country,” he says, “I would miss my family … my neighborhood where I grew up.”

Ndaw, who grew up 100 kilometers from Dakar, the capital of Senegal, describes a similar absence when thinking about celebrations after major victories.

“In Senegal we celebrate in the streets,” he says. “Here you feel like you might disturb someone.”

Laurenzo sees the same contrast when comparing Houston with Mexico. In Mexico, victories spill into public squares and city streets. In US cities, celebrations often remain inside homes and restaurants.

And the streets and neighborhoods where people learned how to celebrate the game together remain far away.

On Steinway Street, however, the feeling of home still flickers during big matches. Coffee shops fill with fans, televisions glow behind restaurant windows, and crowds spill onto the sidewalks as supporters watch together.

For a moment, the neighborhood begins to resemble the places many fans left behind.