At The Table With: Reem Assil and the Food That Carries a People Forward

Instagram: @reemassil
Pronouns: She/Her

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There’s a particular kind of place Reem Assil has always been drawn to—not the hushed fine dining room, not the trendy pop-up, but the corner bakery.

The kind of spot where the door opens to the smell of fresh bread and the hum of people who know each other or are about to. That vision became Reem’s California, the James Beard Award-nominated restaurant she founded in Oakland that draws on Arab street-corner bakery culture.

But from the beginning, the food was only part of the point.

That sense of connection runs through everything Reem makes, including her acclaimed cookbook, Arabiyya, a collection of recipes rooted in the experience of living as an Arab in the diaspora.

Cooking Arab food in America, she says, is as much about identity as it is about flavor. It’s a way of touching land and memory you can’t always reach physically, of carrying a lineage forward in a culture that doesn’t always make space for it.

“Arab food in America is a way for those of us in the diaspora to connect to place and purpose. We can’t literally touch the soil and understand the memories, but we can evoke them through the foods from the homeland.

I personally am so proud to carry the lineage of my family and my ancestors. At a time when our cultures are actively being co-opted or erased, my food is a testament that my people exist and will continue to resist.”

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In her own kitchen, that means cooking fish—whole roasted or slow-cooked into a stew—and spreading a proper mezze: dips, pickles, small dishes meant to be passed and picked at over unhurried time.

She also reaches for two ingredients she wishes more American home cooks would keep on hand: sumac, a tart berry indigenous to both the Mediterranean and the United States, and za’atar, the herb blend of za’atar plant, sumac and sesame that delivers an earthy, tart, nutty hit to anything it touches. Both go into salads and marinades, onto eggs, onto bread. Both carry a whole culinary world in a pinch.

Before Reem was a chef, she spent over a decade as a community and labor organizer, and that experience didn’t stay in the past. It became the architecture of how she runs her restaurant.

The cooperative ownership model, the investment in workers as future leaders, the insistence that hospitality mean dignity and not just service: none of it is incidental to the food.

For Reem, it’s all the same work.

“I wanted a hospitality that was transformative where people feel connected to themselves, to others and to a bigger picture.

Every decision we make, from what we cook and who we hire to how we structure our business, is guided by a bigger question: does this move us closer to the world we want to live in?

Food is simply a vehicle for empowering people, whether they are our employees, our customers or the broader community we are a part of.”

Day to day, she describes it as constantly zooming in and out—tasting dough one moment, thinking about governance structures the next. Messy and nonlinear, she admits. But guided, always, by that bigger question.

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April is Arab American Heritage Month, and Reem has a clear sense of what she wants the moment to actually mean. Not just visibility, but depth.

She points to a shift that has happened since she opened Reem’s: a generation of diners and eaters who want to understand the culture behind what’s on their plate, who are curious about where things come from and what they mean.

Arab food is being named and claimed in ways it wasn’t before. But she’s careful about what that visibility can and can’t do.

“With visibility comes flattening. My predecessors in food were afraid to say their food was Arab—it was almost deemed a bad word—and instead called it “Mediterranean”.

I want people to know the story behind the food and not just buy hummus off a shelf without understanding the rich history behind it. What I wish people understood is that Arab food is not a monolith; it’s regional, it’s diasporic, it’s constantly evolving.

At Reem’s, we’re not just preserving tradition, we’re actively contributing to it. Arab food in California, in the diaspora, is alive.”

For Arab American culinary creators building their own path, Reem’s advice cuts straight to the thing most people are tempted to negotiate away: specificity. The pressure to dilute, to simplify, to make things more palatable is real and, she argues, backward.

“Tell your truth through your food, not the version you think people want to hear. The magic is in the specificity: the more rooted you are, the more universal your work becomes.

Don’t shrink your vision to fit the system. Build a system that fits your vision.”

There’s always more at Reem’s table.
Follow along at @reemassil and dive deeper into her story and recipes in Arabiyya.