Reem’s California is an Arab bakery shop in San Francisco. Proudly embracing the slogan “Arab Street Food made with California Love,” this restaurant serves traditional Arab bread infused with fresh, locally sourced ingredients from California. As soon as you step in, you will be welcomed by a vibrant mural titled “Seeds of Love” which includes a quote by Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan: “If it were in my hands, if I were able to flip this world, if I possessed the ability to fill this world with seeds of love.” This space is filled with the inviting aroma of freshly baked bread, a scent infused with the love, care, and mutual support of Palestinian Americans and local community organizers. The fragrant smell likely comes from one of their signature dishes: man’oushe (singular for mana’eesh), an Arab flatbread topped with za’atar—a spice blend of wild thyme, sumac, and sesame seeds—mixed with olive oil and garnished with fresh tomato, cucumber, and mint.
Reem’s California is a worker-owned restaurant. It is democratically run by local workers. Using worker-ownership, the restaurant challenges the long-standing inequality and violence prevalent in the restaurant industry, and provides an empowering and transforming workplace for those who have faced the most barriers–people of color, queer, formerly incarcerated folks, and undocumented individuals.
Profit-sharing
In the restaurant industry, service workers, including servers, bartenders, cooks and food preparation, have historically depended for their wage on the tipping system. Under federal law, the minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. Moreover, Under the FLSA, tipped workers are not even entitled to that minimum wage. (Some states have laws that mandate applying the standard minimum wage to restaurant workers) All of these exploitations persist while managers and owners exclusively enjoy the profits. Moreover, this tipping system, rooted deeply in colonial history, blatantly reinforces social inequality. Study shows that class, gender and race have a direct impact on workers’ frequency and number of tips. At Reem’s California, instead of this exploitative and discriminatory wage system, they adopted a 20% service fee charged equally to every customer’s bill. Overall profits, generated through the restaurant’s operation including this service fee system, are distributed fairly among workers as labor costs. With this financial model, the restaurant was able to provide a living wage of $16.75 up to $20 an hour, at a time when minimum wage was $14.00 per hour and average service workers at restaurants were only earning $9.81 hourly.
Responsibility-based wage system and cross-training
In the restaurant industry, racialized and gendered hierarchies often create a division of labor and compensation. Front-of-house positions, such as servers and bartenders, are predominantly held by white workers who often receive higher pay due to customer tips and visibility. In contrast, back-of-house workers, such as cooks and dishwashers, and many of the unskilled and manual laborers, are disproportionately people of color, and are given lower wages. This entrenched division of labor not only perpetuates economic inequity but also reinforces social hierarchies within the workplace.
The responsibility-based wage system uses the worker’s level of responsibility as a metric for profit distribution. As Assil, the restaurant’s founder, explains, “The more responsibility they have, the more recognition and pay you get.” This approach deconstructs the social and financial value that capitalist systems typically assign to roles, striving instead to dignify all forms of labor.
Similarly, cross-training encourages workers to learn tasks beyond their assigned roles—for example, enabling dishwashers to acquire prep cook skills. This not only provides a gateway to upward mobility but also dismantling rigid hierarchies fosters a collaborative environment while recognizing each other’s contribution.
This flattening system also challenges the traditional authority of chefs, who often enjoy disproportionate recognition and control over restaurant operations. This kind of exclusive and false authority enabled those in higher positions to persist in abusive actions on workers. Shockingly, the restaurant industry is recorded to have the highest rates of sexual harassment of any industry—disproportionately impacting women and workers of color.
While many chefs are afraid to let go of their control, fearing the deterioration of the restaurant’s service, a non-hierarchized workplace actually encourages more open-communication and creates collaborative environments, outperforming what chefs can achieve as a single actor. One notable example is the story of head baker Luis Vasquez and prep cook Armando Bibiano, whose shared expertise and cultural knowledge inspired a popular recipe celebrating the rich exchange between Mexican and Arab culinary traditions.
Open-book management
While in many companies, workers inquiring about financial information is considered taboo, disclosing this information and being “comfortable talking about money” is essential to participatory governance. Assil believes that financial information, a measure of business success, allows workers to “feel equipped to have an opinion,” and engage meaningfully in governance. Moreover, open-book management offers multiple benefits: being transparent about whether the company is doing well or not instills trust; giving workers material stakes in the business makes workers’ commitment and loyalty stronger.
Apprenticeship program
Reem’s California did not begin as a worker-owned restaurant, but transitioned into one through a carefully designed 15-month paid apprenticeship program, This program provided existing employees with a pathway to become worker-owners by offering training in leadership, small business finance, effective communication, and political education—focusing on skills necessary for ownership beyond the kitchen. Assil, the restaurant’s founder, emphasizes that living in a racialized and sexist society means many workers have not been conditioned to think of themselves as owners. To address this, the program fosters both learning and unlearning, enabling workers to realize the principles of democratic governance. At the end of the program, participants collaboratively draft cooperative bylaws, an important legal document that outlines the rules and regulations of their membership, elections, voting, and representatives . This opportunity to collectively design the foundation of their business, reflects Assil’s philosophy of “let them build with you,” demonstrating its deep commitment to participatory governance from its inception as a worker-owned restaurant.
Building an alternative economy where cooperative restaurants can thrive
During the pandemic, Reem’s California, like many other restaurants, was desperately scrambling for dollars. Despite multiple strategies to raise sales —stay-home family catering and meal kits or wholesale programs for local grocery stores—these efforts only allowed the restaurant to barely survive in the game of capitalism. Even as a worker cooperative equipped with a structure to provide livable wages for its workers, the profits needed to sustain financial security for workers still relied on customers’ discretionary spending, which is highly vulnerable to precarious economic conditions.
The challenge inspired Reem’s California to explore alternative business strategies that align with a socialist economic model. Partnering with World Central Kitchen and SF New Deal, the restaurant transformed itself into a commissary kitchen, supplying meals to frontline workers and vulnerable communities. This mutual aid effort not only kept its workers employed during difficult times but also provided 10,000 meals a month to those in need. What if restaurants were subsidized to feed communities? Reflecting on the challenges to maintain restaurants in capitalism, Assil remarked, “society is not built for cooperation.” She recognizes the need to restructure the broader economic system, where cooperatives can truly thrive.
Solidarity Restaurant Ecosystem
Reem’s California embodies an essence of Arab hospitality. In the Arab world, refusing an offering of sweets or coffee is considered offensive. At the heart of these gestures is the recognition of hard work behind these gifts. Refusing gifts means refusing the host’s efforts, even sacrifice. With this mindset, Assil advocates to change our modern restaurant industry where hospitality is provided to customers often at the expense of underpaid and understaffed workers. This dynamic places a responsibility on guests to “rehumanize experience that has historically been dehumanized for restaurant workers.” In practice, this might look like going to the kitchen after dining a meal to directly thank cooks, or generously giving tips as an investment for the team’s future. Moreover, hospitality, Assil emphasizes, should no longer be a passive and transactional exchange. Instead, both workers and guests must collaborate to make hospitality a site to cultivate connections and build relationships. With the mutual support of everyone involved, we can work toward creating a solidarity-based food ecosystem that uplifts and dignifies all contributors.
Can Cooperatives Transform the Restaurant Industry?
While cooperatives have the potential to combat inequities in the restaurant industry, Assil explicitly acknowledges the inherent limitations of cooperatives. “We can’t scale Reem’s California. It’s not meant to be scaled.” The limited scalability of cooperatives can be attributed to their requirement for significant investments of time and money to build a foundation for democratic governance. For Reem’s California, this included a 15-month paid apprenticeship program, as well as many difficult and patient dialogues with workers. With the majority of Reem’ California workers coming from marginalized backgrounds, face-to-face conversations were essential to help them unlearn the inequalities they have internalized. “There is no cookie-cutter way,” Assil says when talking about creating democratic environments. She cautions that without such deep work, even non-hierarchical structures can easily reproduce informal hierarchies, especially in a society where humans are socialized to hierarchize everything.
The difficulty of scaling enterprises may be a limitation in a capitalist world, but in a cooperative and democratic economy, such internal work should be welcomed as a valuable process. For more restaurants to transform into worker cooperatives and provide empowering and transformative workplaces, we need policies that distribute resources for cooperative models as reparations for the damage the fine-dining restaurant establishment has inflicted on workers. These resources should fund apprenticeship programs like Reem’s California’s and provide technical and financial assistance for worker-cooperative restaurants.