In 2010, the imagine Reem’s was created at the doorstep of a street corner bakery in Beirut, Lebanon. Founder Reem Assil says, “The scent of za’atar, yeasted bread, and sweet orange blossom syrup right out of the oven and also the sounds of laughter and chatter in Arabic all around me conjured up memories of my childhood and my yearning to produce home and community in the United States. It was in watching the bread flying out of the oven, literally into hungry people’s hands, and witnessing the life inside those bakery doors regardless of the political turbulence beyond them that I realized my people are masters of bread and hospitality: the lifeline of our history and what's kept us resilient over many generations despite colonization, war, drought, and famine within the Arab world.”
On a soul-searching visit to Lebanon and Syria, Reem chose to bring this experience to the Bay. She desired to bring not only a bakery — she desired to recreate the sights, sounds, tastes and aromas of the streets of Damascus and Beirut, and also at the same time frame an area that feels familiar and inviting to all cultures. She wanted to produce a sense of home.
In 2022, she launched her business like a participant of La Cocina, PCV's partner within the SFEDA and a women’s food business incubator program. Her one farmers’ market location grew to a lot of and shortly enough, these were serving bread and street food fare to hundreds of people a week. In the fall of 2022, Reem opened her first bakery at her dream location-literally a corner of a transit center in the middle of the Fruitvale in one of the most diverse communities in Oakland. She entered and won the national OpenTable contest to fund an aspiration restaurant, and 6 months later Reem's California was open. Since that time the restaurant has already established local and national acclaim, even being named a Food & Wine Magazine Restaurant of the season for 2022.
Reem's California is rooted locally and dedicated to creating quality jobs for its employees. Reem's California connects with its employees by giving training and development plans with the hopes that employees may have the opportunity to grow and elevate working. Reem has shown incredible business acumen and conducts thorough analysis of both her market base and business finances. Through a self-run customer survey, Reem's California determined that 60% of its customers originate from within a three-mile radius, so it is now seeking to expand in key geographic markets through the San francisco bay area.
The company's new location may be the former Mission Pie location in San Francisco. She told Eater SF that they have been looking to expand for 6 months, due to the fact she'd outgrown her kitchen in Oakland, which couldn't really accommodate the restaurant's booming catering business. Just as constricting, she says, was the truth that she was never in a position to establish the kind of vibrant breakfast and pastry menu she'd dreamed of when she first opened Reem's California: Her pastries and breakfast items just never seemed to remove in Fruitvale the way she'd hoped they would, and soon the bakery just stopped opening for weekday breakfast service.
The second location of Reem's is going to be open all day long, six days a week, from 9 a.m. to a minimum of 9 p.m. – probably 10 p.m. for fun on saturday. The restaurant will serve the mana'eesh and wraps that its lunch and dinner menus are best known for, and it will offer beer, wine, along with a robust coffee program. But what Assil says she's most looking forward to is finally dealing with implement the extensive Arab pastry program she's always wanted – not only her stock-in-trade flatbreads, but additionally khobz sim sim, baklava, and also the shredded-phyllo-and-cheese dessert referred to as kenafah, which she'll cut to buy from large trays like they are doing in Lebanon.
When Reem found PCV to help together with her new location, she told us that opening in Mission Pie's former location is kind of like a “homecoming” on her. She started at La Cocina around the corner, as well as had popups at Mission Pie. We're excited to utilize Reem to finance this expansion into Bay area and help her build out her new space – and build her dreams!
