Where Avocado Toast Shares a Menu With Yemeni Favorites

They’re ignored by much of the world, the withered, papery husks sloughed off the fruit of the coffee tree and discarded in favor of the precious beans. But in Yemen, the husks are treasured, steeped in boiling water with cardamom and ginger to make qishr, a brew that, half a millennium ago, Sufi dervishes drank to help them stay up all night, chanting the name of God.

Qishr appears under the more general name of qahwa (“coffee” in Arabic) on the menu at Yafa Café, a serene coffee shop in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The old-world drink is coffee’s ghost, dark without body and free of bitterness, tasting of tamarind and crushed berries.

It’s a meditative chaser to a breakfast of khubz, flatbread with flaking layers from folding the dough over and over; foul, fava beans mashed roughly, for texture, rather than obliterated into velvet; scrambled eggs bright with a confetti of bell peppers; and wedges of Abu Al Walad (literally, “for the child”), a cheese as soft as butter, found in almost every Yemeni home.

Ali Suliman and Hakim Sulaimani, both 26, opened the cafe in August, a few doors down from the corner bodega that their families have run for more than 20 years. Their fathers are brothers, their mothers, sisters.

In 1995, when they were young children, their families left their small village in the Yafa tribal region of south Yemen, fleeing the turmoil after a civil war. Once settled in New York, their fathers found work at a bodega, and a year later bought it from the owners.