The Diaspora
Reem's California brings the Arab street-corner bakery home to Oakland
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
This week the Palestinian Table sets itself in Oakland, where the smell of za'atar hitting hot bread has just returned to the waterfront. On 26 June, Reem's California opened its long-awaited flagship at Jack London Square — back in the city where it began, and now owned by the workers who run it.
Reem Assil built the place on a memory. The daughter of a Palestinian mother and Syrian father, she grew up outside Boston far from the corner bakeries of Beirut and the Levant — the ones where the day starts with a mana'oushe folded in paper.
A community organizer before she was a baker, she opened the first Reem's in Oakland's Fruitvale district in 2017 to be exactly that corner for her own city.
The recognition came fast: James Beard award nominations, a cookbook — "Arabiyya: Recipes from the Life of an Arab in Diaspora," published in 2022 — and years at San Francisco's Ferry Building that made her mana'eesh a Bay Area institution. The San Francisco Chronicle ranked Reem's No. 81 in its 2026 Top 100 restaurants.
The homecoming carries her politics in its structure. The Jack London Square flagship is Reem's first worker-owned location, its owners including Zaynah Hindi, the bakery's co-founder, alongside longtime staff — the organizer's answer to what a restaurant owes the people who make it run. The Oaklandside reported the 3,000-square-foot cafe doubles as the production bakery for the whole operation.
The mana'oushe, as the tradition makes it#
The dish that built Reem's belongs to everyone. For the common heritage version: work a soft dough of flour, water, yeast, olive oil and a little salt; let it rise slow. Mix good za'atar — wild thyme, sumac, toasted sesame — with enough olive oil to make a loose paste.
Press each round flat, dimple it with your fingertips, spread the paste to the edge, and bake hot and fast until the rim blisters. Fold and eat walking, as the streets of the Levant always have.
Assil's own signatures — the muhammara whose walnut-and-pepper depth readers of "Arabiyya" know, the sumac chicken musakhan wrap — are hers; the cookbook gives her versions in her voice, and the counter in Oakland serves them daily. Hours and menus change; verify at the source before you go.
What a reader tastes at Reem's is an argument: that Palestinian food in exile is not nostalgia but a living civic thing — bread, organized labor and an open door on a California square.
