When Rayan Lotfi moved from the East Bay to San Francisco a little over a year ago, he was looking for community.
“I was trying to find places that had kind of SWANA, Southwest Asian, North African culture, Khaleeji Gulf countries, Iranian food, all kinds of different types of cultural spaces, restaurants, places I felt more at home,” said Lotfi, who is Iranian-American.
When he saw an Instagram ad for a Yemeni coffee shop opening in SOMA, he knew that he needed to check it out. This coffee shop was Delah Coffee, which opened in July 2022.
After Lotfi’s first visit, he continued to return, eventually getting to know the coffee house’s co-founder, Omar Jahamee. Jahamee opened Delah with his uncle, Majed Jahamee, when he was just 18 years old.
Delah opened a second location in Oakland in February, and its third location just north of the UC Berkeley campus debuted in September. Continuing to expand, they just announced a new location coming to Elk Grove.
Now in medical school at a joint UCSF/UC Berkeley program, Lotfi finds himself driving back and forth between San Francisco and the East Bay and has been enjoying the East Bay Delah locations.
Delah is not the only Yemeni coffee shop popping up in the East Bay either. Heyma Yemeni Coffee & Tea opened in Berkeley in October, Mohka House came to Oakland’s Dimond District in July and Sana’a Cafe, a Yemeni coffee shop with a location on Montgomery Street in San Francisco, is planning to open in downtown Oakland before the end of the year. Predating this year’s wave of Yemeni cafes, Mellana Cafe opened in 2019 in the Longfellow neighborhood of Oakland and also sells a selection of Yemeni-style caffeinated beverages.
Hamza Ghalid, the owner of Mohka House, says there is a simple reason for the success of Yemeni coffee shops and their recent proliferation.
“Yemeni coffee is the best, like close to none out there,” he said.
The coffee beans come from the mountains of Haraz in Yemen. The beans are grown at high altitudes and are 60% smaller than average coffee beans. Ghalid said that different regions of Yemen each have their own way of harvesting and drying the beans.
Ghalid describes Yemeni coffee as first “earthy, aromatic and then the chocolatey aftertaste sort of flavor.”
Jahamee agrees that Yemeni coffee is great for certain drinks, but he thinks it is not the best option for espresso. Delah uses a unique blend that Jahamee created for their espresso combining Ethiopian, Colombian and Kenyan beans. Delah still uses Yemeni coffee for their more traditional drinks like the jubani (light roast with cardamom, ginger and cinnamon), Delah mofawar (medium roast with cream and cardamom), and Arabian qahwah (light roast with cardamom).
Lotfi’s go-to orders at Delah are the iced Yemeni latte when he wants caffeine and the iced hibiscus when he doesn’t.
“Like a lot of Iranian flavors, for example, there’s a lot of tartness and sourness to [the hibiscus], so whenever I order it, it feels like home,” he said.
Two of Delah’s most popular drinks are the Yemeni latte and the adeni chai. The Yemeni latte is made with a double shot of espresso and has cinnamon and cardamom, while the adeni chai uses premium Yemen black tea boiled with cream, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves and nutmeg.
In addition to the drinks, the Yemeni coffee shops are also set apart by their interior design and late hours. Lotfi says that Delah, with the couches up against the wall and a quiet atmosphere, is reminiscent of traditional coffeehouses in Iran and across the SWANA region, a fusion of modern and traditional.
Jahamee said he wanted each Delah location to create a similar feeling for customers.
“If you would walk in, you would feel like a warm welcome vibe,” he said. “It’s warm, it’s lovely, the music is well balanced.”
For Ghalid, he wanted the inside of Mohka House to feel like the capital city of Yemen, Sanaa, where he grew up. He describes Sanaa as very rich in culture and architecture, something he hopes is reflected in his space. On one side of the wall, there is a mural painted by local artist Robin Gibson. The mural depicts the Port of Mohka. The other side of the wall shows Sanaa.
“I wanted people to sort of experience the environment there, without being able to go there,” Ghalid said.
On a Thursday night in November, the Delah location in downtown Oakland was full of customers. Some were sipping their drinks and chatting, some tapped on their laptops and others were reading or watching something on their smartphones.
For Lotfi, as a medical student, the late night hours are handy for when he wants to study or hang out while waiting for traffic to die down before heading back to San Francisco. He also appreciates that it can be a place to gather and talk late into the night with friends.
“I think it’s a great idea to have it open later because there’s not a lot of places within the Bay that you can go out and do things late at night that are just kind of like chill, laidback, relaxing,” Lotfi said.
Ghalid said that he remembered when there was a Peet’s open in San Francisco 24/7, but there are no longer many options for people for late-night places to hang out besides bars. He wanted to make his coffee shop a place for people to go after 5 or 6 p.m. Mohka stays open until 9:30 pm every day.
Delah’s Berkeley location remains open until 11:30 pm Monday through Friday, and until midnight on Saturday and Sunday.
“Students especially, they don’t want to be stuck at home 24/7 studying,” Jahamee said. “So, it’s always a good thing when they have a spot to go to.” He added that sometimes the Berkeley location sees customers staying until close, and he loves to see people using the space.
These shops are a place for East Bay coffee lovers to experience Yemeni coffee and also provide a space to sip a warm drink long past the time of day when most coffee shops have closed, but Lotfi said that, lately, when he goes to places like these Yemeni coffee shops, he’s finding it important to remember the people behind the coffee.
“A lot of the coffee shops that I’ve been going to, they wouldn’t be here if there weren’t some cause for displacement to bring people here,” Lotfi said. “I was remembering there’s a beautiful part where people share their culture that’s also side by side with the fact that there’s a lot of hardship and heaviness of why maybe they’re here to begin with.”
East Bay Yemeni cafes
Delah Coffee Berkeley: 1807 Euclid Ave., Berkeley; (510) 647-9562; delahcoffee.com
Delah Coffee Oakland: 420 W. Grand Ave., Oakland; (510) 228-8229; delahcoffee.com
Heyma Yemeni Coffee & Tea: 1122 University Ave, Berkeley; (510) 570-2993; instagram.com/heymacoffee/
Mellana Cafe: 4539 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Oakland; 510-250-9488; mellanacafe.com
Mohka House: 2139 MacArthur Blvd, Oakland; (510) 479-3217; instagram.com/mohkahouse/
