“I become really emotional when I go to these cafes and I see the Yemen Coffee becoming one thing,” explains the entrepreneur of the Café Mokhtar Alkhanshali.
Mokha port
hide
tilting legend
Mokha port
“Yemeni Coffee is number one,” said Ibrahim Alhasbani, who founded Qahwah House in 2017, shortly after immigration to the United States, the Alhasbani-expanding Yemeni cafes in full expansion now includes 23 Texas locations in New York.
Above Pistachio Lattes in a Qahwah house in Dearborn, Michigan, he explained that Qahwah is the Arabic word for coffee.
“I want to share the culture. I want to share the coffee. I want to share the story,” said Alhasbani.
Hundreds of Yemeni cafes have opened in recent years on the city’s blocks and in strip shopping centers throughout the United States, the other channels include Haraz, Mokafé and Qamaria Yemeni Coffee Co. Yemen is a former birthplace of coffee trade, and immigrants fleeing his civil war have brought their culture here in the form of cafes.
This wave of Yemeni cafes is distinctive for their beautiful creations, their late hours, coffee drinks with cardamom and ginger, and desserts that go from Kunafa hazelnut cheese cake (made with thin rod rods) with decadent chocolate cakes.
“Desserts are just phenomenal,” said Fionn Pooler. He covers the coffee industry specializing in his newsletter, The casting. Pool, based in Scotland, followed the rise of Yemeni cafes in the United States and the United Kingdom, he was particularly impressed by the pastries he knew at the Qima Café in London. “Most cafes, you get beautiful pastries but not really at the same type of level,” he said.
As for the coffee, the Yemeni grains appreciate a mysticism among connoisseurs because of their rich history and their flavors, said Poole, and what he tasted is up to the media threshing.
“I think it’s probably partly because the coffee that made us recently was really the best of the best,” he said. “Only the best coffee is to go out.”
Coffee prices have skyrocketed in the world due to climate change, affecting exports everywhere. “There is a diversion,” said Poole. “There are people who hang on to coffee because they don’t want to sell it, because obviously, the price can continue to increase.”
Most coffee consumed in the United States come from Brazil and Colombia. It is subject to the same 10% rates as Yemen coffee. Alhasbani imports his coffee from a family farm near the capital, Sanaa. He said that adopting him at the port of Aden, hundreds of kilometers to the south, has become increasingly difficult.
“Before the war, it was like 10 hours of driving to take Sanaa’s expedition to the port,” he said. “With war, it’s sometimes like two days.”
And nothing guarantees that an Yemeni coffee expedition – which can represent the whole growth season of a farm – will even add it, added the Mokhtar Alkhanshali coffee entrepreneur. He grew up in San Francisco obsessed with coffee, at a time when few people outside the Yemeni community knew a lot about the country’s coffee. These days, the Bay region benefits from a wealth of Yemeni cafes, notably Delah Coffee, Heyma Yemeni Coffee and Mohka House.
“The Yemeni Cafe movement is very, very new,” said Alkhanshali. He runs a coffee company called Port of Mokha. (The drink known as “Mocha” takes its name from the old Yemeni Port of Mokha.) “I become really emotional when I enter these cafes and I see the coffee in Yemen becoming one thing.”
Alkhanshali is the hero of Mokha’s monkA Best Seller Non Fiction 2018 by Dave Eggers. He followed his quest to bring Yemeni coffee of unique origin to the United States. Now, he says, he fears that the fragile economic balance helping rural families in a county suffering from generalized poverty and food insecurity.
“Most farmers in Yemen are small operators. They are counting on these cafes in their villages,” he said. “This thing only starts, and it could be blocked because of unhappy policies.”
American policies concerning Yemen have been back and forth in the last decade. The Trump administration first designated the Houthi rebels as a terrorist organization in 2021, but the designation was revoked by Democratic President Joe Biden, largely to help the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, often described as one of the worst in the world. President Trump redesigned the Houthis as a terrorist organization last month in March. This means sanctions and penalties for anyone providing material support to the group.
“Eighty percent of the Yemen Coffee, I would say, comes from the territories controlled by the Houthis in Yemen, the mountain regions of IBB, Sanaa and these provinces,” said Alkhanshali. “This means that any merchant or exporter or importer who bought coffee from these regions could technically be classified as support terrorism because it could return to this organization.”
“We are behind every morning smile,” said Ibrahim Alhasbani, founder of Qahwah House.
Neda Ulaby / NPR
hide
tilting legend
Neda Ulaby / NPR
In one of his Qahwah House cafes in Dearborn, Ibrahim Alhasbani said he was more concerned with high prices on Chinese manufacturing paper cups and Indian cardamom than legal imports from Yemeni coffee. But war affected everyone, he added. His mother and sister were both deceased recently because the country’s infrastructure was broken and they could not receive adequate medical care for treatable problems. The war killed about a quarter of a million people, according to the United Nations, including several thousand civilians.
When political commentators and comedians joked on a journalist accidentally included in an unofficial group with high -ranking American officials using emojis to celebrate air strikes, including in the city of Sanaa, Moktar Alkhanshali was the heart.
“It terrified my family,” he said. “And you are talking about a city with more than 3 million people who live there. Sanaa has been attacked in very high density residential areas, which had not happened in this way, in fact.”
US air strikes continue to pound Yemen, with dozens of civilian victims in recent weeks. Ibrahim Alhasbani observed that it is easier to see people as human beings when you really see them. He wants Qahwah House, he said, a welcoming place that helps the Americans to recognize Yemenis not as people associated with war and famine, but as people who have brought world coffee.
“We are behind every smile in the morning,” he said with pride.
Entertainment
