Tamra & Co. is preparing to bring something new to Pike Place Market this fall: a Saudi-inspired cafe and gift shop built around dates, an ingredient that has followed founder Razan Kattoa through nearly every stage of her life.
The company recently announced its first permanent location in an Instagram post. Kattoa told What Now Seattle that the current target is November, though permitting and inspections could move the timeline slightly in either direction.
To understand the store, start with its name: Tamra means a single date in Arabic.
Kattoa grew up in Saudi Arabia, where dates are closely tied to hospitality and daily life. People serve them to guests, pair them with coffee, and use them in cakes, cookies, and other sweets.
That familiarity eventually became Tamra & Co., but Kattoa didn’t start with a fully formed plan for a date-focused business.
She started experimenting with date-based desserts and testing them at pop-ups. A sticky date cake became an early favorite. Later, she introduced stuffed dates and noticed people showing up specifically to try them. Those events became a way to learn what customers responded to and, little by little, changed her idea of what the business should become.
Today, Tamra & Co. sells carefully packaged date boxes online, including collections meant for individual treats, sharing, hosting, and gifting. The physical store will take that idea much further.
Kattoa said the 650-square-foot Pike Place shop will work as both a cafe and a gift store. Customers will find stuffed dates, pastries, espresso drinks, Arabic coffee, packaged gifts, and other date-based sweets. New stuffed-date flavors are also in development, including matcha, which will debut alongside three additional flavors when the store opens.
Coffee is especially important to the concept.
In Saudi Arabia, Kattoa said, the sweetness of dates is traditionally balanced with Arabic coffee, a lightly roasted coffee commonly infused with cardamom and sometimes saffron or cloves. She first offered it free alongside dates at her pop-ups, but customers quickly began asking whether they could buy the coffee too.
“When you take a bite of anything made out of date, and then you take a sip of that coffee, it’s just like heaven,” she said.
That pairing will now become a permanent part of the shop.
Kattoa describes the shop as a Saudi-inspired cafe with a Seattle spirit. She wants to take recognizable pieces of her culture and present them in a contemporary way that feels accessible to people discovering them for the first time.
The food will follow that same approach. Some flavors will be more Middle Eastern, while others will feel more familiar to people from different cultures.
“I wanted to make sure that nothing that we offer is going to be very different from what they know,” Kattoa said. “It’s going to feel a little bit familiar, yet a little bit different. That’s going to make it unique.”
Even the gift boxes have become part of that experience.
Kattoa said customers often told her they didn’t want to throw the packaging away after finishing the dates. Some wanted to reuse the boxes for jewelry or as decorative objects. That response pushed her to develop additional packaging for the brick-and-mortar store, where products will be displayed ready for gifting.
The physical space is being designed with the same attention to detail. Kattoa plans to include references to Saudi Arabia, such as palm trees and camels, but with a modern look. For her, the experience starts with what customers see when they walk in, then the smell of coffee and cardamom, and finally the food.
“I want to sell an experience of what Saudi Arabia is,” she said.
Finding the right home for Tamra & Co. took time. Kattoa said it took about a year and a half to secure the Pike Place Market space, but she was willing to wait because she has always loved the market and felt it was the right place to introduce the concept.
She does not intend for Pike Place to be the company’s only store. Kattoa said she hopes to grow the concept beyond its first location, making the Market the starting point for something larger.
The project is also personal to her. Kattoa said many people know little about Saudi Arabia beyond the stereotypes they have encountered in the media. Food gives her another way to introduce the country.
“This is going to be a great opportunity for me to tell a story of who we are through something that I love, through food, which is a common language that everyone has,” she said.
Tamra & Co. is currently targeting a November opening at Pike Place Market. Follow Tamra & Co. on Instagram for updates as the opening gets closer.
