(upbeat music)
- So we'll be going to Dyafa
where will be checking out Chef Reem,
the Syrian-Palestinian chef,
cooking up flavors of the Middle East.
Gonna make some flatbread,
eat some hummus,
some chicken confit.
All those spices are making my heart sing.
I'm ready for this one.
Let's go.
- This is food from the Levantine part of the Arab world,
and we're going to be making a feast of
amazing spreads and spreads, as I call them.
So the name of the this restaurant is called Dyafa,
Which is essentially Arabic for hospitality.
- Oh, perfect.
- I'm a child of immigrants, so,
sometimes you feel like you're a stranger in a strange land.
You're neither here nor there.
- Right, right, right.
- People are not gonna ever get the chance
to visit Damascus or Beirut.
So I'm creating a piece of home,
a piece of my homeland right here in Oakland.
So, we're making a Palestinian
chicken dish called musakhan.
If you ask any Palestinian, what's the national dish?
They would say musakhan.
We don't have a state, but we have a national dish.
That's how it goes.
This dish is traditionally big roasted chicken
in a spice called sumac.
It's supposed to be eaten communally.
So we're gonna do a version of how we sell it
here at the restaurant.
We're gonna start with the onions.
- Okay.
How many pounds of this usually?
- We go through, like, a hundred pounds a day.
(laughs)
Are we making you cry, Sheldon?
- You are!
- What's cool about Palestinians is
'cause we're a refugee population,
wherever we go we sort of adapt to where we are.
- Okay.
- So, my earliest memories of musakhan
is actually in a burrito form with tortilla.
My mom used to make it and wrap it in a burrito,
and then we would take them to school as a sandwich.
- [Sheldon] Alright.
After all our tears.
- After all our tears.
(upbeat music)
Throw the sumac in now.
Sumac is essentially a berry.
It's a good tenderizer.
It's used to marinate a lot of meat,
particularly in Arab and Persian cuisine.
But it's not to be confused with
the sumach in the U.S. which is poisonous.
- Right, yeah, yeah.
- So we use the chicken legs
'cause the chicken legs are the best.
- Yes.
(laughing)
These have been cured for the last two days.
So now we're going to take some of these onions
and we're going to start to layer them.
More salt.
More sumac.
Then we're going to do a spice mix called baharat.
It's a seven-spice mix.
Mostly allspice,
but there's cinnamon, nutmeg, a little bit of cumin,
cardamom, black pepper and coriander.
(rhythmic music)
- This is olive oil from previous batches of the confit.
- Yeah.
You know, with each time it gets richer and richer.
- [Sheldon] It picks up the flavor from the previous batch.
- [Reem] Yeah.
- This is amazing.
- Bringing the voice of my Arab heritage
feels very important.
I don't know how many times when I started Reem's
an elder would come into my bakery
and pull me aside and say, thank you for doing this.
People didn't know what Palestinian food was.
- You started as a bakery first before a restaurant.
- Yeah, so I'm a baker.
I got into the food world, actually,
as a community organizer.
So, I was organizing workers for their rights,
and I went on a soul-searching trip
with my father to Syria and Lebanon.
And it was there I discovered the Arab
street corner bakeries and the role that
they were playing in these communities.
You hear about the Middle East on the news
and all you hear about is--
- All the--
- All the violence and the war and it's so sad
but when you go to those bakeries
you don't even know that
that's happening outside those doors.
Those bakeries serve as an anchor
and I wanted to create that here.
Fresh-baked bread, there's nothing like it, right?
That hospitality component carries through Dyafa.
If you were to think about Reem's and Dyafa,
Reem's is essentially the heart beat,
and Dyafa is like the arteries.
Back in the day, when the grandmas did this,
they used cushions to shape their bread.
They would basically stretch their dough on cushions.
- You get this at the local Ikea?
(laughs)
- Amazon.
This is the new school old school.
There you go.
- [Sheldon] Instantly bubbles up.
- The word for this bread is called markouk.
- Markouk.
- Which means thin.
- Okay.
- Everything is very literal in Arabic.
Usually the Arabic word is used to describe
the texture or the shape of something.
This is going to be the base of our chicken.
(rhythmic music)
This is the staple.
It's called zaatar.
It's dried, wild thyme with sumac berry and sesame seed.
- [Sheldon] Nice.
- [Reem] Alright.
We're a gluten-positive space here.
- There's a tartness to it that
I wasn't expecting it to have that.
- Yeah.
- Crispy, chewy.
- This is what my mom used to make us drive 20 minutes for,
to the Armenian bakeries that used to make this.
And I didn't understand why would we drive all that way
and later in life I discovered, it's like,
my parents were searching for home.
This bread embodies that.
Home is an elusive thing now.
Whether you're a new immigrant who came here
or a refugee who were forced from your homeland
or a black resident who's lived here for ages
and seeing their neighborhoods change around them,
that concept of home is fleeting
and so what I really want to do is try to create
that sense of belonging.
That's the virtue of Arabs.
That's the hospitality we bring.
So I want to be able to bring that to the forefront.
(upbeat music)
This is a typical Arabic spread that we call meze.
The root of it comes from to savor slowly.
So it's really shared small plates.
- [Sheldon] Okay.
- Bread is your tool as they say.
Some people use forks and knives and spoons.
We use our bread and our hands.
- Uh-huh.
- Dip into,
do the hummus first.
This is a spiced lamb.
- The spices are,
like when you say you don't hold back over here.
- We don't hold back.
- I love that.
- So this is the dish that we worked on.
- Tears of joy.
Lots of onion.
I remember eating this as a kid
and oil dripping down my forearms
when I was eating the sandwich.
- Mmm, the onion tart on the bottom.
- The onions that we made,
we puree it with red wine vinegar,
some pomegranate, some black pepper, some salt.
Kind of like our version of the adobo.
- Yep.
It does, it had the edamame and the tartness of it.
- Yeah, the sour.
- I can see the hospitality of it
because you have to, whoever's around the table,
you have to be personal with it
because you're--
- You're dipping from the same bowl.
- You're literally eating with your hands
and it's very communal.
- In Palestine, this dish is literally served
in a large platter as big as this table
with loads and loads of onion and chicken.
And people just go at it.
- And just people go at it.
- Yeah.
- Wow.
So you guys made this in the market still.
Tell me about those early days of slinging it like that.
- I was working as a baker
and then I started experimenting at the places I was at.
It turned into a series of pop-ups.
They were just really successful
and I found this program called La Cocina.
They incubate women-owned businesses
and they helped me figure out
how to start my business from ground up.
The baker is part of the family.
In the Arab world, people literally
bring their dough to the oven
for the baker to bake for them.
So I wanted to be that.
I wanted an extended family
because I don't have a lot of family around here.
- When I opened up Tin Roof
I was integrated into people's lives, right?
- Yeah.
- That was so rewarding to me.
You talked about your parents were refugees,
you have influence of the different flavors
and you impart that into your food, too.
- You know, when people say,
that's not traditional, that's not authentic,
it's really authentic to me.
This is who I am.
All these dishes in some way or form
is a story about my upbringing.
My grandma,
she was amazing
because she could remember all these recipes
from back in Yaffa,
and then those dishes melded
into the dishes in Gaza,
because that was right near the Mediterranean,
then they moved to Beirut.
I think that's what's beautiful about the food,
that's it's always evolving.
- I think that's why food is special
when it comes from necessity and practicality like that.
- And for Palestinians, food is very political.
- Yeah.
- When you take, erase the name behind it,
it's another way that you're erasing our culture.
We're fighting to exist.
And our food is a marker of our existence.
My whole life, growing up in America,
I was scared to say who I was.
I was scared to say I was Palestinian.
There was so much racism against Arabs.
It was right around 9/11.
My little-kid self,
who was ashamed of my identity and scared,
that's really depressing.
But I feel like when I came out here
it's a place you can really express who you are,
and I rediscovered food
and my connection to my culture.
And it was through cooking where I healed.
- I love that.
Food is that eraser to blur the lines a little bit.
- A little bit.
And not.
Food can be uncomfortable, too.
- [Sheldon] Yeah.
- I don't think it has to be all lovey-dovey.
I think the table is also a place
to have the hard conversations.
This restaurant is really my homage,
not just to my culture, as an Arab,
but to my culture as an Oaklander.
I want the city to develop,
but I want it to develop
for the people who live in it.
(rhythmic music)
- Marinate this with a little bit of
the achiote, the annatto seed,
a little citrus, a little garlic.
(upbeat music)