Our Story
Three generations.
One kitchen.
From a small village in the Bekaa Valley to the heart of Dearborn. Sixty years of family recipes, one promise: nothing changes about the food.
In 1962, my grandmother left a small village in the Bekaa Valley with two suitcases — one of clothes, one of spices — and made her way to Dearborn. She didn't speak English. She didn't know a soul. But she knew how to cook, and within a year she was feeding half the neighborhood out of her kitchen on Schaefer Road.
That kitchen became a small restaurant. That restaurant fed three generations of Lebanese families settling in Dearborn — first arrivals fresh off the plane, kids who grew up on her tabbouleh, grandchildren who came home from college on weekends just for her knafeh.
When my father took over in 1995, he kept her recipes exactly as she wrote them — in faded blue pen, in Arabic, in a notebook we still keep behind the bar. When I took over in 2018, I made one promise: nothing changes about the food. Everything changes about how we serve it.
Cedar & Olive is what happens when you take sixty years of family cooking and put it in a room that finally does it justice. Same recipes. Same hands. New home. We're glad you're here.
Layla Karam
Owner & Chef
What We Stand For
Our Values
Made from scratch, every day.
Every loaf of pita is baked in-house that morning. Every spice is ground here. No shortcuts.
Authentic to the recipe.
Our family's recipes have stayed in the same notebook since 1962. We don't fusion-ize. We don't westernize. This is Lebanese food the way it's meant to taste.
Family always eats first.
If you're sitting at our table, you're family. That's not marketing — that's how we were raised.
Come sit at our table.
Same recipes. Same hands. We'd love to share them with you.