Delah Coffee (Sansome Street)

Delah Coffee's second San Francisco location occupies a corner unit at 450 Sansome Street, where the Financial District runs into Chinatown, and serves the same menu as the Fourth Street original that Omar and Majed Jahamee opened in South of Market in July 2022. Delah was, by KQED's account, the first Yemeni coffee shop in the Bay Area; the category has since expanded to more than twenty cafes across the region, and Delah itself now has locations in Oakland, Berkeley, Dublin, San Diego and Naperville, Illinois. The brand takes its name from the Arabic word for the long-spouted pot used to serve Yemeni coffee, and the cafes are built to be sat in rather than passed through.

No alcohol is served anywhere on the premises. The Sansome Street shop opens at 6am on weekdays for the office trade and closes at 8pm, running later at weekends to 9pm — enough to make it an after-work or early-evening option in a part of the city where the alternatives are almost entirely bars. The core list is traditional rather than confected. Sana'ani is the house-style black coffee cooked with cardamom. Jubani is a light roast simmered with cardamom, ginger and cinnamon. Arabian Qawah is a light roast boiled with cardamom and served in small cups. Adeni chai, the most ordered drink in most Yemeni cafes, is black tea cooked down with cream and Delah's own spice mixture. Drip coffee brewed from the house beans and an iced Yemeni latte cover the more familiar orders. Everything sits between roughly four and seven dollars. The pastry case carries Turkish delight, honey-soaked sweets and savoury turnovers baked fresh each day, which in practice means the cafe works as a light dinner as much as a coffee stop. Because the group prints one menu across all its locations, the Sansome Street shop pours exactly what the Fourth Street original does; the difference between the two is trading hours and the character of the surrounding blocks, which here means an after-work crowd from the surrounding towers rather than the student and late-night trade that fills SoMa.