Inside Albina Brahimi’s heritage pop-up dinners

By day, Jabby’s Pizza on Old Perkins Road pumps out utilitarian pies from its rotating Italian pizza oven. But twice a month, the casual restaurant transforms into a hotspot for tasteful dinner pop-ups set off by black tablecloths and stylish dinnerware.

The brainchild of owner Albina Brahimi, Albina’s Kitchen started last summer with fixed-price menus specializing in home-style Mediterranean cooking. With reserved seating for around 50 patrons, the dinners have been a chance for Brahimi, a former Kosovo refugee, to fulfill a lifelong dream of high-level cooking.

“My passion for food has been about learning and expanding and growing, and letting others enjoy what I’m capable of,” she says. “I’m trying to do things that are unique and that we don’t already have in Baton Rouge.”

Brahimi often collaborates with other chefs or restaurant operators with expertise in particular foodways. She’s especially drawn to the wide range of Mediterranean cuisines, from Levantine styles on its east coast to Greek, Albanian and Italian cooking in its central region.

Brahimi emigrated to Baton Rouge in 1999 after fleeing the war in Kosovo. She and her parents, sisters and extended family had been living in a refugee camp when Catholic Charities sponsored their relocation to the Capital Region. She later met her husband, also an Albanian refugee, in Baton Rouge.

Brahimi grew up loving to cook as a child, and she long dreamed of going to culinary school. But starting from scratch as a young adult in the United States took her in other directions, including cleaning houses, starting a family and finishing college. She would eventually work as a bank teller and a bank branch manager.

But her culinary dreams didn’t fade. An opportunity came along through fellow Albanian émigré Alfred Kulici, owner of La Contea and Louisiana Lagniappe, who offered Brahimi the chance to co-own her first Jabby’s Pizza location in 2019. The two would open three subsequent locations before closing one on Acadian Thruway.

Brahimi bought Kulici out last year. Owning the restaurants outright sparked an idea to create a venture-within-a-venture at the Old Perkins Road location. Intermittent pop-ups were less expensive than opening a free-standing restaurant, she reasoned, and they allowed her creative freedom.

There was one catch, though. Holding the events at Jabby’s meant cooking exclusively in the restaurant’s only heat source: a rotating, 750-degree dome oven.

“Every time I make a menu, I have to base it on that oven,” she laughs. “It’s the funniest thing, because when other chefs come in, I’m like, ‘OK, you have to understand that we only have one oven.’”

At a recent spring dinner, Brahimi partnered with Lebanese native and Baton Rouge Subway franchisee Maggie Choumar on a traditional Lebanese menu.

Couples and small groups of friends took seats across reserved tables, sharing bottles of BYO wine, some purchased from Alexander’s Highland Market next door. The lineup began with scratch-made baba ghanoush, hummus, warm pita and fresh falafel anchored in tahini sauce. Those starters were followed by sfeeha, open-faced meat pies framed by tender, homemade pastry.

Next came the dramatic main course: maklouba, a baked rice, vegetable and chicken dish that Brahimi baked in a massive terrine and later inverted onto a large platter. She plated it family style, crowning it with juicy lamb lollipops.

The meal ended with Choumor’s osmalia, a Lebanese dessert defined by layers of sweet, creamy filling surrounded by kataifi, the shredded phyllo made familiar by Dubai chocolate. It was perched in a pool of simple syrup and topped with pistachios.

Brahimi says authenticity is her guiding principle. The menus aren’t intended to be fancy but highlight well-trod foodways. When she makes them, she thinks of her Albanian childhood on a small family farm, cooking at the knee of her grandmother.

“She cooked everything from scratch,” she says. “That’s what I want to do. I’m doing this out of passion and my love for food.”

This article originally appeared in the April 2026 issue of 225 Magazine.