That little armored creature rolling around under your rocks is older than the dinosaurs, tastier than you'd think, and better for your soil than you knew.
The entrance to 4019 Market St. Downtown, the building where Levantine bakery Hayet Albi and Slow Bloom Coffee Roasters plan to open. (File photo/Raincross Gazette)
A recent post on the Hayet Albi Instagram account stopped many mid-scroll. After more than a year of delays and false starts, the Levantine bakery and cafe had found a home — and this time with an address.
Hayet Albi, Arabic for "life of my heart," will open in the former Beignet Spot space on Market Street, sharing the building with Slow Bloom Coffee Roasters. The pairing is not new. As the Gazette reported in 2024, the two worker-owned cooperatives had planned to open together on the corner of 10th and Market. That building is no longer in play. This one is.
The road was not simple. The landlord of the original building died the day after a letter of intent was signed, stalling the deal for months before it finally collapsed. A second negotiation dragged on for nearly a year before falling through as well. Out-of-state investment firms that owned other downtown properties showed little interest in leasing to anyone. "Their listing agents were like, yeah, we showed this building all the time, but the management doesn't respond to us," said Nizar Aridi, founder of Hayet Albi. Finding landlords willing to lease to a cooperative, he added, proved harder than expected.
The beignet space came together more quickly. The landlord was enthusiastic about the concept, and the location put both businesses within a short walk of the original site. The split-space model they had envisioned from the start remains intact: Slow Bloom on the coffee and roasting side, Hayet Albi on the bakery and kitchen side, with a shared dining area.
Hayet Albi grew out of the same moment that produced Slow Bloom. When Augie's Coffee closed in 2020 following a labor dispute, several employees regrouped and launched Slow Bloom as a worker cooperative, now operating in Redlands with a loyal following. Aridi, a Lebanese-American baker who had been supplying Slow Bloom with pastries from a rented commercial kitchen in Upland, was building toward something of his own and arrived at the same cooperative structure.
"No one deserves more than what anyone else deserves," Aridi said. "So why would I open a business where I'm benefiting more than everyone else that's working just as hard, if not harder than me?"
In practice, the cooperative model means ownership and profits are shared among the workers. Aridi is matter of fact about how it reads to people encountering it for the first time. "When people see it, it feels a lot less scary. There's a bunch of people working with each other, sharing everything, everyone working as an owner." Together, Hayet Albi and Slow Bloom would be two of only a handful of food and beverage cooperatives in the Inland Empire.
Aridi's baking draws from a Levantine tradition that predates French patisserie by centuries, and he is deliberate about how the two relate. Familiar Western pastry shapes serve as an entry point. "If I make a pastry and it's in a familiar shape, it will open up your horizons a little bit," he said. Mastic, labneh, za'atar, ingredients that may be unfamiliar to some customers, arrive inside something that looks approachable. The deeper menu follows from there.
The plan calls for morning service from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., with brunch food. Evenings, preliminarily 5 to 10 p.m., will add a full dinner menu and a natural wine program, making Hayet Albi something rarer on that corridor than another daytime coffee stop.
Market Street has been gradually shifting from a weekday professional corridor into something with more evening and weekend life. A bakery and cafe named "life of my heart," the kind of phrase Aridi says you reserve for people, not brands, fits that direction.
This story is developing and will be updated as more information becomes available.
More information: Hayet Albi will open at 4019 Market St., sharing the building with Slow Bloom Coffee Roasters. Hours and an opening date have not yet been announced. Follow Hayet Albi at @hayet.albi and Slow Bloom at @slowbloomcoffee.
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