Seedo's Bakery in Chicago's Loop adds Palestinian twist to familiar pastries
A Palestinian-American owned bakery in the Loop is adding a Middle Eastern twist to familiar pastries.
Seedo's Levantine Bakery near Wells and Madison is owned by Mutaz Abdullah. While the cases are stocked with food most would recognize, like croissants, cookies and sandwiches, he adds his Palestinian heritage to them through flavor choices and combinations that are a little more exotic.
"We can take something that everyone's familiar with, like a croissant, and turn it into a pistachio orange blossom croissant, for example," he said. "It would be just a strong influence from the Levantine area, especially Palestine, important onto a lot of French-American ideas, whether it's the croissant, like the [pistachio] croissant, or our basbousa coffee cake, which is a traditional kind of American coffee cake."
"Seedo's" means "grandfather's," and has two locations, one inside Sterling Food Hall that's been open for a little more than a year and a new brick-and-mortar near Wells and Madison that opened earlier this year.
"It's a hard business, a tough business," Abdullah said. "But if you love, it doesn't feel like it's a hard business every day, you know. You enjoy putting smiles on people's faces."
Pleasing people through food is in his blood. Abdullah said his father owned a popular Palestinian restaurant in Hyde Park, and his grandfather was a baker in Palestine.
"So kind of a combination of honoring t hem, but also taking something that's familiar to me and imparting those flavors onto traditional American or French-American type of pastries," he explained.
It's a way of sharing his heritage and culture, especially now.
"There is an occupation and a war happening in Gaza, in the West Bank. I wanted to bring a little bit of light onto that subject, humanize the Palestinian people," he said.
So he is sharing the food he grew up on, the food he loves.
"It's what I'm familiar with. I just know the flavors really well. I grew up with them. It's all we ever ate when we were kids. My mom, everything she made was based off of what she grew up on. And my father, especially my father actually. So there's this almost sense of love for that food, and I just want to bring it to the public," Abdullah said.
Abdullah was originally in the tech sector, but it didn't make him happy. He realized his love of creating food, so he pivoted to being a restauranteur – to the delight of his hungry customers.
