Feb. 14, 2026, 6:01 a.m. ET
In some ways, Arwa is like most other coffeehouses, serving drip coffee, lattes and cappuccinos at its four locations in metro Dallas. But the foam on your latte might bear the business’ signature image of a camel.
Arwa’s drink menu features beverages more common in the Middle East nation of Yemen: There’s mofawer, also known as mufawar, brewed coffee rich with spices and evaporated or condensed milk; and qishr, a tea-like, low-caffeine drink steeped with coffee cherry husks, cinnamon and ginger. Meanwhile, said co-owner Faris Almatrahi, a juban is somewhere in between, utilizing both husks and beans and named for the Yemeni region where it is popular.
“What sets Yemen apart is our use of spice, infused into the coffee during the brewing process,” Almatrahi said — spices that in addition to cinnamon and ginger include cardamom and clove.
From Dallas and Detroit to New York and North Carolina’s Research Triangle, Yemeni coffeehouses are proliferating across America; early last year, Bon Appetit estimated about 30 distinct enterprises in the U.S., some with dozens of locations.
Aside from showcasing coffee beans from Yemen — the world’s first nation on record to roast and brew coffee — coffeehouses like Arwa, Moka & Co., Qahwah House and MoQana serve as both cultural reinforcement and outreach, reflecting the social nature of coffee drinking in Middle Eastern culture.
“In Yemeni culture, you indulge your coffee, and usually with two or three other people,” said Hatem Aleidaroos, co-founder of Qamaria Yemeni Coffee, which has 42 locations in 15 U.S. states. “We’re not used to getting coffee to go. You take your time and chat.”
For Muslims, many of whom eschew alcohol, and for anyone seeking liquor-free or family-friendly social options, the cafes are hospitable hangouts and a late-night alternative to nighttime clubbing.
“People who would go to hookah cafes now come to our coffeeshops and bring their families,” Aleidaroos said. “They’ve started to gravitate toward us.”
Yemeni coffeehouses sprouted in the heavily Arab-American Detroit suburb of Dearborn in 2017, but their growing presence and success reflects a broader reach — and, some argue, a higher quality of coffee, which they attribute to naturally fruity undertones tied to its growth along high mountainside terraces and generations-old sun-drying practices free of industrial mechanization.
“It tastes distinctly different from what many American consumers are used to,” said Nathan Lean, an assistant teaching professor of philosophy and religious studies at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.
Nancy Stockdale, an associate professor of Middle East history at the University of North Texas in Denton, northwest of Dallas, said she’s been struck by the demographic diversity at Yemeni coffeehouses: The lively crowd during a recent visit to Haraz Coffee House in nearby Lewisville, she said, included parents and kids, political organizers and post-game soccer squads.
“I was really taken with how many people were not of Middle Eastern background,” she said. “I thought, it’s really crossed into the mainstream.”
Arwa opened its first Texas location in the north Dallas suburb of Richardson in 2018. The name references a long-reigning 12th-century queen from Haraz, a Yemeni region known for its coffee.
The family business, with 10 locations in four states and two dozen more in development, often features live camels at its grand openings. Arwa’s interiors evoke family heritage in multiple ways, from earth-tone colors and mosque-inspired archways to abstract dragon blood trees and lamps resembling hats worn by Yemen’s female farmers.
The design also reflects nostalgia. With Yemen challenged by the social and economic effects of a sporadic but ongoing civil war between Houthi rebels and the central government, conditions have proven difficult for Almatrahi and his family members to visit their homeland.
“We couldn’t travel to Yemen, so we brought Yemen to us,” Almatrahi said.
The origins of Yemeni coffee
While people from Yemen have migrated to the U.S. since the mid-19th century, they didn’t arrive in large numbers until the 1960’s and 1970s, Stockdale said, along with other Middle Eastern immigrants who moved to the Detroit area to work in the auto and steel industries.
As those industries began to decline, she said, many moved south into the American sunbelt. More recently, political unrest and civil war in Yemen have prompted additional resettlement in places like New York, California, Texas, Illinois and Virginia.
The 2020 Census estimated about 91,300 Yemenis in the U.S. overall.
Aleidaroos was 8 years old when his family moved to the U.S. from Yemen, where they’d farmed corn and watermelon. They settled in Dearborn, where Aleidaroos’ grandfather worked for Chrysler.
As an adult, Aleidaroos started a wholesaling business, importing spices from India and coffee from Yemen, “just getting stuff that my parents liked,” he said. In 2019, he traveled to Yemen to scrutinize the shipping delays that hindered his ability to meet the coffee demands of his Michigan roaster clients.
“It was a big learning curve,” he said. “So many middlemen. I wanted a direct source.”
In the process, Aleidaroos also became aware of Yemen’s pioneering role in coffee history. When he opened his first coffeehouse in Commerce, Michigan, in 2021, he called it Qamaria – a reference to the stained-glass windows common in Yemeni homes that soften incoming moonlight; for him, the name symbolized his own enlightenment.
“They’re still growing coffee the way they were 100 years ago,” said Aleidaroos, who said he rents mountainside rooftops in the region of Haraz to dry coffee cherries in the sun before processing in the U.S. “It takes 45 days. That’s how we get the flavors from the skins.”
The growth of most Yemeni coffee in remote mountain areas has kept production isolated from the war that has roiled the country, said Arwa’s Almatrahi, though the conflict has impacted some ports or made them more difficult to reach.
“It did not halt distribution; it just made it more difficult,” he said. “We’ve been fortunate to be able to still source our beans.”
While coffee plants originated in Ethiopia, scholars believe the beans inside the cherries weren’t roasted and brewed until much later. A history of coffee by Cemal Kafadar, a professor of Turkish studies at Harvard University, cites 16th-century reports from the Ottoman empire of qawha – the Arabic word for coffee – being used by Sufi monks in Yemen “to help them stay awake during their spiritual exercises.”
Then, once enterprising bean merchants began creating sites for social coffee consumption, Kafadar wrote, “coffeehouses spread like wildfire all around the empire.”
Coffee was cultivated and traded across the Islamic world, flourishing in places like Cairo, Tunis and Istanbul. Yemen’s port of Mocha became a major hub of coffee activity, said Ali Asgar Alibhai, an assistant professor of art history at the University of Texas at Dallas in Richardson.
“Coffeehouses and coffee culture are in many ways products of Islamic society,” Alibhai said.
Alibhai, whose expertise includes Indian Ocean trade routes in the 17th and 18th centuries, said he thinks about that deeply embedded history whenever he meets colleagues or students at Arwa in Richardson. He typically orders an adeni, a spiced black tea with evaporated or condensed milk, similar to a chai latte.
“Anything with cardamom is what I go for,” he said. “I’m South Asian. I’m used to drinking tea with spices in it.”
‘Where drive-throughs don’t exist’
Today’s sleek, stylized Yemeni coffeehouses seem worlds away from those 17th-century roots, but they showcase centuries-old traditions that have defined social life for Middle Eastern, North African and West Asian communities.
While modernized, their authenticity and exoticism are part of their appeal to the larger community, said North Carolina State’s Lean.
“The rise of Yemeni coffeehouses fits into an existing, growing pattern of independently owned businesses that cater to crowds who increasingly crave experiences that are genuine and intimate,” he said.
The sourcing of beans from Yemen also aligns with those values, Lean said, offering perceived solidarity between producer and consumer. That’s a draw for consumers “conscientious about sourcing, ethical farming, labor and small business and supporting communities that have been marginalized and disenfranchised in various forms,” he said.
By providing intentionally social spaces in which Middle Eastern immigrants, Muslims and others can interact with their broader communities, these coffeehouses are finding purchase in a post-pandemic world thirsty for human interaction and tired of the detached churn of corporate cafes.
Lean said that “revives a legacy of coffee shops as sites where, for example, drive-throughs don’t exist because the whole point is to encounter a stranger, a neighbor or colleague and savor time together.”
For some, the cafes provide a bedrock of security given rising Islamophobia in the U.S. in recent years. The Council on American-Islamic Relations last year said national anti-Muslim incidents reached an all-time high in 2024, and the political rise of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani sparked widespread conspiracy theories suggesting a broader “Muslim takeover” designed to plant Islamic law nationwide.
In June, President Donald Trump’s travel ban blocking entry of foreign nationals from 12 mostly Muslim and African countries was criticized by CAIR executive director Nihad Awad as “overbroad, unnecessary and ideologically motivated” while the president has targeted Minnesota’s Somali community with disparaging rhetoric and, more recently, heightened immigration enforcement.
“Under this current administration there seems to be a conscious attempt to demonize Muslim and immigrant communities,” said Alibhai, of UT-Dallas. “It feels like such an upside-down of what is actually going on in these coffeehouses. The demographic is not just Yemeni; they’re popular among all ethnicities. That to me was the America I understood — people being proud of their culture and heritage.”
Occasionally, the coffeehouses have found local communities not entirely welcoming. Arwa’s Almatrahi recalled the December 2025 grand opening event outside Arwa’s newest Texas location in Murphy, a fast-growing suburban community northeast of Dallas.
There were camels, balloons and a ribbon-cutting. But a pair of hecklers disrupted the proceedings, he said, forcing organizers to conduct the remainder of the event inside the new cafe.
Nonetheless, Almatrahi said, the event was a success.
“The experience we provided outshined the bigotry,” he said.
