Athens restaurants welcome refugee chefs on World Refugee Day

Seven restaurants in Greece opened their kitchens to refugee chefs this week to celebrate the World Refugee Day.

The Refugee Food Festival, a project launched by a citizen's initiative in Paris in 2016, has expanded with the support of the UNHCR to three continents this year, reaching 15 host cities and 100 restaurants.

"The idea of the Refugee Food Festival was mainly to change the perception of how the world sees refugees and to change the words that follow the word 'refugees'," said Sudha Nair Iliades, publisher of Athens Insider magazine and one of the organizers of the festival's Greek edition.

"Usually, it was followed by the words 'problem' or 'crisis' and we wanted it to be something more celebratory, something joyous, like a festival, and something very primal that all human beings can connect to, like food," Nair-Iliades told Xinhua.

As Nair...