Watch as a brave coffee shop owner confronts and chases down a chip bottle thief.
According to the store, Lindsey Stoyle was filmed dropping everything she could to chase after a man holding an employee’s tip bottle, and the man dropped the tip bottle and ran away.
In some ways, Arwa is like most other coffeehouses, serving drip coffee, lattes, and cappuccinos at four locations in metro Dallas. But the latte’s froth might feature the shop’s iconic camel image.
Arwa’s drinks menu includes drinks more common in the Middle Eastern country of Yemen. Also known as Mufawal, it is a coffee brewed with plenty of spices and evaporated or condensed milk. And kishl is a tea-like, low-caffeine drink infused with coffee cherry shells, cinnamon, and ginger. Juban, on the other hand, is somewhere in between, making use of both skins and beans, and is named after a popular Yemeni region, said co-owner Faris Almatrahi.
“What sets Yemen apart is the use of spices that are injected into the coffee during the brewing process,” Almatllahi said. Spices include cinnamon and ginger, as well as cardamom and cloves.
Yemeni coffeehouses are proliferating across the United States, from Dallas and Detroit to New York and North Carolina’s Research Triangle. Early last year, Bon Appetit estimated there were about 30 different companies in the United States, some with dozens of locations.
In addition to showcasing coffee beans from Yemen, the world’s first recorded coffee roasting and brewing country, coffeehouses such as Arwa Mocha & Co., Kawar House, and Mokhana serve as both cultural enhancers and propagators, reflecting the social nature of coffee drinking in Middle Eastern culture.
“In Yemeni culture, you usually enjoy coffee with two or three other people,” said Hatem Aleydalos, co-founder of Kamaria Yemeni Coffee, which has 42 stores in 15 U.S. states. “We’re not used to taking coffee to go. Please take your time and chat.”
Many Muslims avoid alcohol, and for non-drinkers and those looking for a family-friendly social setting, cafes are hospitable hangouts and late-night alternatives to nightclubs.
“People who used to go to hookah cafes are now bringing their families to our coffee shop,” Aleydalos said. “They’re starting to gravitate towards us.”
Yemeni Coffeehouse was born in 2017 in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, which has a large Arab-American population, but some argue that its growing presence and success is more widespread, and that it is due to the natural fruity flavors of its high-quality mountainside terrace cultivation and generations of sun-drying practices without industrial mechanization.
“It’s definitely a different taste than what many American consumers are used to,” said Nathan Leen, assistant professor of philosophy and religious studies at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.
Nancy Stockdale, an associate professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of North Texas in Denton, northwest of Dallas, said she was struck by the demographic diversity of Yemeni coffeehouses. The lively crowd at a recent visit to Harrah’s Coffee House near Louisville included parents and children, political organizers and a post-game soccer team, he said.
“I was really surprised at how many people were not from a Middle Eastern background,” she said. “I thought this was really becoming mainstream.”
Arwa opened its first Texas location in 2018 in Richardson, a suburb north of Dallas. It takes its name from the 12 stores that have ruled over the years.th– Queen of the century from Yemen’s Haraz region, known for its coffee.
The family-owned business, which has 10 stores in four states and 24 more in development, often features live camels at grand openings. Arwa’s interiors evoke family traditions in many ways, from earth tones and mosque-inspired archways to abstract dragon blood trees and lamps resembling hats worn by female Yemeni farmers.
The design also makes you feel nostalgic. Yemen is facing the social and economic effects of an ongoing but sporadic civil war between the Houthi rebels and the central government, making it difficult for al-Matrahi and his family to visit their homeland.
“We couldn’t travel to Yemen, so we brought Yemen with us,” Almatllahi said.
Origin of Yemeni coffee
Yemenis have been immigrating to the United States since mid-1919, butth Stockdale said they didn’t arrive in large numbers until the 1960s and 1970s, 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, many moved south to America’s Sunbelt, she said. More recently, political instability and civil war in Yemen have prompted further resettlement in New York, California, Texas, Illinois, Virginia, and elsewhere.
The 2020 Census estimates there are approximately 91,300 Yemenis in the United States.
Aleydalos was 8 years old when his family immigrated to the United States from Yemen, where they grew corn and watermelons. They settled in Dearborn, where Aleidaros’ grandfather worked for Chrysler.
As an adult, Aleydaroo started a wholesale business, importing spices from India and coffee from Yemen. “I just stocked what my parents liked,” he said. In 2019, he traveled to Yemen to scrutinize delivery delays that were hampering a Michigan roaster’s ability to meet customers’ coffee demands.
“It was a big learning curve,” he said. “There are too many intermediaries. I wanted a direct source.”
Along the way, Aleydalos also realized Yemen’s pioneering role in coffee history. When he opened his first coffeehouse in Commerce, Michigan in 2021, he named it Kamaria. It’s a nod to the stained glass windows common in Yemeni homes, which soften the moonlight. For him, the name symbolized his own enlightenment.
“They’re still growing coffee the way they did 100 years ago,” says Aleydalos. He rents a rooftop on a mountainside in the Haraz region to dry the coffee berries in the sun before processing them in the United States. “It takes 45 days. That’s how we extract the flavor from the skin,” he said.
Most of Yemen’s coffee is grown in remote, mountainous areas, so production is isolated from the war that has roiled the country, but the conflict has affected some ports or made them difficult to access, Alwa’s al-Matrahi said.
“It’s not that distribution has stopped; it’s just become more difficult to distribute,” he said. “We’re lucky that we can still source beans.”
Although the coffee tree originated in Ethiopia, scholars believe that the beans inside the cherry were roasted and brewed much later. A history of coffee by Cemal Kafadar, professor of Turkish studies at Harvard University, cites 16.th-According to centuries-old Ottoman reports, Sufi monks in Yemen used kawha (meaning coffee in Arabic) “to help wake up during spiritual practices.”
Then, as enterprising bean merchants began creating sites for social coffee consumption, “coffeehouses spread like wildfire across the empire,” Kafadar writes.
Coffee was grown and traded throughout the Islamic world, flourishing in places such as Cairo, Tunis, and Istanbul. Ali Asghar Alibi, an assistant professor of art history at the University of Texas at Dallas (Richardson), said Yemen’s Mokha port became a major center of coffee activity.
“Coffeehouses and coffee culture are in many ways a product of Islamic societies,” Alibay said.
Alibi’s expertise includes 17 Indian Ocean trade routes.th and 18th He said that every time he meets colleagues and students at Arwa University in Richardson, he thinks about its deeply embedded history over the centuries. He usually orders an adeni, a spiced black tea with evaporated or condensed milk, similar to a chai latte.
“I like anything with cardamom,” he said. “I’m South Asian. I’m used to drinking tea with spices.”
“Where there is no drive-thru”
Today’s stylish and stylized Yemeni coffeehouses look far removed from those 17 coffeehouses.th– Centuries of roots, but they point to centuries of traditions that have defined the social life of communities in the Middle East, North Africa, and West Asia.
Although it has been modernized, North Carolina’s Leen said its authenticity and exoticism are part of its appeal to the larger community.
“The rise of Yemeni coffeehouses fits into the existing growth pattern of independent businesses catering to a crowd increasingly seeking authentic and intimate experiences,” he said.
Sourcing beans from Yemen also aligns with those values, Leen said, creating a perceived sense of solidarity between producers and consumers. This appeals to consumers who are “conscientious about sourcing, ethical farming, labor, supporting small businesses, and supporting communities that have been marginalized and disenfranchised in many ways,” he said.
By intentionally providing social spaces where Middle Eastern immigrants, Muslims and others can interact with the wider community, these coffeehouses are finding buyers in a post-pandemic world hungry for human interaction and tired of the isolating crowds of corporate cafes.
“We’re bringing back the tradition of the coffee shop as a place where, for example, there’s no drive-through, because what’s important is meeting strangers, neighbors and co-workers and savoring the time together,” Leen said.
Given the rise in Islamophobia in the United States in recent years, cafes have become a source of safety for some. The Council on American-Islamic Relations announced last year that anti-Muslim incidents nationwide will reach a record high in 2024 and that the political rise of New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani has fueled conspiracy theories suggesting a widespread “Muslim takeover” aimed at instilling Islamic law across the country.
In June, President Donald Trump’s travel ban blocking the entry of foreign nationals from 12 countries, mostly Muslims 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 derogatory comments and recently tightened immigration enforcement.
“Under the current administration, there appears to be a conscious attempt to demonize Muslim and immigrant communities,” said Alibi, of the University of Texas at Dallas. “It feels like a complete inversion of what’s actually going on in these coffeehouses. It’s not just Yemeni demographics. Coffeehouses are popular among all ethnicities. To me, that’s what I understood America to be. People are proud of their culture and heritage.”
In some cases, coffeehouses may prove to be completely unwelcome by the community. Arwa’s Almatrahi recalled a December 2025 grand opening event outside Arwa’s newest Texas store in Murphy, a rapidly growing suburban community northeast of Dallas.
There were also camels, balloons, and a ribbon cutting. But a pair of hecklers disrupted the proceedings, forcing organizers to hold the remainder of the event inside the new cafe, he said.
Nevertheless, Almatrahi said the event was a success.
“The experience we provided broke down the stigma,” he said.
