HOLIDAY PROFILE: Taste the Mediterranean at Baghdad Cafe
Owners serve up delicious, healthy food from "a generous culture with deep and heavenly love for others."
by Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
Business Name: Baghdad Mediterranean Market and Deli
Location: 11144 Patriot Highway, Spotsylvania
Regular Business Hours: 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Phone: (540) 376-7386
Website: facebook.com/baghdadmarketva
Omar Al Douri and his wife Safa Al Obaedi arrived in the U.S. 13 years ago from Iraq with Al Douri’s job with Voice of America, which provides news and information from the U.S. to other parts of the world.
Al Douri then worked as a bureau chief for a United Arab Emirates TV station in Washington, D.C., but he found himself growing dissatisfied with what he saw as a declining adherence to truth and accuracy in broadcast news.
“I wanted to tell nothing but the truth,” he said.
In February 2023, the couple opened their market and cafe in Spotsylvania. The business idea came from their efforts during the pandemic to bake and deliver bread to their friends and neighbors. Al Douri said his sons were at first disappointed when he hung up his suit, stopped stepping in front of a camera and started dealing with flour and dough instead.
“I told them, you have to be proud, because I don’t want to feed you with dirty money,” he said.
The deli serves chicken and beef schwarma, falafel, za’atar-spiced French fries, hummus and tzatziki, falafel, Turkish coffee and other goodies. Al Douri has been perfecting his falafel recipe for 33 years—ever since opening his first falafel stand outside his house at age 10.
Everything, including the sauces, is made in-store and is preservative- and dairy-free.
The market carries frozen and nonperishable items from all over the Mediterranean world.
Three questions for the owner
FXBG Advance: What led you to start your business?
Omar Al Douri: During the pandemic, a lot of our friends, especially Iraqis, were struggling with a shortage of bread for their families. So we started baking pita for free for our friends. We start delivering for our friends, and then to other people from Baltimore, down south to northern Virginia, Fredericksburg, Spotsylvania, Ruther Glen and Henrico.
When you start baking bread in your house, all your neighbors get to smell it. We didn’t sell the bread to our neighbors—we just gave it for free, because in our heritage and our culture, we believe neighbors are family.
After that, people said, Omar, “You have to sell it for people, it’s really good. We know it comes from good hands.” We started getting orders from Florida, Minnesota, New York, Alabama, Texas, Tennessee and we shipped there.
FXBG Advance: What makes your business unique?
Omar Al Douri: In the market, we have products from all countries in the Mediterranean area—Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Greece, Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Morocco, Lebanon, Italy. We have the best spices from India and Pakistan. We also have European products from Italy, the U.K., Poland.
We make Turkish baklava. We make Iraqi tea with cardamom and Ottoman coffee with pistachio. People tell us our hummus is the best in Fredericksburg and our baklava is the best in Fredericksburg.
In the deli, we make everything here with our own hands—zero preservatives. We make that promise, me and my wife and our kids: we will not serve to people anything we wouldn’t put on our table.
We are helping others to survive with good food!
FXBG Advance: What’s your business philosophy?
Omar Al Douri: We want to give exceptional customer service. We want to be those people who want to connect to others, talk to others, give them a smile, show them respect and show them we are coming from a generous culture with deep and heavenly love for others.
We serve food to share our culture. I teach my kids to take the good things from our culture and the good things from the U.S. culture and they will be unique.
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-Martin Davis, Editor
Wow!! I’ll be right over for the hummus and baklava. What a great business story.
We discovered this cafe early on. Great food-generous portions- best Middle East experience in the region.