Samiramis Imports

best store for anything middle eastern. I was so happy when I found this place. The staff is extremely friendly and they would go out of their way to help you!

Coming here for years! Best selection of middle eastern foods, spices, music and kitchenware. If you like baklava get it here!!!

I love their pumpkin seeds here, super delicious! they have a wide selection of middle eastern goods from persia and turkey. there’s a lot of little treats and candies as well. Give it a try!

This store is an absolute gem!
I am not Middle Eastern but I recently started cooking a lot more Middle Eastern inspired dishes, so it’s wonderful to have found this store for authentic goods. It’s my go-​to for imported pickles and tahini paste, but they also carry some fresh items like mini Persian cucumbers — perfect for Israeli salad, etc.
Fresh pita breads sold here are NOT like what you find at a regular store. So much better! I haven’t tried their pastries yet but those also look spectacular.
They carry a wide array of spices that are sold from bulk containers, which is great when you don’t want to necessarily buy an entire jar of something. Take a bunch of small bags and experiment with different spices without spending a lot of money. They carry multiple types of za’atar, sumac, etc.
I also have to mention that the staff are incredibly sweet and helpful.
I could spend hours in this store checking out all the different specialty items!

So glad to have this place in the heart of the city. It’s a little piece of home. If you’re having trouble finding any authentic or high-​quality middle eastern ingredients, Samiramis is this place to go. Highly recommend!

I love this place! They carry tons of ingredients so you can make your Persian faves at home. Zereshk, orange blossom water, whole fat yogurt, golden raisins, dried rose petals, sangak, basmati rice, dates, paneer, dried ghormeh sabzi mix, shambalileh etc etc.

Halloumi cheese, Mamool cookies, a zillion varieties of Turkish Deligh… this tiny place is packed with sorts of delicious hard-​to-​find treats, as well as a great selection of babaganoush, hummus, pita, and other staples.

Super fresh whole dates, nuts from all over the world, and my favorite, dried apricots. Also a wonderful selection of herbal teas that you cannot find anywhere else, such as anise tea. I come here for olive oil, nuts, dates and apricots, teas, and of course, sweets.
This place reminds me of the middle eastern imports stores in Brooklyn in the early days (1970s) when my family would drive from three states over to get to these stores for annual supplies of dry goods, spices, etc. I love this place, brings back memories.

Love this place. Has all the goods I need to make my Lebanese lentil rice and Bastila. The guys who work here are really sweet and helpful.

Authentic, Pleasant, Inexpensive.
This place is the real deal. My parents are from the Middle East so I grew up on a lot of this stuff. Everything you’d find in a market in the Middle East is magically imported to Samiramis. Everything is genuinely authentic, surprisingly fresh, and shockingly inexpensive for such rare items!
From the bread (amazeballs) to the spices, to the dates, yogurt, cheeses, olives, I could be here all day.
This is the place to get your home sick fixin’ of the Middle East, or you’ve come to find out what you are missing out on. Yeah, I’m biased, but Middle Eastern food is the tits. My friends who’ve had my cooking tend to spontaneously sing «A Whole New World!». Even the vegetarians.
Message me if you want some ideas on what to make, recipes, or what to try!

Came back at 12 and got my doog, lavashak and zereshk! Kheili doost daram!
:(can someone please update Unilocal If they are not open on Sunday’s or not open at 10am on sundays. I woke up early to get here right at 10 so I can go shopping before going to church and they weren’t open by 10:20! I am still empty handed– no zereshk, no lavashak, no Persian goodness. I will update my one star when my sadness is remedied.

I looked for fenugreek leaves at 4 other places before finding them here– TJ’s, Safeway, Other Avenues, and a greek market in the sunset. This place has fenugreek seeds, powder, and leaves!
Good prices too. Cardamom pods are more than 7x more expensive at Safeway.

Finally found a middle eastern groccery store in SF with everything I’ve been looking for.
Persians will go crazy for this place, they carry essentially everything you need for persian cooking that you cant get at a groccery store.
Tea selection is amazing. Also, great variety of canned goods, pickles, and dairy products. Recommended rice brands are India Gate and Royal.
My one recommendation is that they get more variety of bread, I couldnt find any lavash bread. They have a million types of pita, but thats just not what I was looking for.

Great selection of everything you need to make humus! Friendly service — good honey selection too!

I was looking for a Turkish grocery store in the city, and stumbled upon Samiramis on Unilocal.I wasn’t disappointed when I made a trip down there! I was in search of basic Turkish/​Cypriot foods — biber salca, kaser, Turkish tea, Turkish coffee, vegetable salt, sumac, keskul in a pack, sucuk, halloumi etc. Found all of these things here, and more!
They’ve got a wide variety of spices which they sell by weight, and also have spices that are pre-​packaged in bottles. The store is fun to just browse through — I caught myself picking up things I didn’t really need here and there as I walked through the store, and had to exercise self-​restraint so that all my groceries would fit in the two bags I had brought.
Once some of our current Turkish food stock runs out, will be back for sure!

I really thought I already reviewed Samiramis but it appears I haven’t, so off I go…
When I first found this place a few years ago, I ran in breathlessly excited. Turkish and other international grocery needs in San Francisco? Yes, please. The shopkeeper replied, ”Well, we’ve been here since 1972.” I am still laughing over that one. Hilarious. Thank goodness they’re not going anywhere.
Samiramis is Palestinian-​owned and run by Wadi Imseeh, an accountant. A numbers kind of man. He’s from the West Bank. They even wrote about him in The New York Times. He keeps his shop well-​stocked. It’s a classic international grocery, so you’ll find all sorts of edible delights and kitchen utensils ranging from Lebanese, Palestinian, Saudi, Greek, Italian, Russian, Afghani, Jordanian, Bulgarian, Polish to Sri Lankan, Spanish, Turkish, Israeli, Armenian, and much more. He’s friendly and inviting and all can feel welcome. Israelis in the area and tourists even stop by for a chat and some tastes of home.
You can leave your politics at the door, there is no tension here unlike what the media tells you we should have round the clock. Epicureans welcome.
There is ample stock of cezves, or Turkish coffee pots, and tea kettles you can use for making Turkish tea. There are books in Arabic, cookbooks, art adorns the walls, and handcrafted ouds are hanging from the ceiling. Arabic rhythms and words perfume the space. There are hard to find spices, Turkish and Armenian sucuk or soujouk, Turkish lokum (i.e. Turkish Delight), Fard Persian nougats, gargantuan slices of lavash, olives, triangle spinach pies, za’atar, frozen okra, pickles, Noyan sour cherry preserves from Yerevan and Istanbul, nazook pastries, tubs of hummus, black olives, Egyptian soaps, bulgur pilav, tins of Turkish coffee from Kurukahveci Mehmet Efendi and Persian tea, amidst dozens of other intriguing and useful products for various global kitchens.
Samiramis is actually spelled SamirAmis and is a play on words from the original owners name, Samir Khoury and the Assyrian queen Semiramis. So, he likened himself to this queen legend that is beloved throughout the Levent, Persia, Mesopotamia, Arabia, Asia Minor and the Caucasus. We actually have this name in Turkey to this day, little girls are given this name.
Sami was a man-​about-​town back in the ‘70s, and had opened a liquor store, specialized in hummus at his little grocery and hosted a radio program in Arabic for Bay Area residents. His understanding of the need for such a place in San Francisco has remained and continues to draw in locals and visitors alike, in the droves. Samir sold it to Wadi and the rest is history.
Go for the kunāfeh and cactus sweets, and pomegranate nougats and all the foods you love or never even heard of. Look for Wadi and tell him Turkish girl Asli sent you!
Pro-​tips:
+ Next door is Old Jerusalem and is a great post-​Samiramis lunch or dinner.
+ In the spirit of Assyrian culture, find the Assyrian statue of King Ashurbanipal near the Asian Art Museum!

At heart, I’m an Arab girl. This place has great halva by the slice, string cheese with caraway seeds, alllllll the teas, and all sorts of canned deliciousness.
The owners are super friendly and don’t laugh at me when I try to practice my Arabic.

I got it into my head that I wanted to try my hand at cooking a Lebanese meal (that’s happened to everyone, right?). A traditional Lebanese treat is ma’amoul, a kind of cookie flavored with rosewater and filled with dates (or pistacios, or walnuts). You can shape them by hand, but they’re prettier when made in a mold. So, of course, I needed a ma’moul mold right away.
Since I was in the neighborhood, I stopped in at Samiramis Imports in the Mission. Fine purveyor of all things Middle Eastern (and other things too) for decades. As soon as I walked in, I knew I was in the right place. The scent of spices, coffee, briny olives and sandalwood greeted me as I checked out the bulk spices. I wandered over to the shelves with pomegranate syrup and date molasses. Rose water and pickled eggplant. Nuts soaking in honey. I turned around and smiled at the different grades of bulghur, semolina, chickpea flour, and a selection of teas. Olive oils, not the Italian or Spanish variety I’m used to seeing, but oils from all over the middle east.
The refrigerator case in the back was stocked with so many different unfamiliar cheeses that it was very hard not to buy one of each, skip the cooking and just have a cheese tasting instead. «Next time, next time,» I kept telling myself.
A very nice guy who was running the store helped me find the ma’moul molds. I was expecting them to be wooden, and when I asked about that he told me that the wooden ones are made in Syria. Apparently, exporting ma’amoul molds is not at the top of Syria’s to-​do list these days. Plastic will have to suffice.
Of course I walked out of there with a bag full of stuff. But I exercised some self restraint — I’ll be back for the fresh pita, the olive oil, and some of those cheeses. I will definitely be back.

Need a little spice in your life? Shimmy over to Samiramis for all your Middle Eastern culinary needs. The stock bulk quantities of Harisa, Tumeric, Cumin, Paprika and so much more. Ever made a Chicken Merguez Couscous dish and needed the fire spice to liven it up, such as Ras Al Hanout? Samiramis has it!
It’s not a large market by any means. In fact there are only two rows, but trust me when I say the rows are packed with lentils, beans, olives, couscous and rice varieties.
Don’t be shy, ask the clerks (I think they are related) about recipes or ingredients that you would otherwise not find in the larger grocer chains.

Loads of hookahs, middle eastern art, spices, tea, packaged food, frozen items and some clothing.
Friendly staff, but no matter how friendly, I couldn’t get over the open vats of olives in the back which had white skin growing on the liquid.

Ich habe lange Zeit in London gelebt und dort habe ich meine Liebe für nahöstliche/​orientalische Küche entdeckt: Libanesisch, Israelisch & Türkisch. Ich bin vor allem ein großer Fan von Ottolenghi und experimentiere gerne mit den Gerichten in seinen Kochbüchern herum (vor allem Jerusalem). In London war es kein Problem, alle die Zutaten zu bekommen, die man routinemäßig für seine Gericht benötigt, wie Zatar (Za’atar), Gewürz-​Sumach (Sumac), Harissa oder Orangenblütenwasser und Rosenblütenwasser (Orange or Rose Blossom/​Flower Water).
Am kommenden Wochenende habe ich Freunde zu einem Kaffeeklatsch eingeladen und neben typisch-​deutschen Kuchen, wie zum Beispiel Bienenstich, will ich auch einen Orangen-​Kuchen backen (Link zum Rezept befindet sich unten). Nun, dafür benötige ich aber Orangenblütenwasser und leider gibt’s hier in San Francisco nahöstliche Supermärkte nicht an jeder Straßenecke, so wie in London.
Hier bei Samiramis gibt’s aber alles was das nahöstliche Herz höher schlagen lässt…und für mich war ein Trip in die Mission auch mal wieder ein Grund bei meiner «Lieblings-​Burritoria» vorbeizuschauen: La Taqueria!
Hier ist, wie bereits oben erwähnt, der Link zu dem super-​leckeren und super-​saftigen Orangenkuchen: