Wiseman’s DGS Delicatessen shuttered in 2018, but it was in DGS’s basement that Little Sesame debuted in 2015. And Sababa, a sit-down Israeli restaurant that has earned a Bib Gourmand distinction from Michelin, opened in Cleveland Park in early 2018. Taim, a popular New York hummus and falafel chain from chef Einat Admony, opened in Georgetown in 2019.
In 2016, the kosher-certified and vegan Shouk - a fast-casual Israeli street food restaurant - opened in Mount Vernon Square. When the Little Sesame pop-up first appeared in 2015, it did not have much Israeli hummus competition in Washington. And the antidote to the deli was the vegetable-centric food that became Little Sesame.” And so our first project was the Jewish deli. “Dave and I grew up eating Sunday brunch with smoked fish and bagels together. “We wanted to launch something that’s very authentic to us and our family, honoring those traditions,” said Wiseman, a third-generation Washingtonian. It was named for District Grocery Stores, a 20th-century grocery cooperative that at its peak comprised 300 stores, most of which were owned by Jewish immigrants from Europe. Washington foodies will recall their previous restaurant, DGS Delicatessen, a Jewish-style deli that paid homage to the region’s Jewish food heritage. Little Sesame wasn’t the trio’s first project. “We always dreamed of opening our own place one day,” said Wiseman. Wiseman created Little Sesame with his cousin, Dave Wiseman - a lawyer, not a chef - and Ronen Tenne, an Israeli chef with whom Wiseman worked as a line cook at a restaurant run by Michelin-starred chef Michael White in New York. But, Wiseman said, the team “couldn’t be happier” with sales at Whole Foods. Little Sesame’s two storefronts are in Chinatown and Farragut Square, two business districts that have yet to see a mass return of office workers.
After nearly a year of experimenting with acidity levels and pasteurization, Little Sesame’s hummus hit shelves at 13 Whole Foods locations in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia over the summer. There’s a lot of learning we had to do,” Little Sesame co-founder Nick Wiseman told Jewish Insider in a recent interview. It’s just a few ingredients, they thought.
So, when the Israeli-inspired restaurant, Little Sesame, first showed up in downtown Washington as a basement pop-up in 2015, it quickly became a local favorite.Īfter the coronavirus pandemic sent sales at Little Sesame’s two downtown locations into a tailspin, the company’s chefs figured it would be easy to create a packaged version of its popular hummus to sell in local grocery stores. Washingtonians would know: Until a few years ago, it was nearly impossible for residents of the nation’s capital to find a restaurant serving the fresh dip like those that line the streets of some Middle Eastern cities. Good hummus doesn’t need many ingredients: chickpeas, fresh lemon juice, tahini, some garlic and salt.īut that doesn’t mean it’s easy to make.
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