A New Bakery Inventively Celebrates Classic Middle Eastern Flavors and Treats

Get more recipes, food news, and stories at wttw.com/food or by signing up for our Deep Dish newsletter. 
Have a food story or recommendation? Email us at [email protected].

When I met Mutaz Abdullah, he was holding two five-pound bags of custom ground za’atar, a Middle Eastern blend of sumac, sesame seeds, and herbs, that he had just received from West Town’s Epic Spices.

Abdullah owns and operates Seedo’s Levantine Bakery in Sterling (formerly Revival) Food Hall at 125 S. Clark St. in Chicago’s Loop. Much of that za’atar would soon be generously sprinkled on his savory signature za’atar croissant, which is filled with labneh, a tangy yogurt cheese. This gem sits alongside such other Seedo’s pastries as caramel tahini brownies, magic halwa bars, sticky date cake, and more Middle Eastern-inflected goodies baked on site in the shared 20th floor production kitchen.

Abdullah comes from a restaurant family. His father Sudki opened the iconic Cedars Mediterranean Kitchen in Hyde Park in 1992, after immigrating to the US in the 1970s, dabbling in the grocery business, and owning a 24-hour diner in West Town. Sudki’s staff made pita bread, falafel, and hummus for hungry University of Chicago students and the surrounding community, and his wife Basima and their sons played a huge part in the family business: Mutaz’s brother Amer still operates it today. Mutaz remembers being 15 or 16 years old and learning butchery from the Jordanian chef at Cedars. “I got really interested,” he says. “How do you debone a chicken? How do you marinate lamb, and stack it on a spit?”

After a false start in the tech industry, Abdullah yielded to the pull of the restaurant industry, and he and his business partners opened Mezza in the Loop in 2003. “Mezza was the first Middle Eastern fast casual [restaurant] to open downtown,” Abdullah claims. It thrived, and he and his partners went on to open five more locations.

After the pandemic temporarily decimated the downtown lunch scene, Abdullah regrouped, and decided to launch Seedo’s, which opened in December, 2024. Seedo is a Palestinian Arabic word for grandfather, and the bakery nods to Abdullah’s roots in restaurants and hospitality. His grandfather owned a bakery in Jordan and made pita and sesame ka’ak breads. “I chose the word ‘Levantine’ because otherwise I would be doing the cuisine and the pastries an injustice if I didn't say, ‘There's Palestinian influence, there's Lebanese influence, there's Syrian influence, there's Jordanian influence, a little bit of Turkish, a little bit of Iraqi stuff.’ There's a little bit of everything.” His menu is loaded with ingredients from Palestine such as olive oil and Jericho dates, while spices come “from all over.”

He developed the pastry menu with baker Ashley Robinson, taking classic Middle Eastern cakes and “making them into something a little more familiar to the American eye,” Abdullah says. The traditional flat, syrup-soaked semolina cake known as basbousa became a square slice like a pound cake, and the date cake is swathed in sticky toffee sauce and pecans in a decadent transformation. Croissants get the Levantine treatment, too, like the one densely coated with za’atar, or another stuffed with a pistachio filling tinged with orange blossom water.

For lunch, Abdullah uses the thin, clay oven-baked flatbread known as taboon bread for pizza-like manakeesh and what he playfully calls “sandweesh.” He thought, “We can take this dough, press our fingers into it, throw a bunch of ingredients on top to make it look like pizza, and voila, we have manakeesh.” The daily manakeesh are studded with olives, cheese, garlic confit and sumac, or za’atar. 

A thicker version of the bread – “like a cross between a taboon and a focaccia,” Abdullah says – serves as a foundation for their sandwiches.Layered with smoked turkey, roasted cauliflower, or pasterma, a Turkish-style spiced cured beef, and dressed with housemade slaw and pickles, the rectangular sandwiches are built eight at a time on split sheets of taboon.  Abdullah’s team makes a harissa-like sesame chile crunch with dried Aleppo and urfa chiles, spices, and olive oil that gets mixed with mayo and smeared on the sandwiches as well. The Seedo Salad, based on a popular salad from Abdullah’s Mezza restaurants, is packed with dates, goat cheese, almonds, and avocado, in a freshly made dressing of white balsamic and organic honey.

Abdullah fulfilled a dream by opening a bakery that celebrates the flavors of his family’s homeland. His counter has been attracting the downtown crowd, including many Middle Eastern office workers and students, “and the guys going to pray at the mosque” at the Downtown Islamic Center just three blocks away. Those who make the journey reap the rewards, in the form of homemade lentil soup, peanut butter thumbprint cookies, and many more Levantine-inspired treats.