08-07-2025
- Business
- San Francisco Chronicle
Nationally acclaimed bakery is finally returning to Oakland
Five years after leaving Oakland, an acclaimed chef is making her return to the city that jump-started her career.
Reem Assil will open an outpost of her eponymous Arab bakery, Reem's, in Jack London Square this fall. It's not far from where Reem's first opened in the Fruitvale neighborhood in 2017 and garnered national attention for its marriage of Arabic and California cooking, as well as its owner's activist streak.
Despite closing its original Fruitvale location in 2020, 'we've always kept an Oakland following,' Assil said. 'They're just waiting for us to come back.'
The new bakery at 85 Webster St. will become a central hub, fueling Reem's current restaurant in the Mission District and its wholesale retail business selling frozen flatbreads to grocery stores and popular chocolate chip cookies to local cafes. Most of the 3,000-square-foot space, last occupied by Timeless Coffee, will be used for production, with windows to let customers see employees mixing dough and baking flatbreads. A small cafe in the front with limited seating will serve a concise menu of dishes like herb-strewn mana'eesh (flatbreads), dips with impossibly fluffy pita bread, and coffee for lunch and dinner. It will resemble a mostly takeout-focused Reem's that recently closed at the Ferry Building in San Francisco.
Assil is familiar with Jack London Square — the new space is across from where she once ran modern Arabic restaurant Dyafa — though it comes with new challenges. The waterfront landmark has seen a flurry of post-pandemic closures in recent years, including restaurants and the longtime Waterfront Hotel.
'Jack London Square has always been this, do we take the risk? But I've always believed when you have a good anchor, that place gets really enlivened,' she said.
Assil hopes the Oakland space will bring to life her longtime plan to use a central commissary kitchen to open small, kiosk-like outposts of Reem's throughout the Bay Area.
A yearslong effort to convert Reem's to worker ownership will also finally materialize. The Oakland bakery will be worker-owned when it opens, and the Mission District Reem's will move to worker ownership.
Assil, a former labor organizer, first launched her business through culinary incubator La Cocina. She went on to open Dyafa, a second Reem's in San Francisco and the now-closed Ferry Building outpost. She was a finalist for the James Beard Foundation's outstanding chef award in 2022.
