Forget Starbucks—Yemeni Coffeehouses Are the Real Third Places

Coffee trends are unpredictable. They bubble up with little warning, fueled by consumer demands and whatever’s doing well on social media. Often, they fade away just as quickly (see the dalgona coffee phenomenon of early 2020, a brief pandemic fixation). 

But sometimes, coffee trends have more staying power. Iced coffee, for example, has steadily grown in popularity over the years, even as its form has morphed. In the 1960s—and during its revival in the early 2010s—cold brew was the hip new thing. Iced lattes came after, followed by nitro cold brew and blended, milkshake-adjacent “specialty drinks”. (There’s also something called a “refresher” being touted by Starbucks, but I refuse to look into that.)

Then there are the industry trends that feel more structural, like the increasing push towards automation and convenience in place of atmosphere and craft. This is not new, of course. Automats were a popular concept in the early 1900s, offering coffee and food without the inconvenience—and, for the companies, the cost of workers. 

A century later, many coffee companies—from large chains to those focused on specialty coffee—are doing something similar. Take Starbucks, which embraced mobile ordering and drive-throughs when the pandemic slowed foot traffic to a crawl, and doubled down even when customers began to return. These new policies represented a big shift from the company’s previous, self-mythologised focus on being a “third place”, or a welcoming public gathering space outside of home and the workplace.

The change didn’t go so well. Starbucks is now trying to right the ship, with a reinvention plan focused on returning to what it was doing before the obsession with convenience and automation took over. Still, as I’ve written previously, the company was never really a third place in the first place.

Meanwhile, as the megachain’s struggles have garnered headlines, other industry players are showing what a welcoming community gathering place actually looks like. Over the past few years, dozens of Yemeni coffeehouses have sprung up around the United States, offering a unique approach to coffee drinks and design, plus emphasis on warm hospitality. 

In the process, they’re demonstrating that the third-place concept is still vital—despite the efforts of chains like Starbucks to flatten it into a meaningless buzzword.

From Dearborn, With Love

The growth and spread of Yemeni coffeehouses in the U.S. is one of the more fascinating subplots in the coffee industry’s recent history. Seemingly from nowhere, franchised chains and independent shops have begun popping up across the country, spreading from Michigan all the way to California and Texas.

Publications from Bon Appetit to the New York Times have tried to explain the phenomenon across a number of recent stories. (I have, weirdly, been quoted in a couple—thanks NPR and Food & Wine!)

A 2024 CNN piece by Ramishah Maruf and Monica Haider dug into the history of U.S.-Yemeni coffeehouses, tracing them back to the early 20th century, when Middle Eastern immigrants came to Detroit to work in shipping or the auto industry. Coffeehouses gave these workers—mostly men who had moved to the States alone—a place to socialise and build community. “Many of the initial mosques in the area were originally established in the backs of the coffee houses”, Maruf and Haider wrote.

Dearborn, a Detroit suburb and the first Arab-majority city in the U.S., is the birthplace of this most recent coffeehouse phenomenon. Some of the biggest Yemeni coffee chains, such as Qahwah House (which kicked off the trend in 2017), Haraz Coffee House, and Qamaria Yemeni Coffee Co., all started in Dearborn, and have since expanded across the country.

Their success has inspired others, most of which share a few simple elements: airy, design-driven interiors often inspired by Yemeni architecture; coffee, tea, and specialty drinks incorporating Yemeni spices; ornate pastries; and, crucially, an emphasis on customer service and community.

This hospitality is a key part of Yemeni culture, says Susan Shihab, co-founder of the Texas-based Arwa Yemeni Coffee. “You do not walk into a house in Yemen and not be offered a coffee or tea”, Shihab tells me. While others may be focusing on quick turnarounds and convenience, Yemeni coffeehouses are offering something closer to the ideal of the third place.

‘A Part of Yemen’

Yemen’s relationship with coffee goes back almost to the beginning. The country was the first to commercialise coffee production, in the 15th century, and the Red Sea port of Mokha was an early centre of the global coffee trade. As the researchers Arzaq Al-Najjar, Youri Dijkxhoorn, Rehab Zubiry, and Ruerd Ruben wrote in a 2023 paper, Yemen enjoyed an essential monopoly on coffee cultivation for several hundred years, until European powers began to ramp up production in their colonies.

Today, Yemen accounts for a miniscule percentage of global coffee production. “Despite its rich history and cultural importance, Yemen’s coffee industry has faced numerous challenges in recent years”, the authors wrote. “Political instability, economic hardship, and environmental factors have all contributed to a decline in coffee production and a loss of income for Yemeni farmers”.

Attempts to revive Yemen’s coffee industry are ongoing, although they continue to face challenges: A bloody civil war has, since 2014, killed hundreds of thousands, and a U.S.- and U.K.-backed blockade has contributed to ongoing famine while also affecting exports of commodities such as coffee.

In spite of these difficulties, several companies now specialise in exporting coffee from Yemen, the most famous of which is Mokhtar Alkhanshali’s Port of Mokha. Alkhanshali was the subject of the bestselling 2018 book “The Monk of Mokha” by Dave Eggers, which detailed his quest to return Yemeni coffee to prominence, and has since become a spokesperson of sorts for Yemeni coffee. Other exporters include Qima Coffee, based in London (and whose cafe, incidentally, is incredible), while some companies source their beans directly. 

Arwa works with distributors in Yemen to buy and import their coffee. “It was very important to us to source the beans from Yemen”, Shihab says. “Every drink you’re getting, whether it be out of the espresso machine or a traditional drink, you’re getting a part of Yemen. And in that, we’re also supporting the farmers”.

Open Late

“The number-one thing is the atmosphere”, says Omar Jahamee, co-founder of the California-based Delah Coffee. This is what sets Yemeni coffeehouses like Delah apart from chains like Starbucks, he says. That, and the attention being paid to the drinks. “It’s not fast food. Everything is handcrafted—for us, even though it takes a little time, we prefer that”.

Like Shihab, Jahamee connects his company’s success to the Yemeni culture of hospitality and community. “For me and my family, when we want to hang out, we gather at someone’s house and we just drink coffee and tea until midnight”.

Ah yes, midnight. A key element that differentiates Yemeni coffeehouses from their third-wave or chain siblings is the fact that they stay open late. In most places, bars and pubs dominate the options for public evening socialising—in fact, such places are among the classic examples sociologist Ray Oldenburg gave to illustrate his concept of the “third place”. However, for those who don’t drink, which includes many Muslims and an increasing number of young people, that means there are few public places to socialise in the evening.

A big part of the appeal of Yemeni coffeehouses, then, is that they offer a late-night gathering spot that doesn’t revolve around alcohol. “A lot of people that I know, they don’t drink”, Jahamee says. “So a coffee shop that closes late is a good spot for them, especially as it’s [also] family-friendly”.

This late-night community aspect was one of the main reasons Ibrahim Alhasbani first opened Qahwah House in 2017, as he told Luke Fortney in the New York Times earlier this year. “If I wanted to hang out with my friends, where was I going to go?” Alhasbani said. “There was no place like that”.

For Shihab, the third place aspect is hugely important to Arwa’s success. “[There’s] the idea of being able to go out and spend time doing something that is not around alcohol, but we also see first dates, and people who want to just go somewhere different, where you can actually talk to someone, that doesn’t have loud music in the background. It allows for conversation”.

Arwa designed its cafes’ interiors to encourage connection between customers by incorporating communal seating. “Every house in Yemen has that communal seating. It’s the living room. We wanted to make sure that was incorporated”, Shihab says. 

Reclaiming the Third Place

The concept of the third place is relatively broad. As Oldenburg wrote, it is above all a place where “the stranger feels at home”. 

Under former CEO Howard Schultz, Starbucks took great pride in creating this feeling—although, as a corporate behemoth trying to commodify and dominate the coffee industry, it’s doubtful it ever truly succeeded. The company’s shift in focus to the fast-food model of quick service and high turnover, followed by the recent attempt to go “Back to Starbucks”, shows that coffee culture is about more than just a quick sale through a drive-through window.

Even as they’ve grown, Yemeni coffeehouses in the U.S. are facing a number of distinct challenges. Sourcing coffee from Yemen remains difficult, and, because of its scarcity, hugely expensive. In addition, many Yemeni-Americans are dealing with the social fallout of a decades-long civil war and famine, and confronting a rise in Islamophobia (just see the reaction to Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral primary win).

Against those obstacles, it feels quietly remarkable that these businesses have grown so successfully—they’re clearly offering something special, and catering to visitors in a way that many other cafes aren’t. Their customer bases are hugely diverse, and they continue to attract new visitors as they grow. “You walk in during the day, and I don’t think you could pinpoint a customer base by age, by culture, or background”, Shihab says. “It’s really beautiful”.

For a megachain like Starbucks, the refocus on being a welcoming third place feels reactive, a flailing attempt to halt its falling sales and stock price. The company’s argument that “human connection has always been at the heart of everything we do” and that “we’re not just about coffee, we bring people together” sounds hollow given its continued antagonism towards its unionised workforce and its new customers-only bathroom policy.

For Yemeni coffeehouses, that focus is much more sincere. Shihab acknowledges that, just like every other coffee company, Arwa depends on customers grabbing a coffee on their way to work. However, the company’s main hope “is that people can sit down and converse”, she says. “When you look at the origins of coffee, that’s what it was for. It was to sit down and to have conversations—it isn’t this transactional drive-through”.