Reem’s in Oakland Probably Won’t Ever Be a Sit-Down Restaurant Again

Like many other local restaurants, Reem’s, chef Reem Assil’s self-named Arab bakery, closed its Oakland location in early April after a couple of weeks of trying to sell family meals for takeout. In the end, Assil felt the takeout model wasn’t a sustainable venture during the coronavirus shutdown of Bay Area dining rooms, and so turned the restaurant into a commissary kitchen to supply meals to frontline workers and other vulnerable communities — again, a pivot that many, many other restaurants and bakeries have made. The main difference is that Assil says these changes will probably be permanent.

“I don’t foresee Reem’s in the Fruitvale ever being a sit-down restaurant the way it was,” Assil tells Eater SF. And beyond that, she is in talks with her workers on how to transition the business into some form of worker-owned collective.

The Fruitvale bakery and restaurant is, of course, the place where Assil first came to local and national prominence, but she says the business was largely unsustainable even before the pandemic, in part because it never got nearly as much foot traffic and volume of sales as she expects to at, say, the bakery’s other outpost in the Mission. That spot opened just days before San Francisco’s shelter in place went into effect, and remains open for lunch takeout. The Oakland shop is located in the same plaza as the Fruitvale BART station, and, as Assil notes, “when that plaza goes dead, everything else goes dead with it.”

When Assil made the initial decision to shut the restaurant down in early April, she wrote on Instagram, “We have decided that it is no longer viable or desirable to try to sustain our current model in an economic system that will never allow us to live out our values. Instead we want to use this time as an opportunity to be more radical — to act from a place of love, not fear and panic.”

What that’s meant, mostly, is teaming up with World Central Kitchen, chef José Andrés’s nonprofit disaster relief organization, and other local relief efforts to provide meals for those in need. According to Assil, the Fruitvale kitchen is now cranking out 300 meals a day, six days a week — 1,800 meals a week that go out to frontline workers, low-income residents, and members of the homeless community.

Theo Schear

The restaurant’s transformation into a commissary kitchen has stripped away any sense of ego in terms of the food itself — Assil had been a James Beard Award nominated chef, after all. Now, Assil says, the kitchen isn’t making anything that her customers would identify as “Reem’s-style food” most of the time. One day, they might box up several hundred portions of spaghetti with tomato sauce; the next day it might be Filipino-style chicken adobo.

The pandemic has also forced Assil, whose previous background was as a grassroots labor and community organizer, to reckon with how her own political ideals were playing out at her place of business. In a recent episode of Let It Die, Nigerian-American chef and activist Tunde Wey’s new video series about the pandemic’s impact on the restaurant industry, Assil describes the way her skeleton crew of remaining employees worked around the clock during the early days of the shelter in place, as the restaurant scrambled to generate enough revenue to cover payroll — “I felt like we broke trust,” she says in the video.

The upshot was that her workers organized and wrote a letter to management asking what the restaurant’s long- and short-term plans were, and what Reem’s was going to do to look after its workers’ best interests. Realizing that she didn’t have good answers for them, she began discussions about moving toward some kind of worker-owned model — one where the workers themselves would have a voice in making decisions about the restaurant’s future. For now, it looks like the kitchen commissary model is the one that’ll provide the most sustainable livelihood for them as well.

“This team in the Fruitvale is the best team I’ve ever had. My goal is to do what it takes to keep them invested,” Assil says.

Assil says the commissary model won’t preclude Reem’s from still selling food to the public in Fruitvale in some form. Eventually, she says, she anticipates that the restaurant will still serve as a neighborhood lunch stop, but with a drastically streamlined menu — more packaged grab-and-go salads, for instance, than ones that need to be assembled to order. And the emphasis will be on larger-scale food production: catering, wholesale, and perhaps some version of the kind community work the restaurant is engaged in right now.

“I think what these programs have shown me is that socialism kind of works,” Assil says about efforts like World Central Kitchen and SF New Deal — programs in which private donations subsidize restaurants while also serving the community at large. “Everybody gives a little, and the rich could be giving even a little bit more, and nobody is hurt. Everybody wins.”

• Some Restaurants Are Making Permanent Pivots to Adapt to a New Normal [Eater]
• Are Worker-Owned Restaurants Better Equipped to Weather the COVID-19 Crisis? [ESF]
• Want Better Working Conditions in Restaurants? Build a Co-op [Eater]