The fluffiest pita you ever did taste is at Alida’s Kurdish Bakery in Everett

“I haven’t really thought it through,” laughed Nechirvan Zebari. “In retrospect, it was a really bad idea.”

Usually not, as one owner and baker talks about opening his shop, but if you try Zebris Samoon Bread (diamond-shaped Iraqi style flatbread) from Alidas Bakery in Everett you’ll be glad he took the risk of going into the store to go.

Alida’s Bakery is tucked away in a mall in Everett, where a range of Middle Eastern bread and baked goods are freshly baked daily that have never been found on most Seattle bakery shelves. From Kanafa, a cheese-filled puff pastry, to Za’atar Manakish, a flatbread that is generously coated with a Middle Eastern blend of spices called Za’atar, Zebari bakes the foods of his childhood and upbringing as a Kurdish immigrant to the United States

Before opening a bakery, Zebari was an intensive care nurse at Swedish Edmonds and continued to work as a nurse for the first two years of the bakery. He even worked in a COVID-19 unit at the hospital during the first wave of the pandemic last spring, but left the position at the end of the summer.

“It was one of the hardest experiences of my life, it completely burned me out as a nurse,” said Zebari. Then he turned to full-time baking. Despite a pandemic and government restrictions on businesses, Alida was so busy that Zebari no longer needed a second income to cover the bills; When it opened, the bakery baked from 80 pieces of bread a day to around 70,000 pieces a month today.

It was not easy to get these numbers, however, and there was a lot of trial and error. Zebari started his bakery as a novice baker, with no work experience but with a passion for traditional Middle Eastern bread that he couldn’t find anywhere else in town. His brother and sister-in-law taught him family recipes and techniques, hence the name of the bakery Alida, a combination of the name of his brother Ali and the name of his sister-in-law Khalida. But baking at home, he learned, was very different from doing it commercially. Bread is especially difficult to master because it is vulnerable to the elements, from moisture to temperature.

“Every day is different and presents different challenges,” says Zebari.

Persistence, it turns out, is a key ingredient in bread baking. When Alidas first opened, Zebari was struggling to get his pita to make the signature pita pocket in the center of the bread. So he tinkered with the tech for almost six months before getting it right.

“It was like putting pieces of the puzzle together,” he said, playing with everything from the length of the fermentation to the baking time and temperature. Now its saoka flatbread is the hallmark of its menu, light and fluffy as opposed to the thin, almost papery flatbread sold in grocery stores, and yes it has the perfect pocket in the middle.

Through his bread and desserts, Zebari was able to share a piece of Kurdish culture with Seattle. When he was only five years old, his family came to the United States and were expelled from Iraqi Kurdistan. The Kurdish people are an ethnic minority in the Middle East who have long sought an independent nation-state and are persecuted as a people across the region.

“We were also kicked out of our home country and neighboring countries. There is pride [to being Kurdish] because of what we went through, ”said Zebari. By sharing the food of his people, he hopes to give the Seattlites a glimpse into Kurdish culture and an understanding of the history of his people. “This is from our homeland, it is what our family does and we want to share that with people.”