Reem Assil Transcript
Kerry Diamond:
Hi, everyone. You are listening to Radio Cherry Bombe. And I'm your host, Kerry Diamond, coming to you from Rockefeller Center in the heart of New York city. Each week, we talk to the coolest culinary personalities around, the folks shaping and shaking up the food scene.
Joining me today is Reem Assil, who I think is one of the warmest and bravest folks in the food world, so I'm thrilled we get to know her a little better. Reem is the founder of Reem’s California, which was inspired by her Palestinian and Syrian heritage and located in the Bay Area. She is also the author of Arabiyya: Recipes from the Life of an Arab in Diaspora. It's her debut cookbook and it is filled with the beautiful seasonal food you can find on the menu at Reem’s.
Today's show is presented by Talea Beer Company, the only exclusively woman-owned and woman-founded production brewery and taproom in New York City. I love that. Talea was founded in 2019 by Bombesquad members, Tara Hankinson and LeAnn Darland, who met after leaving their corporate jobs in tech and media to join the beer industry. Talea is all about pushing the envelope on flavor, like with their Indigo Crush, a sour, slightly salty gose style beer. That's gose, G-O-S-E. If I'm pronouncing that wrong, please DM me. That is brewed with more than two pounds of fruit per gallon, and has a beautiful rich violet color from blackberries and blueberries. I personally love a fruit-forward beer so I can't wait to try that. If you are more of a traditionalist, you will enjoy Al Dente, an Italian-style Pilsner that's crisp and floral with hints of honey and herbs that pairs well with just about everything.
Talea has three locations in New York City. There's Talea's flagship taproom and brewery—brewery's a tough word to pronounce, just FYI—and brewery in Williamsburg, their brand new Cobble Hill taproom, and the Talea summer pop-up at Grand Central Station. Want to join their beer club or book one of their taprooms for birthday or bridal showers? Visit taleabeer.com. P.S., congratulations to the Talea team on being named Supplier of the Year for Whole Foods Market Northeast region. We're very proud of that here at Cherry Bombe because Tara and LeAnn met the Whole Foods team at our Jubilee conference in 2019. Obviously, that means you can find Talea in select Whole Foods. And don't forget, 21 and over. And please enjoy responsibly.
Now, let's check in with today's guest. Reem Assil, welcome to Radio Cherry Bombe.
Reem Assil:
I'm so excited to be here. It's been a very long time.
Kerry Diamond:
Congratulations on your beautiful book.
Reem Assil:
Thank you so much.
Kerry Diamond:
I'm so excited for you. And I learned so much about you going through the book. For those listeners out there who love cookbooks that you can spend time reading, this is the book for them.
Reem Assil:
Thank you.
Kerry Diamond:
Tell me why you decided to tell your story via a cookbook.
Reem Assil:
Well, I had been on the culinary scene for a little bit. It all kind of happened so fast. I started my small but mighty operation of Reem’s as a farmer's market operation. And within two years we grew to five farmer's markets. Before I knew it, I was opening a restaurant. I didn't know anything about running a restaurant. I was a baker up until that moment. We had gained a lot of national attention. It was amazing. I was like, I didn't know that people were paying attention, but I felt like it was happening so fast that my narrative was starting to be constructed for me, this like meteoric rise of the Brown woman chef. I don't know. It just felt a little uncomfortable. In 2019, I just had a child. I was in postpartum. I had walked away from a restaurant partnership and just felt like I needed to take back my narrative.
Kerry Diamond:
You couldn't even take a maternity leave. I read that.
Reem Assil:
No. I literally opened a restaurant two weeks later. I just had an epiphany moment of like, "This is the time. I want to tell my story." I had had people asking me, "When is the cookbook coming out? When is the cookbook coming out?" And so I went back and reached out to folks. But I think in my mind I wanted to write a memoir, but people really wanted a cookbook so I figured out a way to tell my story through the language of food.
Kerry Diamond:
That question ran through my mind when I was reading the book. Your story is so rich.
Reem Assil:
Yeah. Yeah. I really like the way that I thought about this book—was how can I best pick the recipes that would tell the story in the most holistic way if somebody were wanting to understand, “What is it like to be Arab in America?”. The title of the book is called Arabiyya, which translates literally to Arab woman. So it's sort of a reclamation of me. This is who I am and all these stereotypes. And all these tropes of what you think an Arab woman is, throw that at the door, because I'm going to challenge every single assumption that you have, and I'm going to do it in this book. So that was the guiding force, but it also was a continuation of what I was doing with my restaurants, which is to really celebrate this thing—Arab hospitality—that has given me so much joy over the last five years to share that with the world and say that y'all can experience this, you can immerse yourself in it, and you can learn a little bit about the stories behind it and have some dinner parties.
Kerry Diamond:
Cookbooks can be total little beasts when you are putting them together.
Reem Assil:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
They're very needy little things.
Reem Assil:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
How did the book evolve during the process?
Reem Assil:
Yeah. It was a push-pull honestly, because I had a structure in my head around what I wanted to do. And the thing about cookbooks, you only have so many pages, so many words that you can get all this stuff out on. So you have to think of a structure that, one, is able to convey all those things, but two, that an average home cook can follow. Just for example, putting sweet pastries smack dab in the middle of my cookbook was controversial, but I was like, "No, the street corner bakery is the apex of this book and we're going to put it in the middle and it's going to tell this story." Somewhat non-linear story of my evolution, right? The second chapter of the book is really this moment where everything shifted for me. So I really tried to create the chapters with the themes of each essay that line up this book.
And those evolved over time. At first I was like, "Okay, we're going to have this theme, that theme, these basic themes." And then as we started to write, other themes unfolded. For instance, the Arab table was a celebration of Arab hospitality, but then it became a story about my mom and all the contradictions of being a woman in this country and as an immigrant. So that was really fun to go through that.
I would say the hardest part of writing this book was rewriting it. We turned in a manuscript in the middle of a pandemic. I was on the hook for a manuscript and I was literally trying to save both of my restaurants for the first three, four months of 2020. And so it was not easy to pack this manuscript in, but I had amazing editors. The book came together and they supported the structure that I had built.
The other thing about it was the baking section. If you see other books in my genre, I guess the genre of the Middle East, whatever…
Kerry Diamond:
What is your genre?
Reem Assil:
I know. I'm like, "I want my own genre. This is Arabs in diaspora." And I talk a lot about place. My food is a culmination of the places that I've been and how they've inspired me. But my baking is... the baking is essential to Arab cuisine. If you can't make the bread, that's the bread that's the cornerstone of Arab eating and I feel like a lot of books in my genre just kind of skip over that part. And so I really wanted to maybe show off my nerdy, like, to remind people that I was a baker before I turned into a restaurateur/chef.
We spent a lot of time making sure that people had all the steps that they need. So it is a little bit of a dense book, but I hope what came out of it, we got more and more ambitious as we started to write it, was that there's a little bit of something for everybody, for the nerds, for the baker extraordinaire, to the folks who are just like, "I just want to put three or four ingredients together and make a dip." There's a little bit of something for everybody.
Kerry Diamond:
A little bit of all those people in there. I think the listeners can probably tell from this little snippet of our conversation is that we've got a lot to unpack about Reem's story. There are so many chapters to what you have done. You wrote that even as a child you never chose the easy way.
Reem Assil:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
Tell us a little bit about your childhood and your parents.
Reem Assil:
Yeah. I was a pretty rambunctious child. Now having a four-year-old who's basically like a little incarnation of me, my mom was like, "Payback." My mom would tell me stories of how I wouldn't want to hold her hand walking across the street. I'll hold my own hand. So I was always crafty and wanting to be independent. It was never easy. But I had these dreams of being an actress and performing so I always had this muscle of hospitality and entertaining people and making them feel happy and making them laugh. My upbringing was not easy because I was doing that in the context of being an Arab in a very small white suburb of Boston, Massachusetts.
We grew up on “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” but then our Arab culture was very strong at home so it was a little bit confusing. I was proud of all these things and I was absorbing all these things like a sponge. By the time I got to the age of 12, I was grappling with “Who am I?” and trying to just fit in just like any other preteen, but also wanting to express myself. It was a paradox, I guess, for lack of a better word. My parents were really good role models, but they couldn't understand what it felt like to be a child facing, what I didn't know at the time, was racism. But how do I balance my Arab culture with this American identity, which they feared a lot of for us to lose our culture.
Kerry Diamond:"
You wrote about having the code-switch. I don't know when that term came into existence, but it wasn't something we talked about back then.
Reem Assil:
Yeah. I didn't know what that was either, but in retrospect I've built that skill. I can always tell when I'm code-switching depending on who I'm talking to. But yeah, being in very white spaces where people don't really understand my culture and don't ask for consent to make assumptions about it. And then me feeling like I can't draw that boundary. I feel sheepish to be like, "Actually, I'm not from Pakistan." Or whatever silly thing that they come up with. It's invisibilizing. You feel invisible but then you want to crawl into a hole and feel even more invisible.
Kerry Diamond:
You said culture singular, but your parents came from very distinct cultures themselves.
Reem Assil:
Totally. Yeah. I mean, my parents met in Lebanon, but my dad had a very different upbringing. And I talk about these two very distinct upbringings in the book. They didn't have the same upbringing. My dad escaped Syria and studied. He's a citizen of the world. He studied in Egypt and then was part of the revolution and then moved to the U.S. and became an engineer. My mom was in the midst of a civil war and came from a refugee family. Those things were at clash with one another so it was a very confusing context to live in. But what I do remember that was so struck is the pride that we had in our food and our culture. We would go to concerts. And the music, the dance, all of that stuff was just very vibrant in my household. That was something I always came back to and something I still carry with me today.
Kerry Diamond:
Tell us about the food. We’re all dying to hear about that. And food, you had two different food cultures too.
Reem Assil:
Yeah. Totally.
Kerry Diamond:
You had the American latchkey kid as you told me earlier and your family's food.
Reem Assil:
My upbringing is not this romanticized, nostalgic child of immigrants, "Did you learn how to cook from your mom?" Maybe I learned some shortcut tricks because she was a working mom. She came to this country from civil war to literally Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which is like the middle of Amish country, and she didn't know how to cook. My grandmother did everything. She was the matriarch of the family. She took care of everything. Your pen and your education was your way to freedom, and then she was expected to cook in the kitchen. So needless to say, I wanted to be as far away from the kitchen as possible. It's kind of ironic that I ended up in the kitchen. What I watched my mom do was really cook on her own terms. And so my childhood was really a mix of being a latchkey kid, making Top Ramen for myself and macaroni and cheese. Whatever's easy. Chips, the Ellio's pizza, and watching my mom make these one pot meals in her pressure cooker because she didn't have time to be cooking a stew low and slow all day.
Kerry Diamond:
I love that you used the expression "cook on her own terms."
Reem Assil:
Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
I don't think anyone's ever put it that way in all the years we've been doing the podcast. That's a pretty powerful statement.
Reem Assil:
It really is. And I talk about this. It's like being in the kitchen could be a very, very spiritual act, an act that gives you joy. And it can be really oppressive when it's expected of you and when you don't cook on your own terms.
Kerry Diamond:
Which a whole generation of women went through.
Reem Assil:
Yep. This carries to the restaurant world, that I entered an industry that I had no part in shaping. And I'm expected to follow all these cardinal rules that feel very oppressive to me. And so I'm constantly trying to figure out the ways of keeping the joy in cooking and serving people by channeling my mom's spirit of like, "I want to do this on my own terms."
Kerry Diamond:
Mm-hmm. What were some of the foods when you did have big family gatherings? What were some of the foods folks brought?
Reem Assil:
Yeah. Potlucks are the big thing in Arab households. We drive 20, 30 minutes to the next Arab household and everybody brings something. The iconic things are obviously the hummus, a lot of the dips. Somebody is always bringing the store-bought bread from the Arab grocers somewhere in Watertown, Massachusetts, because that's where all the Lebanese-Armenians are. Somebody is always bringing dessert. Knafeh is the big one. That's our sweet cheese encrusted with shredded phyllo. It's delicious.
Kerry Diamond:
The photo of that in your cookbook…
Reem Assil:
The cheese bowl.
Kerry Diamond:
... killed me when I saw it. The cheese bowl. Mm-hmm.
Reem Assil:
Yeah. Bringing that out when it's nice and steamy hot. I just have all of these memories. And then my mom's kind of claim that she had two dishes that we always brought to potluck. One was what is the inspiration for the Pali Cali at Reem’s California—musakhan, which is a traditional Palestinian chicken dish that's basically brined in sumac. It's like this deep purple hue. And it's equal parts onion and chicken. You caramelize the onion and you cook the chicken low and slow. She used to wrap it in tortillas and make little bites. It's just addicting. We used to eat it at home and eat it at potlucks. And then layali lubnan, which is really easy. That's the other thing about... a lot of Arab desserts can be really easy. It doesn't have to be this strenuous baklava. It was like a farina, like a pudding almost, that firmed up with like... she used to use Cool Whip and then drench it in a rose and orange blossom syrup. And it was so good.
Kerry Diamond:
I love that. I love that she hacked the Cool Whip that way.
Reem Assil:
Oh yeah. She had all the hacks.
Kerry Diamond:
Obviously when you're younger you're not thinking, "Oh this is Arab hospitality."
Reem Assil:
No.
Kerry Diamond:
But that's when those seeds started to be planted in your mind.
Reem Assil:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean I had two matriarchs in the family. Obviously my grandmother, and I talk a lot about her in the book. She made it her duty and her virtue to embody the whole spirit of Arab hospitality. For her what that meant is like nobody enters her kitchen… "I'm going to cook you a feast. I am going to prepare for weeks on weeks ahead so that I can host anyone who comes into my home at the drop of a dime." That was the kind of... it was tables filled, overlapping each other, filled to the brim.
My mom's hospitality was a little bit more genuine. She really didn't have that much time to do what my grandmother took it upon herself to make it her whole life's purpose. But what she did was, she was really able to make you feel like you were the one, that you were taken care of. That even when she didn't have much time, she could put something together really quick and sit with you and make you feel really seen.
So I feel like I took a little bit from both of them. But again, my hospitality was really in organizing people, bringing people together, telling stories. The food part didn't come until later. And it was really when I went to the Arab world as an adult and I didn't have a feeling of belonging and I didn't have a sense of place and home that I felt home for the first time in many, many years that I was like, "Ah, this is what Arab hospitality feels like." And it was through the food. It was really through the warmth of something being freshly made for you, the attention that that person gives, the drink. Coffee is a big part of our culture. I didn't know I had it in me. It always kind of came through my organizing and my community building. But Arab hospitality in essence is really about community building.
Kerry Diamond:
We're going to jump ahead to you as a young adult. How and why did you become a political organizer?
Reem Assil:
Yeah. As a child of diaspora, it is a stranger in a strange land. We used to visit the Arab world all the time. Or not all the time; it was quite expensive. But every eight years we would go. And so I'd get to see my family abroad, but it didn't feel very connected there. I already talked about my childhood not really feeling connected to the culture growing up in school. And so this grappling of, "Here I am, this privileged kid from America going to the Arab world, but I don't feel part of that, but I don't quite feel like I fit here."
It was really in high school... I didn't want to take this class because I was like, "America's history is really short," but I took a class called Post-War America. I had this really cool Jewish teacher from the Bronx who loved the Bronx. We learned Catcher In The Rye as a history book, not as an English book as it traditionally is taught. We would go to New York and go to where all the beats were. He would show us all these things. And so my consciousness of other movements in this country started to take form as early as high school. We went to the Deep South and we learned about the Civil Rights Movement straight from the people who lived on the front lines. I really believe that that was the aha moment for me where I made connections. I'm like, "Wow, Mississippi could be Gaza. I have a memory of Gaza that looks just like this. What if it's the same forces that are creating these conditions that these folks live in?"
So I started gravitating towards other communities and struggle. I was really inspired by Black and Brown movements here in this country and started to get into organizing. I got this like, oohmp of like, "I'm going to be this diplomat and I'm going to figure out what peace in the Middle East is." Then I went to school. I went to college. And that was a very sobering reality of academia and what they teach you in school, especially in liberal arts, and it literally made me sick. Literally made me sick. I could not eat. I had developed a deep depression; the second week of my college years was September 11th. And so that forever changed the way that I was going to be in this country. I left school to really escape that, but I think what I did find, it brought me closer to my purpose, because it brought me to California where a lot of these movements that I was really attracted to as a high schooler were well and alive. I just got hooked to organizing. I loved the idea of being able to walk into someone's home and just have coffee with them and learn about their life. And just it being organic and developing this trust and relationship. And then getting them to face their fears and be strong and brave and tell their landlord they can't up the rent on them because they need to stay in their home. There’s just something really, really powerful about that. So I felt empowered by empowering others. It was quite a journey to get to organizing the way I did.
Kerry Diamond:
I loved reading about that. I did laugh out loud at one point because you pointed out at the same time, I won't call them hobbies because Buddhism is not a hobby, but you had two distinct passions at the time. Buddhism and poker.
Reem Assil:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
What was that about?
Reem Assil:
I was really soul-searching for everything. I still am. Yeah. I mean I think of someone who's really thinking about justice and why the world is the way it is, is always searching. And I think that the Bay Area in particular was a place where everybody could be as they are. I found this community of color that was practicing Buddhism. For me it was like, "Oh, Buddhism is for the New Age privileged white folks who are appropriating Eastern culture." And then as I started to sit and be with it, I realized, "Oh, the ability to really see things as they are was really helping me with my organizing because what we were fighting against was just so hard."
I came to a point of burnout in my organizing because we're just fighting, fighting, fighting and I couldn't see what it is that we were fighting for anymore. I think poker came at this time where it allowed me to really explore these other parts of myself and my emotions. I think in many ways it's kind of related to Buddhism, because it's meditative, right? You can focus on the here and the now.
Kerry Diamond:
I have never played poker so I don't know.
Reem Assil:
Oh. Yeah, you focus on the here and the now and you're going through the ups and downs. And you're not attached to the ups or the downs. You're just there in the moment. And you're appreciating the moment. And as a woman that is playing against—quite frankly, the majority of the field are men—being able to feel empowered and just have my alter ego persona and beat them at this game that I love. Because I am kind of a numbers nerd and I love psychology; I love game theory; I learned all that stuff in school. I just get to be this person that I couldn't express.
Kerry Diamond:
Do you have a good poker face?
Reem Assil:
Not in life. At the poker table, yes. But not in life. You can kind of tell. I was like, "Dammit. I looked like that on TV. I clearly do not like that person."
Kerry Diamond:
I don't think I have a good poker face at all.
Reem Assil:
But yeah. I mean, I even competed in the world series.
Kerry Diamond:
Wow.
Reem Assil:
Just to be good at something and to get to represent.
Kerry Diamond:
When did the transition into food begin?
Reem Assil:
I would say officially in 2010, although food was always sort of the thing I was gravitating towards as an amateur baker and cook even before then. It's funny. When I became a chef, a lot of folks from college were like, "Oh yeah, I could have told you that. You were cooking a lot in school and you were making meals." So I was engaging with food, but you forget these things because you have so much trauma. In 2010, I was really thinking of leaving my job, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. I tell this story in the book and to a lot of folks when they asked me about where was Reem’s born. It really was on this trip in 2010 where I took a trip with my father to Syria and Lebanon. And up until that moment, my father and I had been a little bit of estranged. So it was a really powerful trip to reconnect me to my roots. A lot of times when you're soul-searching, you're also running away from stuff. That trip allowed me to really face the things that I was running away from and connect to this place that has memories that my dad had embedded in them and to really understand my dad in a deeper way.
It was in these street corner bakeries. the first time I really felt alive and up the hillside of Syria where people were just taking me in as if I was their own that I was like, "Ah, that's what my community needs." Because I was like, "I don't want to organize, but I don't want to go corporate." So I was like, "I'm just going to bake.” I want to be outside of my head. I was struggling with the Buddhism. I was going back into depression, maybe I could just go back and be in my body for a little bit.
So I literally came back. I was like I wanted to build something that would be eventually Reem’s, but I knew that I needed to build the technical skills. And so I left my job to the dismay of my parents who already didn't know what I was doing with my life. I enrolled myself in a baking and pastry program and went to school and then hustled a lot of different jobs, including a really formative experience working at a cooperative bakery called Arizmendi Bakery & Pizzeria.
Arizmendi is a co-op that is modeled off of The Cheese Board Collective, which has been a co-op in Berkeley, California, since the '70s. It was a cheese shop at first, hence Cheese Board, but then they expanded into pastries and then sourdough California-style pizza. You have one ingredient for the day, one kind of pizza, and that's what you get. It's seasonal and it changes and it's always vegetarian. Arizmendi was modeled off of... that was actually named after a priest named Arizmendiarrieta. That was his last name. José Arizmendiarrieta, who organized in the anti-fascist movement in the Basque. He built this multi... now it's a multi-billion dollar enterprise in Spain called the Mondragon System. I learned so much about what could be in all these different alternative models.
Kerry Diamond:
Did you gravitate toward that because it was an alternative model?
Reem Assil:
I think so.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay.
Reem Assil:
I think so. I was maybe six months into culinary school. A lot of people are trying to get into Arizmendi when openings come up because you have to become a member. It's not an easy application.
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah. Explain what that means—that it's co-op.
Reem Assil:
Yeah. So to be in a co-op, basically you get to have a say in big decisions around the business. You participate as an active owner. So you're not just a baker, but depending on what your interests are, you might run payroll or learn how to be on the production committee or do marketing. So you're like literally running the business with other business owners so you're learning that.
So I wanted to learn how to run a business. There was a little bit of research there. But also when the business profits, everybody gets to have a share in that profit. So that was really an invaluable experience for me because I not only got to build my technical skills as a baker, but also learn how to work collectively and learn these really, really concrete technical skills of what it is to be a business owner. So I'm very, very thankful that they took me among several, several candidates.
One of my first cookbooks, ironically, when I moved to California years before was The Cheese Board cookbooks. So I brought in three recipes from that to my interview and I was like, "You have to take me for this job." And I think…
Kerry Diamond:
I love that.
Reem Assil:
I think they were a little scared of me so they were like, "Okay."
Kerry Diamond:
Ah, no. You walked in, they’re probably like, "We've got to give her a job."
Reem Assil:
Yeah. Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
What came next?
Reem Assil:
So after Arizmendi, I jumped around freelancing. I was a pastry chef for a big corporate catering company called Grace Street Catering. Being a pastry chef, it was actually really fun, but you work in silos. The pastry chef is often sort of in the corner. It was the first time I worked in one of those kitchens, dare I say, not-so-nice to people or women for that matter. So that got a little old. I was baking on the side. I was taking gigs trying to figure out my recipes. I became obsessed with the man'oushe, which became the iconic product…
Kerry Diamond:
What you're already known for. Mm-hmm.
Reem Assil:
... signature product. What I'm known for at Reem’s. Every entrepreneurship program for women there was, I did it, on the side. It wasn't really until I joined a program called La Cocina, which is an incubator program that really helps take small women-owned businesses and help them scale so that they can support their communities and their families.
Kerry Diamond:
Hopefully, everybody listening knows about that organization.
Reem Assil:
Yeah. They're an amazing organization.
Kerry Diamond:
And a great cookbook.
Reem Assil:
It was life-changing. Yeah. And I was part of that cookbook and got to tour all over the country with them.
Kerry Diamond:
I remember when that cookbook landed on my desk. It might have been at Yahoo Food back then and I just wanted to learn more about that organization. So for those of you listening, definitely check out the cookbook and check out the organization because they've helped so many women get their businesses off the ground.
Reem Assil:
It really did. They taught me so much. And I really understand why so many small food businesses only last a couple of years. Had I not had La Cocina, I don't know if I would be where I am today because every time I was trying to quit, they would throw more resources in my face. And it was like a boutique consulting company where you were not paying. You're building fellowship and camaraderie, not just with the staff of La Cocina, who are providing you with all the skills, they connected me with… I apprenticed with so many good chefs and learned how to work out of a commercial kitchen.
Kerry Diamond:
Did I read they even found the original location of Reem’s for you?
Reem Assil:
Yeah. They found it. Exactly.
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah, it's incredible.
Reem Assil:
I talked about that in the book. They scope out and they help you negotiate leases, all these things that I was too afraid to do on my own. And they were like, "You're ready. You're growing too big for La Cocina."
Kerry Diamond:
You were doing farmer's markets before you had your brick-and-mortar.
Reem Assil:
Yeah. And so we worked out of that commercial kitchen. I want to say that working for two, oh God, it was three years, and it was hard. So I worked three years out of that commercial kitchen. I was still sort of working on the side, taking whatever catering gigs I could and just trying to support myself. But at a certain point, I took the leap of faith and quit everything else and leaned into Reem’s.
Kerry Diamond:
In 2017.
Reem Assil:
Yeah, 2017.
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah, you opened your brick-and-mortar, Reem’s California. What was your vision for the space?
Reem Assil:
When they found that space, I was like... I wouldn't have imagined BART. BART is a transit line at Reem’s. But then when I saw the neighborhood of the original Reem’s space, it was like perfect, because the Fruitvale neighborhood in Oakland, California, is the intersection of so many different communities. It's one of the last parts of Oakland that still exists as it was before other parts got gentrified and a little bit more homogenous. It felt like I was walking down the streets of Beirut when you walk down the streets, because it's like you're in Mexico and those cultures are very similar. I wanted all walks of life to come into Reem’s. That it was on a transit line was perfect because I wanted to be part of people's daily routines. That's how the Arab bakery functions in the Arab world.
It really was what I imagined was to be this movement space, the space where people can come and organize. That's when I was an organizer, I'd go to cafes to speak to the workers or the residents I was organizing. So I wanted it to be this hub where everybody could come and intersect with one another and maybe build community that they otherwise wouldn't have. I really feel like we accomplished that at Reem’s. The thing that I always heard and I still hear today, it's like, "Every time I go into Reem’s, I run into someone I know."
Kerry Diamond:
I love that.
Reem Assil:
Or, "Every time I go into Reem’s, I meet someone new that I'm still connected with." That is exactly what I wanted. It was quite sobering to realize that this industry doesn't really allow for that and the way that I really wanted to manifest it, but it was a safe haven for employees too. We hired directly from the communities that were living in that area. So the community was really reflected in both the patrons and the workers.
Kerry Diamond:
Ultimately though, we have talk about this, those outside the Bay Area learned about you not because of your food and this beautiful third space you had created, but because of a mural painted on a wall inside of Reem’s.
Reem Assil:
Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
What was the mural?
Reem Assil:
One of the things I always say was when someone is really expressing the truth, it makes people feel uncomfortable. Just to be Palestinian, cooking Palestinian food and to say, "We are here and our food has been taken away from us," was really controversial. But I knew that I really wanted to tell these untold stories. And so when I built Reem’s around the time that we were doing the construction, there was an activist, her name was Rasmea Odeh. She was the co-director of the Arab American Action Network in Chicago. She was an organizer. And she was at the time 65, I want to say. She had been organizing Arab women in the Chicago area for 17 years around issues that nobody wanted to touch: domestic violence, language access, all of these things. And she really built an amazing leadership.
And because the government wanted to make an example out of her because she was an activist—a prominent Palestinian activist who was really outspoken about her belief in Palestinian liberation—they deported her. They said that she lied on her government papers 20 years ago and stripped her of her citizenship. And so I wanted to bring that story to light. It could have been anybody, but her picture because of her character, she was like this... I'm talking about her in the past tense. She's still very alive and well and making home where she is. She's in Jordan now. But she was the life of the party. And I wanted her to smile down on me. I wanted the face of a Brown woman, elder, who said, "Anytime you feel scared to be who you are, don't be scared." I'm looking at…
Kerry Diamond:
Have you gotten to know each other?
Reem Assil:
No, but just through the interwebs, through people. A lot of people have commemorated her. She said that the mural that we put up of her was her favorite because she looks pretty and she's smiling. Because that's who she was.
Kerry Diamond:
Did you ever want to interview her one day?
Reem Assil:
One day. Yeah, I would love... I mean, she's so amazing. And they villainized her and called her a terrorist and called me a terrorist. And all of a sudden I woke up, I was at that time four months pregnant, I woke up to a series of one-star Yelp reviews, 700 to be exact. Overnight.
Kerry Diamond:
I mean Reem, that’s…
Reem Assil:
From all across the world.
Kerry Diamond:
I don't even know how you handled it.
Reem Assil:
Saying they wish that my…
Kerry Diamond:
What came next?
Reem Assil:
Yeah. I mean, this was the time of Charlottesville where a lot of the right-wing forces, the vigilantes, they were all emboldened. Breitbart wrote about me and was calling on people to go protest my restaurant. And it was very scary.
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah. With all these big right-wing media organizations with rallying people against you. How did you handle all this?
Reem Assil:
Ugh.
Kerry Diamond:
You're pregnant, you're young, it's your business. All your money is on the line. Your employees' livelihoods on the line.
Reem Assil:
Yeah. Some days I handled it better than others. I was a hot mess for a lot of the time. But I feel like these moments, you say everything that you did prepared you for this moment. And I really feel like those 10 years of organizing of building solidarity with other communities and struggle who understood what it means to be an Arab woman, to be Palestinian, came to my aid. They built a community network of defense around me. Everything from abolitionist groups, like Critical Resistance, to Jewish Voice for Peace, a lot of white allies came to my aid and then other Latino and Black organizations. And they were like, "We're all going to defend... because this is our space. This is not just Reem’s space. An attack on Reem’s is an attack on our values for social justice." They came and they did Edens, which was really hard.
I do a scene. My last essay is really about that, of like, it was really hard on us because it's like they're coming to our defense and we're just learning how to be a restaurant, but we need the business. And the PR people telling me like, "Just shy away from the mural, talk about something else." And I'm like, "That was a big mural of my... these are my politics. I can't hide who I am." I doubled down on myself, on Rasmea, and it ended up being the best thing I could have ever done because they say there's no such thing as bad press. All press is press. I don't necessarily know if I believe in that because of the trauma. I mean, I literally had people calling me profane things and saying like death threats. They were doxxing me. I was afraid to go home at night. I mean, that was the level of fear that I had, but I want to say that they gave me a chance to…
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah, I don't know if all press is good press when it includes places like Pride Park.
Reem Assil:
Yeah, like violence.
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah. And Fox and all that.
Reem Assil:
But they did. They gave me a chance to educate the community of what is it like to be Palestinian in America and why the generations before me hid their food behind Mediterranean or even Greek. We're not Greek. Say what it is and you don't have to be afraid. So hopefully I broke a little bit of that dam that's been needing to be broken for a long time.
Kerry Diamond:
When did things start to calm down for you and your team?
Reem Assil:
Pretty soon after, 2018. Food & Wine named Reem’s one of the top 10 restaurants in America and I got nominated for a James Beard. So the pessimist in me was like, "What is happening? Is this a conspiracy? Is this a trap? What is happening?" But they moved on to the next thing.
Kerry Diamond:
You eventually went on to open two more places. One was part of a partnership that you had a change of mind about.
Reem Assil:
Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
The other had been open three days before the pandemic and the order to close all restaurants in California. Tell us about the state of Reem’s California today.
Reem Assil:
Yeah. I've learned so much now having done this a few times. I'm getting better every single time. We're learning more lessons. If there's one thing that the pandemic really taught me is that you always want to lean in on your values, have clarity around your values, and if something deviates from those values because as you become more popular and people are going to be throwing things your way all the time. When I took my second partnership, I was operating from a place of deficit. What I've learned now having opened Reem’s in the Mission and really both my spaces being resilient in the pandemic is that when you really invest in your people, that's when you're resilient and that's when you're going to survive.
We spent more money on our people. We did not shut down. In fact, our oven, I'm not sure if you heard of this, but in the end of 2020, the oven that we inherited from our predecessors which was these amazing folks who had a bakery in that space, it exploded. We were six months without an oven. Our community came to our aid and we went back to our farmer's market roots and we were popping up at Delfina and restaurants all around San Francisco. And we kept all of our employees. So it's survival. We didn't have a choice. I don't have a choice.
I remember those first weeks of the pandemic laying in my bed feeling sorry for myself. But I was just like, "I have no choice but to fight." I'm quite an outside-of-the-box thinker. Anybody who works with me has to run with it because that's what we do at Reem’s. We experiment. Reem’s is a test kitchen really for these models that we haven't even thought about. I knew that I wanted to be worker-owned and I was like, "Instead of saying ‘Build it and they will come’ or ‘Build it for the workers’ which felt a little paternalistic, let's just build it with them. They'll have more buy-in in it; they'll share the risk; they'll share the burden. And then it's not the sole business owner who has to make or break people."
The burden on me as the sole person who had to either be the person who saved everybody or failed everybody, that's just not fair to ask of anyone. And I had just been a candle burning on both ends. It was so liberating to say that out loud and say, "I want to leave a legacy, but I don't have to be at the center of it." In fact, I shouldn't be at the center of it. More people should be stepping aside to make space for leadership, for the people who've been holding this industry up.
Kerry Diamond:
So you're a worker-owned today?
Reem Assil:
We're not worker-owned yet.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay.
Reem Assil:
We function a lot like a worker cooperative. We have a lot of democratic practices. One thing that I learned from being in co-ops is that you can't just build a co-op and say it's cool. It's like you can't put a person of color and leadership and say, "We've solved racism in the industry." You're just like repeating the same thing. So for me, it was really important when we go to this model that people really understand what it is and embody it and unlearn some of the things that they've learned whether they're a manager or like a worker, a dishwasher, who've only ever worked in industry that's told them, "You need to stay in your lane and there's no advancement and you can't be a dishwasher and do this other thing."
So we did a 15-month apprenticeship program. I got a fellowship from the Emerson Collective, which is an amazing nonprofit. It funded me to be able to do this work with my employees. We had 11 people graduate from that program. We had 25 workshops in which we learned together. There were all practice with the tenant of language justice where we had simultaneous interpretations so people could really be able to express themselves in their native language, the language that they feel most comfortable expressing themselves.
And that was really eye-opening for me as a business owner. Yeah, so we're working with lawyers and figuring out a structure. I'm kind of crazy. I'm turning this into like... I'm selling this to the workers and I'm trying to grow Reem’s at the same time, because it's just not enough to just have a small restaurant, but I want to build wealth. I want to build wealth for the long haul. This restaurant model just in and of itself, it's not going to feed my workers in San Francisco the way that I want to, so we made a decision. We literally did our 10-year vision in 2020, January 2020 at Reem’s. So we had to go back after the pandemic and relook at that 10-year vision. We fast-tracked a bunch of these little things. So wholesale. How can we get our breads in as many homes and hands as possible?
Kerry Diamond:
Tell us now. So there are two Reem’s locations. One is your wholesale kind of...
Reem Assil:
Yeah. So I opened the third restaurant three days before the shutdown. And we've survived somehow after oven explosions and all the gamut of things that the pandemic presented us. Because we were on a transit line and because our patrons were the people who worked in that plaza, it was no longer viable to be a restaurant. We turned it into a commissary and we worked with World Central Kitchen for almost two years feeding hundreds and thousands of people. Yeah, we made like a hundred thousand, out of this very, very small kitchen in the Fruitvale. And then it was just no longer viable to do that because somehow the pandemic is over and the funding all dried up.
So we are in a commercial kitchen now. I sold my restaurant to an up-and-coming... she was just nominated, a finalist for Emerging Chef at the James Beard Awards, Crystal Wahpepah. So Wahpepah's Kitchen. She's a Native chef and she's amazing. It just feels so good to pass the torch to another woman of color. We're negotiating something in downtown Oakland, which will be the flagship.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, that's so exciting.
Reem Assil:
That will be the one-stop shop, kind of workshop, where you can see all the bread being made.
Kerry Diamond:
The original Reem’s is not open to the public.
Reem Assil:
No.
Kerry Diamond:
But the one in the Mission is.
Reem Assil:
Yep.
Kerry Diamond:
So we have barely talked about food.
Reem Assil:
And then we have a kiosk coming too.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, fun. Yeah.
Reem Assil:
I mean, I would be remiss not to plug it, right?
Kerry Diamond:
Yes, you would.
Reem Assil:
I guess I could say it because we signed a lease.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay.
Reem Assil:
We were going to be in the Ferry Building. That was home to us. They were part of our story actually. One of our first farmers' markets was literally every Saturday morning at the Ferry Building. We're slated to open in September.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh that's soon. Okay.
Reem Assil:
Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
So folks should be able to visit that in September and you can go to the Reem’s in the Mission district right now. We have not even talked about the food at Reem’s.
Reem Assil:
Oh my God.
Kerry Diamond:
So if folks are visiting for the first time, what do they need to order?
Reem Assil:
Definitely our za'atar man'oushe. I like it. We call it the classic, which is veg mix, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, mint, with a little bit of a labneh. That's the California love. So you can kind of mix and match everything, but that's my go-to when I want that vegan fix. Or not so vegan with the labneh, I guess, but that healthy fix. Our Pali Cali which I just made on…
Kerry Diamond:
Tell us about that.
Reem Assil:
…the TODAY Show for 30 seconds.
Kerry Diamond:
This will air in August, but Reem was on the TODAY Show today and she's looking very glamorous despite the fact that we are going through a nasty heat wave right now.
Reem Assil:
Yes, you got to look good.
Kerry Diamond:
Now, I should have videotaped you walking across the Rockefeller Center Plaza because you look like you were just on an award show or something.
Reem Assil:
Yeah. Coming to Cherry Bombe, I got to dress right.
Kerry Diamond:
I got to say she has on a one-shouldered peach jumpsuit with a gold belt, a manicure. Look at you.
Reem Assil:
Matching all of the things. Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh my gosh. And the shoes match the nails. I love it. I love it. I'm impressed.
Reem Assil:
Thank you.
Kerry Diamond:
I'm impressed.
Reem Assil:
Thank you. In the pandemic I had this little bit of a meltdown more delayed than everybody else. I did a lot of things with my life. I changed a lot of things drastically and I'm here for it. It's a journey, but I'm here for it. I feel like I'm finding a second life.
Kerry Diamond:
Not to objectify you, but you look…
Reem Assil:
Oh, thank you.
Kerry Diamond:
... you look great. And the fact there's a huge wave and you look great, even more impressive.
Reem Assil:
The original question was?
Kerry Diamond:
The food.
Reem Assil:
The food. Yes. What they should order. The Pali Cali.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, we were talking about the TODAY show. Yes.
Reem Assil:
That's the chicken braised in sumac with caramelized onion.
Kerry Diamond:
Mm-hmm. Your mom's dish.
Reem Assil:
... with arugula. That's like our California love. Some avocado. Oh my God. That's just like... and the knafeh if you want something sweet. Everybody loves the muhammara at Reem’s. That's a roasted red pepper walnut dip. The cookbook is really a collection of the hits at Reem’s, plus something that I was inspired by from my cooks or some specials that we ran that really celebrate the intersections of Arab culture with other cultures. And then my love for vegetables. There's a big vegetable section in there.
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah. We barely talked about the cookbook too. We're going to have to make this a two-parter. What would you say is the gateway recipe?
Reem Assil:
Probably our master dough recipe because the baking section is really big because it's such an important part of the cuisine. So if you can master the master dough, I have two, like a leavened bread with yeast and a sourdough if you have a starter. I even show you how to build your own starter for the ones who are ambitious. And from that you can make pretty much that whole bread section, a big part of it from that master dough.
Kerry Diamond:
Can newbie bakers do these recipes?
Reem Assil:
Yes. Yeah, they're super easy and accessible. I really wanted to make this accessible. Lots of process shots. I would say on the just meze/savory dip side, all of the mutabals, there's a whole section called Mutabal. Mutabal is what we know as baba ganoush in the US. It really translates into any roasted veg that you mix with tahini, garlic, and lemon, and make wonderfully. So if you can get the eggplant base, I have a few different variations that celebrate the vegetable.
Kerry Diamond:
Which recipe is the most personal to you?
Reem Assil:
This one's a hard one. I want to say the fish dish. So my grandmother passed away a year before I signed this book deal. I had been thinking about her a lot, just how much she lives through me and how I didn't realize that when she was alive. She didn't talk much. She had a lot of trauma. At the end of her life, she had dementia. So really the stories of her cooking are through these fleeting memories, but then also stories that I pieced together from my family.
My mom used to talk about this dish where she would take trout usually traditionally and stuff it with herbs and garlic and lemon and all these things. But it's traditionally a fish baked in tahini sauce. But because my grandmother grew up on an orange citrus grove—oranges are very important in Palestinian culture—she would make it with oranges. And so I was just constructing the different parts of the story of how she made this dish and created my own dish out of it. And I just think about her. I just hope that she'd be proud. It's probably nowhere near the dish that she made, but it just reminds me of her every time that I serve it.
Kerry Diamond:
Which recipe is the biggest hit so far?
Reem Assil:
The dish that I'm seeing the most on people's Instagrams are definitely the hummus with lamb. People love hummus. I guess it is like a vessel for a lot of different things.
Kerry Diamond:
Well, tell me about that dish. We all know how hummus is made, but how is the lamb?
Reem Assil:
Yeah. So it's hummus Bil Awarma. Awarma translates to “a lamb confit.” Preservation is a big part of Arab culture. It was for our survival. And so traditionally, you basically cook the meat in its own fat. So I did a more chef-y fancy thing, which is take the fattiest part of the lamb, which is the breast. You can use the shoulder if that's not available. You slow braise until it's falling apart and you get all of that delicious meat and then you cook it back in its rendered fat. And you get almost like a carnitas effect of soft with crispy. It was a hit at Dyafa and it is a hit at Reem’s. And so I can understand why people love it.
I'm trying to think what other things that I've seen on people's Instagram feeds. There's just been so much. It's been so much fun. Oh, the tacos el pastor, the chicken shawarma meats. El pastor because I mean, who doesn't love el pastor? That's kind of a fun celebration, you can build your own tacos. Yeah, I would say those two.
Kerry Diamond:
We didn't get to talk about the team. You said it was an all-female team that put the book together.
Reem Assil:
Yeah. I was really intentional that... I mean, it has a lot of female energy. I mean the whole book is called Arabiyya, which means Arab woman. I wrote it with my aunt, which was like a labor of love. Her name is Emily Katz, my white Jewish aunt from Humboldt, California who grew up on a farm and taught me how to basically cook a vegetable. Yeah, we learned so much through that process of what it means to write about food and to write about story. Food stylist Jillian Knox, Fanny Pan, amazing. They just rocked that shoot. You can tell when women work together, we create really beautiful things. So people need to invest in us. The illustrator, Cece Carpio, she was the one who illustrated my mural in the Fruitvale. She has a beautiful mural as an homage to the Mission in my Mission location. She's an amazing artist. Alicia Garza, I have to give her a shout out.
Kerry Diamond:
She wrote the foreword.
Reem Assil:
An amazing force. A mentor of mine in organizing. Just a lot of powerhouses in this book.
Kerry Diamond:
And there's so much to this book. I think it's so nice for people to know the team that went into it because it just makes it richer when you go through the book and look at the illustrations and look at the gorgeous photos.
Reem Assil:
Yeah. It's not just me. It's a team effort to make this book come alive.
Kerry Diamond:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Reem, how the heck are you taking care of yourself these days? Tell us. Mentally, physically.
Reem Assil:
Some massages. I've been flying a lot more than I have ever flown in the past, really ever. It's like more than before the pandemic, even in this concentrated time. So a lot of sitting on planes. So I try to get massages when I can. I try to call my mom, talk to my sisters. My sister just had a baby, so I'm going to be an auntie. Or I am an auntie I guess. Share meals with friends. That feels really important. My community really grounds me. So sharing meals, having good wine, having good drinks. And yeah, just drawing boundaries, honestly. I think that this has taught me a lot about—I can't do it all. I can't be the restaurateur, the cookbook author, the mama, and the friend, and be good at all of those things. So I kind of pick my spots where I shine in all of those places and try not to be too hard on myself, I guess.
Kerry Diamond:
That's good advice. Not to be too hard on yourself. Any upcoming events that folks should know about?
Reem Assil:
Yeah. Yeah, I'm in this East Coast stint of my cookbook tour. I'm going to be in my home of Massachusetts in August. We're doing a demo and cookbook event with the good folks at Sofra on August 11th. They should be selling tickets. You could check out their website or Instagram.
Kerry Diamond:
So you'll see Ana Sortun and Maura.
Reem Assil:
Yeah. Maura Kilpatrick. Yeah, they're amazing. That was one of my inspirations for Reem’s. I remember taking R&D trips and going in there.
Kerry Diamond:
I love Sofra. For folks who haven't been, you have to. You have to go visit.
Reem Assil:
And then yeah, I'll be in the Pacific Northwest. I'm going to do a few events in Seattle in mid-October and in Portland. The best way to know my whereabouts is really my IG, reem.assil. I do have a website, reem dash assil, hyphenate, assil dot com.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. Excellent.
Reem Assil:
So yeah, you can find me there. It's been really fun to go around the country and connect with people who are so touched by this book and people I would've never even thought who can really relate to it.
Kerry Diamond:
But thank you for being a model for so many people who know there's a different way. It just means a lot to have someone like you to look to as an example.
Reem Assil:
Thank you.
Kerry Diamond:
So thank you. Congrats on the book and thank you for squeezing us into your busy New York schedule.
Reem Assil:
Yay. Oh, my God, it's so amazing to see you. Yeah, I'm such a huge fan. Thank you for amplifying our voices.
Kerry Diamond:
That's it for today's show. Thank you so much to Reem Assil for chatting with me today. If you'd like to snag Reem’s debut cookbook, Arabiyya, head to your favorite bookstore or check out Reems' Instagram, @reem.assil, for more details on the book and her book tour. And if you find yourself in the Bay Area, well, go enjoy some of Reem's food at Reem’s California.
If you enjoyed today's show, check out our past interviews with other great cookbook authors like Molly Baz and Yasmin Khan. Thank you to the Talea Beer Company for supporting today's show.
Radio Cherry Bombe is a production of Cherry Bombe Magazine. I would love for you to sign up for our newsletter over at cherrybombe.com. Our theme song is by the band Tralala. Thank you Joseph Hazan, studio engineer for Newsstand Studios at Rockefeller Center. And thank you to our assistant producer, Jenna Sadhu. And thanks to our pals at City Vox Studio in Manhattan. Thanks to you for listening. You are the bombe.