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.
Although the cafe shares the same block as the bodega, it belongs to a newer Brooklyn. Diners loll with laptops and nurse lattes with froth flowers. You can order an açaí bowl, an egg sandwich with Sriracha mayo, and the inevitable avocado toast, here dusted with za’atar.
But the draw is the Yemeni-inflected food. Some dishes are traditional, like shurba, a half-soup, half-stew of bulgur wheat and collapsed tomatoes, typically eaten at iftar, the evening meal that breaks the daily fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Others are an inspired in-between, an analogue to how Mr. Suliman and Mr. Sulaimani have had to navigate two worlds as Americans of Arab descent. (Mr. Sulaimani wrote out the recipes for the chef, Huberto Cordoba, a restaurant veteran who grew up in Puebla, Mexico.)
In a homage to their fathers’ bodega, the New York corner-store staple of bacon, egg and cheese is smartly reconfigured — with turkey bacon, observing the Muslim injunction against pork — inside delicate samboosas (stuffed pastries), with all three ingredients present in each bite.
Chicken rests overnight in buttermilk and hawaij — a warm spice blend made here with cardamom, nutmeg and curry powder and bearing the faint sweetness of star anise — and is then rolled in panko and submitted to the fryer. It makes for a craggy sandwich on golden brioche, dramatic in heft, with a smoky sauce of plum preserves and chipotle. The finishing touch: deli-style pickles.
Lamb is roasted for four hours into near shambles, but loses none of its musk. It comes heaped alongside turmeric-stained basmati rice or between charred sourdough, with a side of sahawiq (also known as zhug), a delirium of chiles, barely assuaged by tomatillos, cilantro and a gasp of lemon.
If you’re lucky, among the standard array of Western pastries you’ll find khaliat nahal, honeycomb buns that dimple at the touch, glossed with cardamom-scented honey. Little whorls of cream cheese await at their centers.
None of this quite amounts to dinner, and for now, the cafe is open only for breakfast and lunch. It’s enough, to linger here through the day, sipping “habib tea” — the name is a pun on the Arabic for darling — suffused with mint grown by Mr. Suliman and Mr. Sulaimani’s grandmother in Yemen.
Or a pour of coffee from the Yemeni highlands, where coffee plants, brought across the Red Sea from Ethiopia, were first cultivated in the 15th century, an art lost and revived only in recent years, even as the country has once again fallen into civil war.
Or a cup of qishr, so gentle you hardly feel the twinge, nerves rustling like the strings of a harp.