Nubian Markets

Nubian Markets opened in May 2023 at 2565 Washington Street, in a Nubian Square that had spent years without a full-service grocery. Chef Ismail Samad and Yusuf Yassin built it as three businesses under one roof: a halal butchery sourcing from regional halal farms, a grocery stocked for the North, West, East and Central African cooking of the surrounding neighborhoods, and Nuba Cafe, a counter-service restaurant and coffee bar. The project has been covered as a food-access story as much as a restaurant one, by Edible Boston in September 2023 and the Bay State Banner the same month, and Samad has been consistent in framing it as neighborhood infrastructure rather than a destination.

For a reader who is not drinking, the useful fact is structural: the entire business is halal, so there is no alcohol on the shelves or behind the counter, and the cafe keeps evening hours to 8pm six days a week. The coffee bar runs a full espresso program with a chai latte that has become the thing regulars order by name, plus a vanilla orange blossom latte that leans on the same aromatic pantry the kitchen uses. Food from the cafe covers the diaspora deliberately, from the Butcher's Burger with halal ground beef, cheddar, berbere citrus mayo, tomato jam, shaved onion and lettuce in a house-made golden pita, to lamb couscous, ginger beef with injera, jerk chicken, chickpea peanut stew and chicken bunny chow served in a hollowed bread bowl. It works as an early-evening meeting place rather than a late-night one, and it is one of very few options in Roxbury where the no-alcohol answer is the building's default rather than a special request. The market has also been covered as a public-health story rather than a restaurant one, by Boston Medical Center's Health City and by the Conservation Law Foundation, both writing about what a full-line grocery does for a neighborhood that had gone without one.