Reem Assil is the author of Arabiyya: Recipes from the Life of an Arab in Diaspora and the chef-owner of Reem’s California.

Alicia: Hi, Reem Thank you so much for taking out the time to talk today.

Reem: Thanks for having me.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Reem: So I grew up in a very small suburb, right outside of Boston in New England. My first food memories are actually — the stories of the food that I grew up versus the memories of food, there's a complete dissonance between the two, I remember sort of growing up and eating macaroni and cheese from the box and ramen, instant ramen. We were latchkey kids, so that was our comfort food. 

But we also had sort of an eclectic mix of Arab food. My mom always tried to find ways to take sort of American classics and Arabify them, as we would say. Our spaghetti and meatballs were more kofta and meatballs, with the red sauce that was spiked with our seven spice mix. So yeah, just a hodgepodge of sort of traditional Arab foods, but with a lot of sort of Americana cuisine trickled in between.

Alicia: How did you make your way into cooking, into professionally cooking?

Reem: Sort of a roundabout way, I would say. I never imagined that I was going to be a professional cook, per se. Sort of prior to my culinary career, I was — I spent a lot of time in the nonprofit sector. I was doing work around the issues that really matter to me here in the Bay Area, which I've been lucky to call home for the last 18 years, issues like affordable housing and living wages for workers and community benefits for residents. 

And that work was really amazing. I was part of campaigns that won some real tangible things for the communities that I was working with. But I think that my work as a professional community and labor organizer wasn't sort of getting the transformative piece of organizing that I was really yearning for, that sort of taking time and transformation of people in their leadership. It's too unstable. The nonprofit sector just basically was reliant on the funding we would get, and one month I'd be working in one community and sort of building up towards a campaign and the next minute the priorities of our funders would change and we’d have to move.

And I was like, ‘I don't want to do this anymore. I really want to build deep with the communities I was working with.’ And I also noticed that like the communities I was working with, and the things that we were fighting for, it was just like, ‘We're losing our ability to imagine what actually is the world that we want to live in.’ And that made me really sad. 

I was burnt out at a certain point, and went on a trip to kind of just deal with the burnout. So, it was really a selfish thing in the beginning. And when I was burnt out, I was really turning towards baking. Baking was sort of my place. And I had sort of been an amateur baker throughout the years. California is really where I learned how to work with ingredients, how to learn all these things. And it was really sort of a healing place for me, but it was personal, right? It wasn't like, ‘Oh, I'm gonna pursue a career in baking.’ 

But then when I took a trip in 2010 sort of out of Burnell back to the homeland, it was there where I kind of — everything sort of came together. For me, it was seeing these spaces. And these are the kind of spaces I was yearning for, this deep connection to my culture that I didn't have. I had been to Syria, Lebanon, Palestine over the course of my childhood, but I was a kid from America and I didn't have the memories in that homeland that my parents did. 

And so it was always sort of a strange feeling going back home. But it was this last trip, and it has actually been the last trip that I've taken there since. The food spaces is where I really felt connected, and I, really — the sort of gift of Arab hospitality and Arab breadmaking, and a way to think about the lifeline of Arab history and all that we bring. And I was like, ‘The U.S. needs to know about this.’

So, it became sort of just a mission. And I came back, and I was — I quit my job. And I enrolled myself into a culinary program at my local community college. They had a baking and pastry two-year program. And I scared the crap out of my parents. And there it is.

I was like, ‘I'm gonna be a baker, because I want to create this.’ So I always sort of had a mission, that sort of pursuing a culinary career was a means to this end, which was much bigger than just like, ‘I want to learn how to bake.’ But I knew that if I was gonna create this bakery; it had to be the best bakery. And I needed to show the truest reflection of what I saw when I went to Syria and when I went to Lebanon. 

And so I spent really 10 years doing that, or 7 years doing that before I opened my bakery. And I feel super fortunate to have done it in a shorter amount of time, ’cause the food world is not kind. [Laughs.] Working in kitchens is not great. And I got to learn what is it that I want to do, and what is it that I don't want to do. So yeah, my entry into the food world was really sort of a roundabout way. It wasn't my love for food, but my love for community that sort of brought me in.

Alicia: And how did your work as a labor and community organizer influence the way that you run your restaurants? 

Reem: Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, as somebody who is a self-proclaimed anti-capitalist, to suddenly open my own bakery and become the ‘boss,’ that was a huge contradiction. And I grappled with it for a long time. I mean, I spent, prior to that, spent my time in underground campaigns to help workers sort of deliver their letter to the boss. And so I was like, ‘Ok, I'm going to be different.’

And in many ways, I think my labor organizing, seeing my workers as sort of leaders, and how do I build a team that builds the leadership of these workers to be more than just workers, right? I don't see my team as just cooks or front of house, or any of these things. And so I think, sort of having that experience of building leadership and workers as sort of nuts and bolts organizing skills really did help me and my leadership style. 

Right out of culinary school, I was really lucky enough to get a job at a pretty renowned bakery and pizzeria cooperative called Arizmendi. And so I learned what sort of participatory management and leadership looks like, in a way that I think I wouldn't have if I just reading about co-ops. 

And so I think all of those things really helped me build empathy. I mean, it's not easy to be a small business owner and I was constantly at odds with sort of the constraints of running a food business with sort of my recognition that from a workers’ rights standpoint, it's that these things have to be in place. And so it didn't make me necessarily the most profitable business in the beginning, but it was a long-term investment that I knew that I was going to build my model around sort of having a high labor line and in really investing in my workers.

Not just in wages and benefits, but also in time. We would have staff meetings, and we would pay people for their time to sort of go above and beyond. And that turned out to be really good for us. You know, we have a pretty good retention rate at Reem’s. 

And I want to say the biggest moment — and I talked about this in the piece with Tunde that you mentioned — that my workers delivered a letter to me in the midst of the pandemic. And of course, as the ‘boss,’ I could have been really scared and threatened and take it personally like, ‘Don't they know what I'm going through?’ [Laughs.] 

And instead, I was really proud. Yeah, I was like, ‘Ok, go, this is you stepping into your power and asking for transparency.’ This is a chance for me to kind of really check my own contradictions in sort of the role of power that I play. 

So, yeah, it's a lot of contradictions and a lot of things that I grappled with. But I think, above all, my world and community and labor organizing really helped me be a better leader. And that's kind of how I think of myself at Reem’s. And I'm still learning, but it definitely informed the way that I structured my business to really sort of center my employees first.

Alicia: And when you opened Reem’s, you told the press that you had envisioned it as a community hub. And has your understanding of the role of the restaurant in politics and community changed since that time, and especially in the pandemic?

Reem: Yes and no.

I don't think it's changed, per se. I think it's gotten more and more clear. When we opened Reem’s, or when I sort of envisioned Reem’s even 10 years ago, we weren't imagining just a restaurant, like the sort of traditional form of a restaurant. And the more and more I got — the deeper I got into the food industry, I realized that it's very short-sighted.

Alicia: I wanted to ask you about how you express political ideas and political realities through food and through the space that you have created. And how have you been successful and what do you think helps in trying to discuss issues of maybe colonization, apartheid, all these things? How do you express them through food and through a food space?

Reem: So, I think that sort of how my food sort of intersects with these larger concepts of colonialism and apartheid, I think that that is a multi-layered question. I think that just inherently my food is political, just by nature of being a generation of oppressed people who are fighting to, just for their mere existence. And so food becomes sort of a marker of our existence, our identity, in the midst of a myth that we never existed as a people. 

So the work that I do around my food is really as someone who is an exile. I'm in diaspora, as a Palestinian and Syrian, and my role is to continue sort of the generations of storytelling. Many communities that come from struggle sort of use food and other sort of cultural traditions to be able to carry that story, so that we don't forget.

But I think, in particular, being in diaspora in the U.S., which is the belly of the beast, as I would call it. The U.S. has been single handedly responsible, if not aiding and abetting, other forces of colonial rule and extraction of resources from other communities. And so if we can change the worldview of people, it's a sort of organic consciousness raising. 

Food becomes this sort of very visceral experience. If you create these conditions through food, you can break down at least some barriers to be able to have the hard conversations. And then hopefully the people who engage with my food, particularly as an Arab in this country, they could start to question, what is the role and what power do they have to hold their government responsible? I don't think that I'm going to end apartheid in Palestine through my food or anything like that. But I think that that sort of deeper level of consciousness raising is important. 

I think the second part of my work, which is a little bit more indirect, is sort of the issue of food sovereignty. Reem’s, we sit in different neighborhoods in Oakland, mostly Latinx communities, Black and brown communities. It is important to intersect the struggle that people are dealing with the forces of gentrification and being sort of cut off from their food systems, and what has helped them be resilient. We think about sort of the connections between our disconnection from our food with the disconnection of other Black and brown communities. 

And so the intersection of struggle is really important for us, and why we sort of engage in questions of food sovereignty, and how do we build resilience in communities, and fight sort of the forces of disaster capitalism.