A new, locally owned Yemeni cafe is brewing in Falls Church, with plans to open in a couple months.
Rashfa Cafe hopes to open this June at 310 S. Washington Street, owner and founder Abdulrahman Al Harethi told ARLnow. He wants to share his heritage with the community through Yemeni-sourced coffee and menu items like rawani cake, sabayah pastries and honeycomb bread.
“We’re going to represent our country, providing a different coffee concept, bringing people together,” Al Harethi said. “Give them a good atmosphere to sit down and have a great coffee. It’s not only coffee, though. It’s drinks, pastries, desserts [and] connecting with people.”
Coffee at Rashfa will be prepared the way it typically is in Al Harethi’s home country — light or medium roast, and brewed with spices like cardamom, cloves, nutmeg and ginger.
The founder plans to source beans from Ibb, his hometown and the place where his grandparents once worked as coffee farmers.
“It’s a mountainous city,” Al Harethi said. “We produce a lot of plants — not only coffee, but coffee is really popular in Yemen. They say that coffee was first discovered in Ethiopia; we are okay with that, but it was first brewed in Yemen.”
An Alexandria resident, Al Harethi moved to Virginia from Yemen about seven years ago while pursuing higher education. Rashfa Cafe is his first eatery, and he hopes to eventually make it a franchise.
However, he’s also trying to cultivate something personal.
“I have been working in a couple of different businesses, but I think food is something that you can connect and interact with other communities more than any other business,” Al Harethi said. “Everybody is your customer. If you provide something beautiful, people will get in line into your place. And hopefully, we succeed.”
Plans for Rashfa Cafe have been in the works for about a year and a half. The cafe is replacing a vacancy left by a former smoke shop and will be able to seat about 30 guests across roughly 1,500 square feet.
As of this week, Al Harethi said the new business has fulfilled local requirements to open and is currently wrapping up some interior renovations.
Elsewhere in Northern Virginia, Yemeni franchise Sheeba Restaurant is placing roots in the town of Vienna. Franchisee Nadir Naimi hopes to open the eatery there this summer.
