Ten years ago, we founded Reem's inspired by Arab street corner bakeries and the vibrant communities that surround them. We set out to create a liberatory space in a political climate of recession, war, and rampant gentrification.  More than just a restaurant, Reem’s is an anchor space in the neighborhoods it is in, providing healthy nourishing food to the community, dignified living wage jobs with career pathways, and a sense of home for all at a time when home has become elusive.

We believe in the power of food to restore communities when they have access to and control over their foodways. To that end, Reem’s model is to uplift the voices and agency of marginalized communities, who have traditionally been excluded from decision-making in the restaurant industry.

Through vision-aligned partnerships we have leveraged the resources, expertise, social capital, and funding to be a nationally-renowned bakery and restaurant. We continue to grow and expand that network with community members like you!

Our founder's background in organizing and deep roots in the Bay Area position the restaurant to be a community-anchored space that is supported through challenging times. Her national recognition and ability to inspire people all over the country has fueled Reem's growth and pushed people to engage in deeper work around food sovereignty in both the restaurant industry and beyond. 

The work we have done has garnered us several accolades — including 2018 Food & Wine Best New Restaurant, 2021 Bon Appetit Heads of the Table and 2022 Food and Wine Game Changers— as well as recognition in TV, radio, digital, and print media. To date, we have been featured in hundreds of publications across the nation.

This doesn’t just mean we make good food; it signals that the world is ready for this type of enterprise.

In 2020 when the pandemic hit, we witnessed millions of restaurant workers lose their jobs, get sick without access to benefits, and face unsafe conditions on the job. This was a clarifying moment for Reem's.  If we are to change unjust systems in the industry those most hurt by it must have a stake and a voice in creating solutions. With funding from the Emerson Collective, we built a successful apprenticeship program called Sumoud (Arabic for steadfast resilience) to train a core group of managers and hourly employees to be future worker owners at Reem's.  Our journey was documented in trailblazing chef and food writer Ruth Reichl's award-winning documentary Food and Country and were spotlighted at the Sundance Film festival in 2023. We hope to build on this program as a replicable model for employee ownership for other restaurants.

Our evolution as a business has been relatively quick: from one small farmers market to a multi-location multi-revenue stream operation.  After many lessons learned, our focus is to build a profitable, sustainable business model that builds generational wealth for our employees.  And we can’t do it without mission-aligned investors.

We want to invest in core administrative operations, our workers and their pathway to ownership, and a flagship bakery that will help take our consumer packaged goods & wholesale strategy to a new level, helping us scale and support more workers and their communities. Through our diverse revenue streams, each component of the Reem’s ecosystem support one another. In our 10 year vision, the central hospitality group grows its internal capacity to support our restaurant, wholesale, commissary and catering operations and ensure that Reem’s is living up to its vision and mission across all of our locations.

In this next phase of growth, Reem’s is looking for partners to help us build a vibrant ecosystem of empowered, healthy, and happy employees, customers, and neighborhoods. A flagship bakery in Oakland will allow Reem’s to scale up wholesale operations to get our breads into as many hands & homes as possible. This will also house a robust catering and retail operation where people can get their daily bread.  Over the next decade we hope to open a number of smaller outposts supplied by the flagship, each serving as a community hub, just like the street corner bakeries that inspired the birth of Reem’s. Join us in making this vision a reality!