There’s a particular kind of courage it takes to leave one country for another and start over with nothing but a recipe box and a plan. Anik Derphilibossian had that courage long before she ever sold her first shawarma wrap. Today, her restaurant at 97 Allen Street in Bangor is proof of what happens when someone refuses to let a dream stay a dream.
But the restaurant is the ending of this story, not the beginning. Before there was a dining room, before there was even a truck, there was a folding table, a cooler of ingredients, and a woman betting that Bangor was ready for flavors it hadn’t tasted yet. Nobody handed Anik a market. She built one, one curious customer at a time.
Meet Anik Derphilibossian
Anik moved to the United States from Lebanon carrying more than luggage. She carried a lifetime of flavors, family recipes passed down the way family recipes always are, without exact measurements, just instinct and memory, and a conviction that food could do what it has always done best: bring people together across a table when nothing else can.
Before she was a restaurant owner, she was a nurse. That detail matters more than it might seem to at first glance. Nursing is a profession built on presence, on noticing what someone needs before they ask for it, on showing up during the hardest moments of a person’s day and making them feel less alone in it. Anik spent her working hours giving that kind of care to patients. In the hours after, she was imagining a different version of the same instinct, one that happened over a shared plate instead of a hospital bed.
That dual identity, caregiver and entrepreneur, is stitched into everything Dreamer Food does. It’s a business built by someone who understands service at its most personal level, and who brought that understanding into Armenian and Lebanese cooking that doesn’t cut corners on tradition, even when cutting corners would have been easier.
Building Dreamer Food
Every founder has an origin point most people never see, and for Anik, it wasn’t glamorous. It was pop-up events. Long before Dreamer Food had four walls or a sign out front, it had a following built one plate at a time, at markets and community gatherings where people lined up not knowing exactly what shawarma or toum was, tried it anyway, and left already planning their next order.
That’s the part of entrepreneurship nobody puts on a highlight reel: the folding table in the parking lot, the small batches of food made in advance and hoped for, the uncertainty of whether anyone would show up at all. Anik did that work anyway, event after event, letting the food speak before the brand had a chance to.
The food truck came next, and with it, something Anik hadn’t had before: consistency. A truck meant a regular presence. It meant people could plan around finding Dreamer Food instead of stumbling into it by chance. It also gave her something just as valuable as sales, proof of concept. People weren’t just curious once. They were coming back, bringing friends, telling coworkers where to find good shawarma in Bangor. That momentum, built slowly and earned honestly, eventually carried Dreamer Food into a full restaurant, where the same recipes that once came out of a truck window now come out of a kitchen built to serve a growing customer base every single day.
The name itself tells you everything about the philosophy behind it. Dreamer Food isn’t a marketing flourish dreamed up by a branding agency. It’s a mission statement Anik has had to live up to at every stage of growth. Turning dreams into reality is the standard she holds herself to, and it shows in a menu built around shawarma bowls, hand-pulled shawarma sandwiches, house-made toum, hummus, and desserts like baklava, Dubai chocolate, and cheesecake that keep customers coming back for something sweet after the meal is technically over.
From Passion to Purpose
What separates a business from a calling is usually the why behind it, and Anik’s why has never been complicated, even if building it was. She wanted to create something meaningful, something that reflected her culture honestly instead of watering it down for wider appeal, and something that gave people in Bangor a real reason to gather. Cooking became the vehicle for that. Community became the actual point.
That focus on purpose over profit alone shows up in the small moments that don’t make it into a menu description. Customers don’t just talk about the flavor of the shawarma or the balance in the toum, though they talk about that too. They talk about how they’re treated when they walk through the door, about being remembered on a second visit, about a restaurant that feels less like a transaction and more like an invitation into somebody’s family kitchen. That’s not an accident. It’s the residue of a founder who spent years learning how to make strangers feel cared for, professionally, before she ever opened a restaurant.
Challenges, Growth, and Entrepreneurship
Nobody builds a restaurant out of a food truck without hitting friction along the way, and Anik’s path was no exception. Scaling from pop-ups to a truck to a permanent location means solving an entirely new problem at every stage. A pop-up only has to succeed for a few hours. A food truck has to succeed on a schedule. A restaurant has to succeed every single day, with staffing to manage, supply chains to maintain, and a physical space that has to perform whether it’s a slow Tuesday or a packed Friday night.
Each of those transitions asked something different of Anik as a leader, not just as a cook. She had to learn to delegate work she once did herself. She had to learn to trust a team with recipes that carried real personal weight. And she had to keep making decisions with incomplete information, the way every founder does, trusting that persistence would eventually close the gap that certainty couldn’t.
Anik has approached that growth the way she approaches everything else, with persistence over perfection. She has been open about wanting to inspire other people chasing their own goals, using her own journey, including the parts that were genuinely hard, as proof that risk and hard work can eventually turn into something stable and thriving. For an entrepreneur, that willingness to be visible about the climb, not just the summit, is its own kind of leadership, and arguably the more generous one.
Building Community Through Food
Dreamer Food has become known for more than its menu. It has become a gathering point for Bangor, a place where Armenian and Lebanese cuisine, often unfamiliar to first-time customers, becomes a shared discovery rather than an intimidating unknown. Anik and her team have made a habit of welcoming that curiosity instead of assuming it away, walking new customers through the menu, explaining what toum is before someone commits to a full plate of it, and turning first visits into standing weekly orders.
That approach to hospitality, patient, warm, rooted in genuine pride for the food being served rather than a need to prove anything, has helped Dreamer Food earn a reputation as a Bangor favorite well beyond the Armenian and Lebanese communities that recognized the flavors immediately. It has also fueled a growing catering business that now serves weddings, corporate events, and private celebrations across the region. Each catered event becomes another quiet introduction, another table full of people encountering flavors they might never have sought out on their own, and leaving with a new favorite.
Looking Ahead
Dreamer Food’s growth from folding table to food truck to full restaurant hasn’t slowed Anik’s ambition. If anything, it has sharpened it. She continues to expand the catering side of the business, grow the retail line of seasonings and sauces customers can bring home, and use her own platform and story to encourage other aspiring entrepreneurs, especially those who feel like outsiders in a new place, to take the leap she once took with far less certainty than she has now.
The next chapter for Dreamer Food is still being written, but the throughline is already clear. Keep the food honest. Keep the welcome warm. And keep proving, one catering order and one first-time customer at a time, that a dream carried far enough eventually becomes somebody’s favorite Tuesday lunch.
Final Thoughts
Anik Derphilibossian’s story is a reminder that entrepreneurship rarely starts with a business plan. It starts with belief, the kind that gets someone through a first pop-up with too few customers, a first food truck shift with too much to learn, and every uncertain year in between. What turned that belief into Dreamer Food wasn’t luck. It was persistence, a genuine commitment to serving people well, and a refusal to let the dream stay theoretical no matter how many times it would have been easier to stop.
For Maine’s entrepreneurial community, Anik’s journey is a working example of what UpStart Maine exists to champion: founders who build something real out of vision, culture, and sheer determination, one plate, one customer, and one dream at a time.
If you have questions or need guidance, we’re here to help. Contact us at innovation@upstartmaine.org
UpStart’s mission is to be the Bangor Region’s innovation hub that connects entrepreneurs statewide with resources to grow their businesses.
For more information on UpStart, contact innovation@upstartmaine.org