Reem's California celebrates its grand opening Friday at 85 Webster St. — a five-year-in-the-making return to Oakland, structured this time as a worker-owner cooperative run by three women who came up through the restaurant's own apprenticeship program.

Reem's California opens its Oakland flagship Friday, June 26, at 85 Webster St. in Jack London Square — five years after the Fruitvale location that started it all closed in 2021, and nine years after founder Reem Assil first tried to bring Arab street-corner bakery culture to the East Bay.

The new location is in the former Miette space, next door to the site of Assil's short-lived fine dining restaurant Dyafa, which she opened with Daniel Patterson's Alta Group in 2018. The room doubles as production headquarters, housing Reem's wholesale operation alongside the restaurant. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Sunday and Monday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

What makes this opening structurally distinct from earlier Reem's locations: it launches as a worker-owner cooperative, managed by three women — Rebeca Cid del Prado, Diana Aguirre, and Angela Lima — who have been with Assil for most of the past decade. All three graduated from the Sumoud program, a worker-apprenticeship curriculum Assil built in 2020–21 with funding from the Emerson Collective. Eleven people completed the 18-month program, which was designed explicitly to cultivate owners, not just employees. Aguirre joined Assil at Dyafa in 2019 as a line cook fresh out of Diablo Valley College's culinary program; she's now a founding owner of the room where she first worked Jack London Square.

Assil and co-founder Zaynah Hindi have operated Reem's continuously in San Francisco — at the Mission location on 2901 Mission St. (opened 2019, in the former Mission Pie space) — through the years the Oakland presence was dark. A Ferry Building kiosk, opened in 2022, closed in January 2025 when the property manager declined to renew amid construction. The new Jack London flagship is the first full-service Oakland room since Fruitvale.

The business model is deliberately diversified: restaurant, catering, and wholesale running under one roof. Seat count and menu pricing haven't been published ahead of opening. Reem's California, LLC is registered with the City of San Francisco at the Ferry Building address; the Oakland entity is registered with Alameda County.

Arab flatbreads — manoushe, the cornerstone since 2017 — remain on the menu alongside Assil's California-inflected treatment of the mezze and grill traditions she absorbed in Damascus and Beirut. The room has always been framed as community space as much as dining room, and the worker-ownership structure makes that claim legible in the lease.