Around the Fourth of July, it’s worth remembering that Mobile’s business community has long been shaped by people who arrived from far beyond Alabama’s borders. Several longtime local entrepreneurs, all naturalized American citizens, say the port city became more than just a place to work – it became home, in ways they never expected when they first arrived. Their stories span Iran, Ethiopia, and Taiwan, and they trace a common arc: newcomers who built businesses, raised families, and put down roots deep enough to last generations.
Mobile has always been a city of arrivals. As one of the Gulf Coast’s historic ports, it absorbed waves of immigrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — Lebanese, Greek, Italian, German, Vietnamese, and Latin American families among them — many of whom opened groceries, restaurants, and shops that became neighborhood institutions. The entrepreneurs profiled here belong to that continuing tradition, and their experiences echo those of the families whose names still mark storefronts across the city.
From a Bakery in Esfahan to Old Shell Road
Reza Hejazi’s story starts in a family bakery in Esfahan, Iran, where he began working at age six. He came to the United States to study at the University of Florida, eventually transferring to the University of South Alabama to finish a civil engineering degree. After struggling to find work in his field, he leaned on the skills he grew up with and, in 1991, opened Food Pak, Mobile’s first international grocery store, in a long-vacant convenience store space on Old Shell Road.
The pivot from engineering drawings to grocery shelving turned out to be a durable one. More than two decades later, the shop is known as much for its global sandwich menu as its imported pantry staples, and Hejazi’s sons have carried the family business into a third generation. For students and families new to the city, Food Pak has functioned as an introduction to ingredients from dozens of cuisines, stocked by a proprietor who learned the food business as a child half a world away.
His wife, Nahin, built her own path in Mobile as well, opening a salon on Airport Boulevard in the 1980s before moving into commercial property management. Between the two of them, the Hejazi family has touched three distinct corners of Mobile’s economy — food retail, personal services, and commercial real estate — over a span of more than thirty years.
An Ethiopian Path to Midtown
Makeda Nichols grew up in Ethiopia, the daughter of a doctor and a farmer, and studied chemistry in Germany before falling in love with an American soldier and relocating to Florida. She arrived with only a few dollars to her name and worked as a seamstress and lab technician before a job transfer brought her to Mobile. It was the kind of start that leaves little margin for error, and it shaped how she thought about money and risk.
Drawing on her family’s background in business and a personal understanding of what it means to go without insurance, she eventually became a State Farm agent, running her own Midtown office for three decades. Insurance is a relationship business, and an agent who has known hardship firsthand brings something to it that cannot be taught in a licensing course. Her office served generations of Midtown families, many of whom returned year after year because they trusted the person across the desk.
Her brother later followed her to the United States and now owns a downtown Mobile restaurant, drawn to the city in part to help care for their mother. The Nichols family’s story is a familiar one in immigrant communities: one family member establishes a foothold, and the rest arrive step by step, each adding a business, a job, or a family to the city’s fabric.
From Taiwan to Mobile
Christina Lau’s journey to Mobile began when her older sister left Taiwan for the United States and encouraged Christina to join her. Family chains like that one have shaped immigration patterns for generations, and Lau’s move followed the classic sequence: a sibling leads the way, the next follows, and a new community gradually takes shape around the first arrivals.
Lau built her life and her business in Mobile after making that leap, joining the ranks of the city’s small-business owners whose storefronts serve as both livelihoods and gathering places. For immigrants who arrive without established careers, small business has historically been the most reliable ladder — it rewards long hours and family labor rather than credentials, and it lets newcomers serve both their own communities and the city at large.
What These Stories Have in Common
Look across the three stories and the common threads stand out. Each entrepreneur arrived with an education or a craft but without a ready-made place in the local economy. Each one adapted — Hejazi from engineering to groceries, Nichols from chemistry to insurance, Lau from a new country to a new business — and each found that the skills of the old life transferred in unexpected ways. The bakery discipline Hejazi learned at six shows up in the consistency of his shop; the persistence Nichols developed as a newcomer shows up in a three-decade office.
None of them described an easy path. Starting over in a new country means learning a market from scratch, building a customer base without inherited connections, and often supporting family members on both sides of an ocean. What made Mobile work for them, they say, is that the city rewarded the effort — a place large enough to sustain a niche business and small enough that reputation travels fast.
The Fourth of July Lens
The timing of these reflections around Independence Day is fitting. Naturalized citizens often mark the holiday with a particular intensity, having chosen the country rather than simply inherited it. The oath ceremony — held for generations at venues across the region — is the moment these business owners formally joined the national family, and each July brings the memory of that step back.
Mobile’s civic life has grown richer for their participation. Immigrant-owned businesses sponsor youth teams, serve on chambers and boards, hire first-job teenagers, and anchor commercial corridors that would struggle without them. The international grocery on Old Shell Road, the salon on Airport Boulevard, the Midtown insurance office, and the downtown restaurant are not novelties; they are ordinary, load-bearing parts of the city’s economy.
Their presence also changed what Mobile offers its residents. A generation ago, a home cook looking for ingredients from the Middle East, East Africa, or East Asia had little hope of finding them locally. Today, the shelves of Food Pak and businesses like it serve families from dozens of backgrounds alongside curious neighbors, and the city’s dining table is broader for it.
An American Dream, Built Locally
The phrase “American Dream” gets used loosely, but these three lives give it a working definition: arrive with little, work without pause, raise a family, and hand something lasting to the next generation. Hejazi’s sons running the family store, Nichols’s brother running a restaurant nearby, and Lau’s extended family in Mobile all represent that transfer between generations — the moment a story of arrival becomes a story of belonging.
As the city celebrates Independence Day, these entrepreneurs offer a reminder that patriotism lives in ordinary places: a sandwich counter, an insurance desk, a grocery aisle stocked with tastes of home. Mobile’s business community has been shaped by people who came from far away and stayed, and the neighborhoods they built in are better for it.
A Corridor of Small Businesses
The geography of these businesses tells its own story about Mobile. Old Shell Road, where Food Pak opened in a formerly vacant convenience store, runs through one of the city’s oldest and most densely built commercial corridors, where small storefronts have changed hands among generations of grocers, cleaners, and cafes. Airport Boulevard, home to Nahin Hejazi’s salon, stretches across the city as a spine of family-run retail and services. Midtown and downtown, where Makeda Nichols and her brother set up shop, round out a map that touches nearly every quadrant of Mobile.
Small, owner-operated businesses like these carry weight beyond their sales figures. They keep older commercial buildings in use, provide entry-level work for teenagers and students, and hold onto customers for decades in ways chain competitors rarely match. When an owner lives in the neighborhood and works the counter every day, the business becomes part of the community’s memory — the place where regulars are greeted by name.
Advice Written in Experience
For newer arrivals to Mobile — whether from another country, another state, or another part of Alabama — the experiences of these entrepreneurs amount to practical counsel. Start with what you already know, even if it seems humble; a bakery skill learned in childhood proved more marketable than an engineering degree in a tight job market. Expect to adapt more than once, since few of them ended up in the line of work they first pursued. And treat customers as neighbors, because in a city Mobile’s size, they are.
Just as important is patience with the pace of belonging. None of the three described feeling instantly at home, and each said the city earned its place in their hearts gradually — through customers who returned, through children who grew up here, through the slow accumulation of years. Home, in their telling, is not where you land but what you build after you land.