Yafa Cafe
Cafe · Sunset Park ·
Yemeni pour-overs, fried chicken sandwiches, lamb haneeth, & more
Yemeni pour-overs, fried chicken sandwiches, lamb haneeth, & more
"Cousins Ali Suliman and Hakim Sulaimani opened Yafa Cafe in 2019 to spotlight Yemeni coffee culture in Sunset Park. It’s still going strong as a neighborhood cornerstone where the Yemeni-rooted food is just as good as the assortment of coffees. The cousins also started to roast an in-house line of coffee during the pandemic, offering blends and Yemeni single-origin roasts for sale from the shop." - Melissa McCart
"Coffee culture is big in Arab communities, so it’s only fitting that Bridgeview is home to a new Palestinian-owned cafe that serves both a wide variety of coffee and traditional teas — a favorite being sage shai, which is black tea with sage leaves steeped within it — but also food and pastries. The breakfast menu is particularly expansive, with a traditional Palestinian offering of mezze like hummus and pita, plus a Yemeni-style menu that has ful and liver dishes. Yafa Cafe is also a great place to hang out for a bit if you work from home — just keep that sage shai coming." - Nylah Iqbal Muhammad
"Sunset Park-born Yafa Cafe is expanding this year, the first up is an outpost inside the People’s Forum." - Emma Orlow
"Since it opened in 2019 in Sunset Park, I’ve watched Yafa Cafe—founded by Hakim Sulaimani with help from his cousin, Ali Suliman—grow from a scrappy neighborhood spot into a community hub and a quiet force in Yemeni representation in New York City. I’ve seen it earn local respect for its coffee (once the subject of a New York Times review) and for food highlights like the hawaij-marinated fried chicken sandwich, while doubling as a space for teach-ins, readings, and phone banks and taking an outspoken stance on Gaza. The cafe began by importing Yemeni beans and roasting at City League Coffee, and now operates its own roastery in the Brooklyn Navy Yards (inside Shared Roasting) with signature blends that meld Brazil, Sumatra, and Yemen and even white-labels beans for other cafés. Expansion plans are underway with outposts coming to Downtown Brooklyn and Midtown, and Sulaimani is cautiously weighing franchising and a future higher-end restaurant while trying to keep the Sunset Park ethos intact." - Emma Orlow
"I read a New York Times piece following the owners of Yafa Cafe — a Sunset Park spot — who are spotlighting Yemeni coffee; as a second-generation owner Hakim Sulaimani says they’re betting on meticulously crafted $7 cups whose taste is “complex and a little funky,” and that sometimes you can “literally taste the dirt and the air.”" - Luke Fortney
