Women Who Travel Podcast: A Palestinian American Chef on Creating Community Through Food
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Food has the power to forge connections, and for Palestinian American chef Reem Assil that means using the flavors, aromas, and hospitality of Arab cooking to strengthen and grow her community in Oakland. Reem chats with Lale about her visionary bakery Reem's, her family’s Palestinian and Syrian legacies, the surreal experience of winning a James Beard award, and her own personal ties with Gaza.
Lale Arikoglu: Hi there. I'm Lale Arikoglu, and this is another episode of Women Who Travel. A year ago this week, the conflict in Gaza started. I'm chatting today with activist, chef, and Oakland restaurant owner and baker Reem Assil. Her visionary store, Reem's, evokes an Arab street corner bakery. Arab hospitality is central to her mission to create a community restaurant.
Reem Assil: When you envision bread and bread bakeries, you always think European bakeries. That's the first thing that comes at least to my mind, my colonized mind as I would say. So I was just really fascinated when I became obsessed with baking, learning the history of bread, when humankind went from just being gatherers and hunters to actually cultivating wheat and turning it into flour, and then taking that flour and mixing it with water, that was from my region of the world.
I mean, in any way, bread for me is life. And so it became a story, a way for me to really go back to my roots and discover my history. And when you think of the bakery from that perspective, the bakery is king. From even the most remote villages in the Arab world, there's the post office and the bakery. It's that important.
So I think from that perspective as an Arab and as a Palestinian in particular, being able to trace back the lifeline of my history through the bread was really important. When I went to the Arab world and saw the bakery, it's just so full of life. You wouldn't even know that there was political turmoil outside of those doors because this space of conviviality, of connection, of warmth, literal warmth from the ovens of people commiserating together, laughing together.
I was lucky to visit Gaza when I was 11 years old and remember those food spaces. So Reem's is a celebration of that feeling, of that warmth, of that conviviality.
LA: Your family when they left, they didn't go straight to the States. And you have connections in Lebanon and Syria, and you went there in 2010 with your father. Correct?
RA: Mm-hmm.
LA: What did you eat? What was it like to go back there?
RA: Oh my goodness! That was such a special trip, and I have the memories with me. The really literally, and I don't say this in a cliche way, the dream of Reem's was born walking into bakery in Lebanon on a busy Hamra Street, which is where all the bakeries are, and smelling the rose and orange blossom waters, smelling the za'atar. I wanted to recreate that sense, that feeling.
It was just so visceral. I ate so much bread, everything from the Manaeesh, which is my trademark street food that I create at Reem's, to thin bread on the side of a road. In fact, the first woman who taught me how to stretch my dough on the pillow that you bake on, these traditional griddle ovens called sages, she didn't even speak Arabic, she spoke Armenian, and she was just showing me with her hands.
The rich and the poor go to the bakery, right? It's a thing that is a right. And as you can see, unfortunately, as a tool of war, the first thing that people go after is the bakeries because it is that thing that feeds the masses. It's that thing that transcends everybody, everybody's culture and everybody's need for life.
So I think when I wanted to be the baker or have a bakery, I wanted to be the person that greets people every morning and gives them the bread that I know that they want and ask them about their life and ask them about their children. I was really wanting that sense of community that I think bakeries really bring to people.
LA: Reem is the daughter of a Palestinian father and Syrian mother. And her cookbook, Arabiyya, honors her family's legacy and describes the struggles across three generations. Not surprisingly, there's also a substantial chapter on bread.
RA: So “Arabiyya” literally translates to Arab woman or all things that are feminine and Arab. I wanted it to be fluid like that, because in and of itself, it speaks to the intersectionality of my identity. People are always asking, "Where's your food from? Is it Palestinian, or is it Syrian?"
And then the Lebanese will come in, "That's Lebanese," and I'm like, "Well, it's a little mix of all of that." It's not one thing or the other. I wanted to really fight against these borders and these arbitrary lines that our colonizers have put particularly around us.
LA: I was going to say lines that have shifted over centuries.
RA: Lines have shifted, exactly. What I've learned about my people is that we're traders and we're travelers. We build communities with other groups. So when you go to Syria, it's not just the Arabs, it's the Armenians. It's the Assyrians. It's the Kurds. And all of us have had, I think, limiting things to a country. It limits the story, the beautiful story of intersections of communities.
I have reverence to the people who came before me, and particularly Palestinians who are Indigenous to the land. And at a time where we are literally fighting our erasure, that it is important to really represent my Palestinian identity and the food.
LA: On the topic of your heritage and your identity, how did that inspire Reem's?
RA: So I grew up in a Palestinian and Syrian household, but my mom grew up in Beirut and they immigrated here to the States. The first place they lived was rural Pennsylvania. And so if you can imagine, I was a child of immigrants in this context and exposed to many, many different kinds of foods and then discovered what real produce is relocating to California 20 years later.
And so Reem's is really a celebration of all of that story, the story of adaptation of the bounty of California, but really a story of Arab hospitality. The bread was the ultimate component because I wanted to really recreate that feeling that I felt when I walked into Arab Street corner bakeries and the vibrant communities that were surrounding them when I visited bakeries in Lebanon and Syria.
One of our original taglines was beyond the falafel and shawarma, that our food is not just limited to this very, very stereotypical way of what people think of when they think of Arab cuisine.
LA: I was about to ask that. And I think often when food gets stereotyped like that, it's diminishing it by making it a snack or a drunk food like when I think of shawarma, for example.
RA: But it could be that.
LA: And it can be that.
RA: And it's like, okay, but it's more than just that. And I wanted to really show the breadth and the depth of Arab cuisine in a way that I think now having done a lot of research on it and really soul-searching myself as someone in diaspora looking for my way, how do you really honor and pay homage to the mom and pops that started this country?
We have been part of the cultural fabric of US cuisine, but because of anti-Arab and Islamophobic, xenophobia, my people have been relegated to these stereotypes and they're afraid of the backlash. It's not to knock on or to discredit the falafel shops and the shawarma and hummus and all these things, but it's just to say that we're more than just that.
LA: You mentioned Arab hospitality. I'm interested to know how you actually define it and what it means to you, because there is a term I think that gets thrown around a lot, particularly in travel writing and travel conversations, but what does it mean and what does it feel like to experience it?
RA: So Arab hospitality, I would say, it could get a little aggressive. Are you hungry? And as my visitor, I rely on you to really partake in this dance with me of hospitality. Even if you're not hungry, I will feed you. It's this real yearning to make you feel at ease and comfortable. I think that what I noticed about Arabs in the Arab world is that we'll make you feel that feeling of abundance.
Even if it's the last round of coffee beans we have, we'll give you that coffee. We want to make sure that you feel that abundance even if we don't have it. We feed our friends and enemies alike because that's what kept us alive when we were traveling through the desert. And I think that thing carries over, not quite literally, but that's what keeps us feeling that feeling of life, that ability to connect with strangers and to connect with communities.
And we often do it through our food. My mom, when left to her own power, there's nothing more than she wants to do than to feed you.
LA: In the US, coming home after a long workday and cooking a traditional meal with fresh ingredients wasn't easy to pull off.
RA: That's where it became really oppressive, and I think there was this heavy burden as a working mom to have to create an Arab table for us to carry our culture at a time where it felt like our culture could really dissipate. And so it was really burdensome for her. And I think that just in general, for women, when feeding people's expected of us, it just takes the joy out of it.
LA: Coming up, how Reem went from a struggle with food to making it a bridge to connect all of her passions.
We're back with Reem Assil on Women Who Travel.
RA: I grew up, really I think the most feminist thing I could do was stay away from the kitchen. That's what my quest was. So it's very ironic that I turned to the kitchen in my times of grief and found this profession ironically in a very oppressive industry here in the US where professional kitchens are really still run by white males.
LA: They are famously not havens for equality.
RA: The kitchen is only romanticized when it's unpaid labor and unpaid emotional labor, and that's where women are relegated to. And I really found that contradiction to be really stark for me when I entered the industry.
LA: As a woman, it was a choice for you. You did choose to enter into this industry. So that must've felt in some way empowering or different from what your mother, for example, was wrestling with, which was expectations to deliver meals and keep everyone fed. You mentioned going into the kitchen as an act that was driven by grief. Could you elaborate a little bit on that?
RA: Yeah. Well, grief, it takes many forms over time. I think that my grief at any given time in my life has come from a place of trauma and has come from a place of not feeling. So grief is not necessarily a bad thing. It's feeling, feeling the hardships of whether it was living as a woman in America or the divorce of my parents.
Two weeks into my life, into my college years, I experienced 9/11, which was very formative, and that isolation that I felt in the grief that I felt from the community that I once thought I had. I'm experiencing grief right now. In those younger years of my life, I had a dissonance from my body, what I was feeling and I wanted to escape. There was a moment in my life where I was really depressed, on the brink of I would say suicide.
And I stopped taking care of my body and my body had revolted against me, and part of that was not being able to eat anymore. Later on in my life again where I was not taking care of my health and not taking care of my body, food had been sitting there in the backdrop helping me find my way. I learned how to cook California cuisine and that helped heal my body.
LA: Well, in the way you talk about food and your relationship to it, I can hear your past as a community activist, which I imagine also hasn't stopped since you became a chef. How did one lead to the other? Because you've been involved in everything from working with the Free Palestine Movement and also for better conditions for Black and brown workers in workplaces. How has that informed you and led you to becoming a chef?
RA: Well, food became a way for me to express every facet of my being. Up until then, I had really compartmentalized. Here's Reem as the Palestinian. I'm going to fight on the front lines for a Free Palestine, whatever that looked like. It took different forms over the years. Here's Reem as a community organizer, and I was working in workplaces and knocking on doors in different communities.
And it wasn't until I became a chef and realized that not only can I cook food, but I can create space. I could create an institution, if you will, that could be for all of these communities coming together to feed them and sustain them. It could be a place for the organizers to come and organize their workers just as I had done when I was a young organizer. It could be a place for me to talk about food erasure and what it means to be Palestinian.
It could be to break the glass ceilings of being a woman in this industry and be a small business owner. Quite frankly, I'm still trying to figure out in this economy, in these systems that are really, really set up against women, against women of color, but I'm really trying to be a pioneer and to forge that path that I think my expression of feeding my community through this beautiful gift of Arab hospitality that I continue to learn about every day.
On a good day, I'm walking in and all of that is in sync. Our community members are coming in. We're like rolling in the dough, quite literally, rolling out the dough and rolling in the dough. That said, on a really hard day, my restaurants can be really empty, and I'm constantly facing questions around what's good for business versus what's good for my people. And those things come at odds with one another.
There are no security systems to help us and no systems that reward us for doing the socially conscious thing to do with our business.
LA: Unfortunately, I'm caveating this with you not being the first Arabian business to experience this, but there have also been campaigns to drive you out of business. How do you face that and get through it?
RA: I think I have what I like to call my people's spirit of Samood. In Arabic that means steadfastness or steadfast resilience, and I really do think Palestinians have it. I don't know, it's ingrained in us. My mom had that grit. I inherited that grit. It's not like when you're backed up against the wall, you have to prove the people wrong somehow. You just survive. And so I feel like I am a woman with many, many lives, and the backlash that I have felt against me for being Palestinian.
People are always like, "Why are you so strong? It's so inspiring." It's like I don't really have a choice as the position that I have. I have to keep going. They haven't gotten any less, the backlash I've gotten, but they've gotten a little bit easier to deal with because I've built my community around me and I think that's my superpower. It's not me. It's my ability to build community around me.
That has been the force field for me. That when someone is saying, "Oh, she's a Palestinian. She's supports terrorists," I can say, "Well, this is not the first time I've been called a terrorist." Unfortunately, it won't be the last time. And when I experience racism, I like to expose it because it's free PR for me because it shows where my values stand. I continue to speak my truth.
I continue to experience my joy. And in doing so, to me, that's the biggest act of resistance, to be able to dance and laugh and play and to do all of these things. So I try to stay true to myself in the face of that.
LA: Reem has had many accolades and was a 2022 finalist for the West Coast James Beard Outstanding Chef Award.
RA: I don't necessarily think that I'm in line with everything that an institution like James Beard brings, but...
LA: Well, because I was wondering as well, I'm like, are you able to be political once you're within that sort of institution or space?
RA: Yeah. I think I'm asking that question all the time. I don't want to get in trouble, but I basically get on that stage and say, "This is all phony. Stop molding me." I want my voice to be heard by the masses, but I don't want my story to be cultivated into this cookie cutter, the rags to riches.
LA: You're still going to accept the award.
RA: Yeah, I'm still going to accept the award. I deserve the award, and I don't take my platform for granted at any time, but I also don't want it to mitigate its impact and I don't want these forces to say, "We're going to give her these awards and create her narrative for her." And in fact, that was an impetus for me to create Arabiyya because I was being celebrated and I was a little bit uncomfortable with some of the narrative that the mainstream media was creating for me.
I felt like it was taking away from my agency. I want to inspire people all over the country, but the media create this narrative for me, of the like, "She is a brown girl and she made it. You can make it too." I didn't want to be an agent of that narrative. I want to be able to speak about the real problems with our industry. So it's always been a conundrum for me. How do I pave my own path forward and still get recognized? We should get recognized for the work that we do.
LA: After the break, Reem's family ties with Gaza and the stories that inspire her. More from Chef Rem Assil. I've read up a little bit on your grandparents' journey. Could you talk a little bit about that history and your family and how it's affected you as a unit today?
RA: I hate to use the word refugee. It's not our choice to be refugees, but my grandmother came from a very prominent farming family in Jaffa, which was invaded in 1948 to create the state of Israel, and she experienced the trauma of being a refugee in Gaza. My grandfather was a Gazan from a prominent family that owned a lot of amazing enterprises, and they were forced out in 1967.
All of the stories that I heard growing up was these stories of war, and really my family would talk about them as they were normal. And I'm like, this is not normal. But I think what I learned from that is that my family, the stories and the grit that I get was their ability to take hardships and turn them into these beautiful, beautiful things. That my grandfather had an entrepreneurial spirit and he built up from the ground every time his businesses were destroyed.
I remember that. Especially when I'm having a hard time in my business, I'm like, well, if he could do it, I could do it too.
LA: It sounds like having these moments of racism that you experience must also in this messed up way make you feel more connected to your mother and your grandmother through this trauma.
RA: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, but I try to take that trauma. I think that my grandmother died with some unfinished trauma. Literally until the day she died, she had rheumatoid arthritis, which they said was connected to her scarlet fever, which she had when she was on the boats coming to Gaza, and it never got taken care of. But then I was like, I don't want our trauma to define us.
I talk about this in the cookbook, the story of how she tried to get this fish or the lemons for her fish, even when there was bombs coming down on them. She's like, "I have to feed my family." And it's like some people would say that's cognitive dissonance, but I'm like, no, she was like, I am going to live life and nobody is going to take that away from me.
So I like to connect to that part of my mom and my grandmother and appreciate those parts of them beyond their trauma because I do think that I am in a place in my life where I'm able to deal with the trauma, the generational trauma that I have, that they didn't have the privilege of.
LA: You mentioned that your family's background was a highly respected farming family. Foodways that were once traditional and very much available in Gaza are no longer now, access to crops and land. How has that... I'm not going to say how because I know that it has. In what ways do you see it having impacted Palestinian identity, both in Gaza and within the diaspora today?
RA: As an Indigenous people, it doesn't matter where we are on this earth, that we're always connected to the land back there. That's why right of return feels so important. It is a responsibility that we have, that we have to carry these traditions forward to take care of a land in a place where those original recipes and foods that we made off the land are no longer possible.
That I can cook the fish dish that I know through stories of my grandmother that Gazans today cannot access because the Israeli occupation doesn't allow them to access their waterways. That is profound that we can carry on foodways that are not in the places of their origin. And in many ways, sometimes it feels trivial sometimes when I'm cooking these foods and having people enjoy them with wine pairings and whatnot.
But at a time when food is literally being weaponized against my people, to me that's an act of resistance for people to eat those foods, ask questions about those foods, understand that Palestinians have connections to that land. That's really important, especially in a time of genocide.
I will say one thing about Palestinians still living in Gaza is, wow, how amazing is the people that wake up day in and day out and they're like, "I'm still alive. Okay, I'm going to go find the plants that are growing through the rubble and propagate them and grow my rooftop garden and continue to grow and feed myself and feed my family." The farmers that are still planting under the risk of being killed.
To me, that's just so amazing that people are willing to put their bodies and their lives on the line to take care of the land because the land takes care of them.
LA: We've touched on the way that Arab food can be a tool to help elevate Palestinian culture and Arab culture and fight against erasure of that culture. Is that going to be a mission going forward with your restaurant and how you're approaching cooking and feeding people?
RA: 100%. I mean, my food has never been just about the food. It's been about the stories behind the food. And I want to use my food not just for cultural erasure, because I do think that my food is a tool to tell stories, but also it's a tool to push the envelope on what Arab food could and should be.
And in fact, my Arab culture has been stronger than ever in this multicultural space that I find that I call California and particularly Oakland and San Francisco. But shout out to Oakland because it is really just a beautiful intersection of so many cultures.
LA: Reem, this has been such a pleasure. If people want to follow your work and your cooking or take a peek inside Reem's, where can they find you on the internet?
RA: I'm mostly hanging out on Instagram @reem.assil, A-S-S-I-L, my name. And Reem's California @reemscalifornia. If you're ever in California, we can be found on the street corner of the Mission and at the Ferry Building, the iconic Ferry Building.
LA: Next week we have a dispatch where we travel to swing states with Cristina Tzintzun Ramirez. She travels to 114 campuses across swing states and organizes some amazing events. See you then. Thank you for listening to Women Who Travel. I'm Lale Arikoglu, and you can find me on Instagram @lalehannah.
Our engineers are Jake Lummuss, James Yost, Vince Fairchild, and Pran Bandi. The show is mixed by Amar Lal at Macro Sound. Jude Kampfner of Corporation for Independent Media is our producer. Stephanie Kariuki is our executive producer, and Chris Bannon is Condé Nast's Head of Global Audio.
Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler
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