TOASTED: Seattle Bagel Sandwich Shop for Halal & Gen Z

TOASTED: Disrupting Seattle’s Bagel Scene

Founders’ Story & Culinary Vision

It was during an entrepreneurship class when University of Washington students Jaafar Altameemi and Murat Akyuz first met and joined forces to write a business plan for a Middle Eastern restaurant. The pandemic, however, slowed them down.

“We signed our first lease in our last semester of business school, but we didn’t feel like we had a fair shot the first time because COVID hit,” Altameemi says. The duo regrouped and had new plans. Miles Lang, TOASTED’s head of operations and supply chain, would join later.

Middle Eastern & Mediterranean Inspiration

“I’m Iraqi and my business partner, Murat, is Turkish and grew up working in his family’s restaurants in the Bay Area, so we knew we wanted to do something with Middle Eastern or Mediterranean street food, but more adventurous than shawarma and gyros,” Altameemi saYS. “Bagels were having a boom again, and we loved the creativity of what we could do with a bagel. We thought, maybe we interrupt this bagel scene with Mediterranean and Middle Eastern flavors.”

Serving the Halal Market

That they did. After a few years of trial and error, developing recipes in their “basement turned lab,” they opened their first TOASTED shop in the U District in July 2024. The menu featured bagel sandwiches stuffed with labneh and dates, walnuts, za’atar, Aleppo pepper-spiced garlic aioli, smoked salmon and halal-certified meats (turkey and turkey bacon) to cater to their Muslim customers, but also “clean-eaters” who care about humane standards (click here for more information on sourcing halal products).

“It really wasn’t that difficult to have an all-halal menu; we just had to get more creative,” Altameemi says. “Halal is very underserved, especially in Seattle—you don’t see a lot of

halal in fine dining or fast casual. Halal meat is at a premium, but we try to insulate our consumers from price increases. Now that we’re at four units and go through a lot of palettes every month, we’re able to negotiate a good deal. It works for the supplier, it works for us, and it works for our consumers.”

(Click here to read about another Seattle-based halal concept, Halal Smash BRGR).

Hospitality-Driven Approach

“The Middle Eastern hospitality that's deeply rooted in our culture is the pillar that supports TOASTED,” Altameemi says. “Hospitality for us is how our parents treated guests in our home. We run everything by one principle: Is this decision in the best interest of the customer or our bottom line?”

Altameemi says hospitality is so important that his team that he’s made a major change to protect it. “One of our locations is a to-go only model, and we're soon to shut it down because we've learned we cannot deliver the hospitality we're trying to deliver when we're just giving food to go.”

The hospitality-driven philosophy also extends to employees and the community at large. “We pay much more than minimum wage. We provide health insurance and real growth opportunities,” Altameemi says. “When SNAP benefits were cut recently, we provided just under 10,000 meals to people in our community—we raised $50,000 to pull that off.”

Quality Control & Scaling Operations

Altameemi credits the hub-and-spoke model for being able to scale up to “four locations in about a year and a half,” while maintaining quality across them all.

“Our hub-and-spoke model lets us drive costs down without declining quality,” he says. “In our commissary kitchen, we produce everything that goes out to each location — sauces and dough. It allows us to stay agile with new items and maintain quality across the board. We’re producing a couple thousand bagels every day.”

Catering to the Next Generation of Diners

Engaging Gen Z Customers

Altameemi says the future of TOASTED lies in the concept’s biggest and fastest growing population—Gen Z customers, just like Altameemi, who is in his mid-20s.

“The majority of our engagement online isn’t from content we post—it’s from content our customers post,” he says. “Gen Z is looking for healthy, delicious, nostalgic, great value—and all those things work against each other.”

Future Plans & Expansion

“We’re also looking to possibly introduce NA drinks at our fifth, 2,500-square-foot location that we’re hoping to open later this year. You have to be all of that in 2026 to drive success.”

To learn more about catering to this next generation, click here.

To read the full Road Trip: Seattle story, click here.