Qahwah House

Ibrahim Alhasbani grew up around coffee — his family has farmed it in the mountains outside Sana'a, Yemen, for eight generations. He immigrated to the U.S. in 2011, first to New York, then relocated to Michigan after marrying a woman from the Dearborn area. Missing the coffee he grew up on, he opened a small shop on Schaefer Road in East Dearborn with a soft opening in late 2017 and a formal grand opening in January 2018. "I did something different and unique in that I use only Yemeni coffee beans," he later said of the decision to build the entire menu around his home country's coffee tradition rather than standard espresso-bar drinks.

The East Dearborn location's menu is still built entirely around that idea. Instead of a standard coffee/espresso split, the board runs through named Yemeni preparations: Sana'ani (medium roast with cardamom), Jubani (coffee and coffee husks with cardamom, ginger, and cinnamon), Mofawar (medium roast with cardamom and cream), Rada'ey (light roast with ginger and cardamom), and Qishr, made from cascara — the dried coffee-cherry husk, not the bean — steeped with ginger and cinnamon. Tea drinkers get Adeni Chai (Yemeni black tea, cardamom, nutmeg, and milk) and a spiced Yemeni Tea (black tea, cardamom, cinnamon, and cloves), alongside a house Yemeni Latte, Turkish-style dark roast, and standard espresso drinks. The beans themselves are imported directly from Alhasbani's family farms and roasted in-house — no alcohol is served or has ever been on the menu.

What started as one shop on Schaefer Road has since grown into a chain of more than 30 locations across the U.S., but Dearborn remains home base, and the East Dearborn store is the original. The location sits in the heart of the country's largest Arab American community, on the same Schaefer Road corridor as the neighborhood's Yemeni and Lebanese restaurants and bakeries — a fitting home for a coffeehouse built specifically to bring Yemeni qahwa culture to an American audience.