This Coffee Shop Born in Sunset Park Has Big Dreams

Much has changed since Hakim Sulaimani opened Yafa Cafe in Sunset Park in 2019. Eater wrote at the time, that he, with help from his cousin, Ali Suliman, was “a quiet force in Yemeni representation in New York City.” Now, a couple of years in, Sulaimani is on track to open two more outposts of Yafa Cafe this summer, in Downtown Brooklyn and Midtown.

The first cafe will run inside the People’s Forum, an organization at 320 W. 37th Street, near Eighth Avenue, that describes itself as “a movement incubator for working class and marginalized communities to build unity across historic lines of division at home and abroad.” Yafa Cafe will be in-house caterers and a cafe for the public. They’ve started serving coffee and will soon offer an abbreviated food menu in June. At the original Yafa Cafe, they’ve become known for dishes like hawaij-marinated fried chicken sandwiches in equal measure as the coffee, once the subject of a New York Times review.

They also won the bid against bigger-name chain coffee shops to open a takeout window inside the residential building at 505 State Street, and Flatbush Avenue, in Downtown Brooklyn, billed as “New York’s first all-electric skyscraper.” It will open this July.

Coincidentally, Sulaimani says the same development group is working on a building down the street that houses the Khalil Gibran school where their cafe has hosted and trained students at the Sunset Park coffee shop.

Since its inception, Yafa Cafe has doubled as a community space. Recently, they have held teach-ins, readings, and phone banks for Gaza: “Since voicing our stance against an apartheid state and a genocidal regime, we expected to lose followers and patrons. What we got instead was an outpour of love and support. Staying silent in the face of injustice is not what we’re about here. We will not censor ourselves to comfort anyone's ignorance,” the cafe posted in fall 2023.

When Yafa first opened, part of the mission was to highlight and “reclaim” Yemeni coffee, once a world-famous export, ruined by colonization, famine, and war, playing a role in its rarity — and therefore pricing — in New York. But it was always something bigger: They wanted to “put coffee as a whole back in the hands of those across the global south, who have historically produced it.”

Ali Suliman/Yafa Cafe

Upon launch in 2019, they imported beans from Yemen, and roasted at City League Coffee, a facility nearby in Sunset Park. Now, Yafa Cafe has its own roastery in the Brooklyn Navy Yards (inside of Shared Roasting), with signature blends like one that melds the flavors of Brazil, Sumatra, and Yemen. They’ve also begun white-labeling the beans for other cafe clients.

It was meaningful for Sulaimani to open in Sunset Park, where, just down the street, his family runs Yafa Deli & Grill, after moving to New York to flee a civil war in Yemen.

The buildout for Yafa Cafe was scrappy, but the shop captured local respect — and is gaining momentum, especially as more Yemeni-owned cafes open around the city. “There’s an exposed ceiling and exposed brick where I just ran out [of money], sanded it and made it look nice. We started off small and slowly kind of picked up to where we want it to be,” he says.

It’s just the beginning. Sulaimani wants to open a higher-end restaurant as well. He almost signed a deal but it fell through. The search continues.

Meanwhile, he has been approached to expand and franchise but is taking his time. “I think it’s an easy proposal to jump on when you own something that seems to be working from the outside to other people,” he says. “We’ve been calling what we’re working on now, our outposts. We want to eventually expand to a location that feels more like our Sunset Park location feels — like it can meld into the community in a seamless way.”

“It’s always been the goal to become New York’s coffee shop,” says Sulaimani. “We take a lot of pride in being from New York and being able to establish something that’s for us, and by us.”