From Bakery Stand to Worker-Owned Flagship: How Reem's California Is Rewriting the Rules of the Restaurant Business

In June, Palestinian-Syrian chef Reem Assil reopened her flagship restaurant in Oakland's Jack London Square, not as a sole owner but as one of four co-owners in a worker-owned cooperative — a structure still rare in American dining, and rarer still for a business built around Arab food. Reem's California began in 2015 as a farmers market bread stand before Assil opened her first storefront in Oakland's Fruitvale neighborhood in 2017. That opening made her a name to watch: her herb-crusted flatbreads, baked on a dome-shaped saj griddle, and her mana'eesh-style street food drew a devoted following and a 2022 James Beard Award nomination for Outstanding Chef, plus two earlier semifinalist nods for Best Chef: West. She went on to write "Arabiyya: Recipes from the Life of an Arab in Diaspora," an award-winning cookbook blending recipes with essays on food, family and displacement. The business itself has had a bumpier road. The Fruitvale location closed in 2021. A kiosk at the San Francisco Ferry Building opened in 2022 and then abruptly shut when the facility declined to renew its lease. A Mission District restaurant remains open but was recently damaged in a hit-and-run. Through it all, Assil kept returning to an idea that predates the storefronts: using food as a vehicle for economic justice, not just cultural pride. That idea is now built into the company's ownership structure. The new 3,000-square-foot Jack London Square location — serving as both a production bakery and a cafe — is owned collectively by Assil and three graduates of the company's own chef apprenticeship program: Rebeca Cid Del Prado, Angela Santos Lima and Diana Aguirre. Co-founder Zaynah Hindi, who joined the operation in its early days and now directs sales and partnerships, called the move back to Oakland "a homecoming in every sense of the word." Worker cooperatives — businesses owned and governed by the people who work in them, rather than outside investors — remain a small slice of the U.S. economy, but interest in the model has grown steadily among restaurant and food workers frustrated by thin margins and high turnover in the industry. Assil, a former labor and community organizer for over a decade before she became a chef, has increasingly positioned Reem's not just as a restaurant but as a demonstration project: the company now offers technical assistance to other food businesses considering similar cooperative conversions, alongside mentorship for emerging entrepreneurs. The Jack London Square menu keeps the focus on Arab street food that made Assil's name: classic za'atar flatbread wraps with mint, cucumber and cherry tomato; a lamb-and-Oaxacan-cheese "La Gringa" wrap; a sumac chicken "Pali Cali"; and a vegetarian falafel sandwich, alongside dips like labneh, baba ghanouj and hummus, and drinks including cardamom lattes and a hibiscus-rose Damascus lemonade. For Oakland, the opening also closes a kind of loop. Assil operated an earlier restaurant, Dyafa, in the same Jack London Square neighborhood until it closed in 2020. Local coverage has framed the new location as both a comeback and a bet: that a business built and owned by the people baking the bread can outlast the turbulence that has hit nearly every other iteration of Reem's over the past decade. The cafe is open Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Sunday and Monday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., at 85 Webster Street.