See All<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\nWe spoke to five of the families who gave the city an appetite for Arab food. A few you may know, like the Sahadis, who still draw third-generation regulars to their grocery store with jars of green-gold olive oil and freshly prepared kibbeh 130-odd years later. Or the Almontasers, whose extended family once owned some half-dozen restaurants near Atlantic Avenue; Yemen Caf\u00e9 is the lone survivor. Here, their descendants rifled through old boxes to unearth family photos and take us back to the early days.<\/p>\n
The Sahadis opened their first shop on Washington Street in Lower Manhattan in 1895 before moving to the current location on Atlantic Avenue in 1948.<\/p>\n
A lot of business was done over coffee in the back room. People would come in and have coffee with my grandfather and then decide what they wanted. It was more like a souk than a typical supermarket. Nobody left in the morning without coffee, and in the midday without tea, and in the evening without arak. That was just the way. If you knew my grandfather, you came in the back.\u00a0\u2014 Christine Sahadi Whelan<\/p>\n
The original Sahadi\u2019s on Washington Street in Manhattan, 1899.<\/p>\n
The Bordays started some of the city\u2019s first falafel shops in the late 1960s. They would open carts, a truck, and more Pierre\u2019s Falafel storefronts, one of which they left to the Chaters, who went on to open Mamoun\u2019s.<\/p>\n
When we opened my father\u2019s falafel shop, the concept of vegetarianism had just started to catch on. There was one Jewish kosher place that was more of a pizza shop, and it wasn\u2019t anything special, but we would go there because it was the only place we could find falafel. Most Americans didn\u2019t even know what a chickpea was. But my parents spent whatever money they could scrounge up and converted one of the very first Hondas that came to America into our first truck \u2014 it was the tiniest of cars, and they ripped out the interior so my father could make falafel in the back. There was this voluptuous belly dancer painted on the side of the truck with a phrase like \u201cHealthy, Tasty, and So Sexy.\u201d Business wasn\u2019t great until he found a spot in front of Hunter College and then it became kind of an institution for students. \u2014 Noel Borday<\/p>\n
Pierre\u2019s Falafel cart on Wall Street, 1980.<\/p>\n
The Chaters opened Mamoun\u2019s Falafel on Macdougal Street in 1971.<\/p>\n
My dad, Mamoun, has always been really good with numbers. In order to go into the food business, he made a list of all of his expenses, and he realized his biggest expense outside of rent was food, so he thought, Well, if I open up a restaurant, that\u2019s taken care of for me. We all grew up at Mamoun\u2019s. I started working there when I was 10. The store is at 119 Macdougal Street, and we lived at 95 Macdougal, and my mom would make a tray of baklava upstairs, and we\u2019d have to bring it down. They couldn\u2019t afford to hire workers at first, so when they opened, my dad would work one shift, my mom would work the other shift, and my dad would go work somewhere else to make more money. Then he would leave to sleep for six hours and do it all over again. I remember the day when a line started forming and my mom freaked out. We ran down the street to find my dad, who was working at some Armenian deli, and he ran back, and from that point on, he said, \u201cAll right, I think we\u2019ve got something here.\u201d And the odd jobs started trickling away. \u2014 Galal Chater<\/p>\n
Azzat Chater, Galal Chater\u2019s uncle, behind the counter at Mamoun\u2019s, 1970s.<\/p>\n
The Almontasers opened Almontaser Restaurant in 1973 and ran multiple restaurants along Atlantic Avenue.<\/p>\n
My uncle Nasser opened Almontaser Restaurant. Atlantic House, run by my father\u2019s cousin Mohamed, came around the same time. I believe Nasser had been involved with Atlantic House first, then left to open his own restaurant. Near East was more of our cousins, and cousins of cousins, a few partners between them. Adnan was run by another one of my father\u2019s brothers. And the Moroccan Star, owned by Ahmed Almontaser and two of my father\u2019s cousins, was where I had my wedding in 1980. Many of them started as busboys and dishwashers, learned the business, learned English, became cooks, saved their money, and then opened their own places. Each restaurant had something different people gravitated to; Nasser was famous for his spinach sauce and chicken. For years, when people recognized my last name, they\u2019d say, \u201cWe\u2019ve never had spinach sauce like his ever again.\u201d \u2014 Dr. Debbie Almontaser<\/p>\n
Almontaser Restaurant on Court Street, 1970s.<\/p>\n
The Alsubais, relatives of the Almontasers, opened Yemen Caf\u00e9 in 1986.<\/p>\n
The first person in our family to come here from Yemen was my uncle Muhamed, who arrived in 1962. We knew a little bit about America because people from our village had been on Atlantic Avenue since 1890. By the time my dad, Yahya, arrived in 1978, my uncle already owned Adnan, a restaurant down the block that served Mediterranean food. There was Almontaser Restaurant and Near East \u2014 there were a lot of restaurants around Atlantic Avenue back then owned by Yemenis but selling mostly Mediterranean food. My dad was about 18 when he opened Yemen Caf\u00e9 with his partner, Muthanna, who was a chef in the World Trade Center before deciding to open a restaurant. The neighborhood had a great Yemeni population, and everyone knew each other. Everything started to change around 2008, when the economy crashed. There was a lot of development, and new people started moving into the neighborhood. Now there are only five of us left standing: Yemen Caf\u00e9, Sahadi\u2019s, Damascus, Malko, Oriental. \u2014 Mahmood Yahya Alsubai<\/p>\n
Akram Nassir, Yahya Alsubai, and their family, 2008.<\/p>\n
\n Photographs by The New York Times, Courtesy of the subjects\n <\/p>\n
More From This Issue<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sahadi\u2019s, 1984. Photo: William Sauro\/The New York Times\/Redux The city\u2019s Middle Eastern food scene started with a handful…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":317808,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[128,119885,119815,119827,9,24,2409,63,61341,119816,119822,129,131,130,119886],"class_list":["post-317807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-the-bronx","tag-bronx","tag-falafel","tag-habibi-city","tag-middle-eastern-food","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-magazine","tag-nyc","tag-sahadis","tag-swana","tag-swana-new-york","tag-the-bronx","tag-the-bronx-headlines","tag-the-bronx-news","tag-yemen-cafe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=317807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/317808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=317807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=317807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=317807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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