“It’s straight up fitna, bro.”

This outrageous statement sounds like a joke. How could a coffee shop be causing strife? But Yusuf Saleh, the manager of Qamaria Yemeni Coffee Co, is half-serious as he hovers over a hot plate of cardamom-infused mufawaar coffee in Grand Blanc, Michigan. He’s referring to the gossip surrounding Dearborn’s Qahwah House, a competitor Yemeni cafe chain spreading rapidly across the United States.

Saleh is uncomfortable with the way young Muslims congregate at Qahwah House. These coffee houses are notorious on the Muslim internet as places where Muslims scope out a potential mate in an alcohol-free environment, amid Arabic music, halogen lights and tessellated art.

It’s concerning to some Muslims, but all very tame by most Americans’ standards. Zareena Grewal, an assistant professor of religious studies at Yale, said: “Muslim norms [about] how women and men socialize with each other vary not only by culture, but by subculture and generation and have always been and will likely always be debated.” This debate goes back to the earliest days of Islam, when she said: “the gender norms of Medina were far more relaxed than those of Muslims in Mecca, and this led to debates between the two communities.” For instance, people agree that young Muslims should marry, but they don’t agree on what’s acceptable on the pathway to the big day.

And the cafes are caught in the middle of that conversation.

This particular Qamaria is located in a fairly sleepy Michigan suburb, but the scene there was surprisingly close to those in Yemeni cafes in larger cities, where they have quickly become a fixture of American Muslim life. There’s a distinctly nervous energy coming from a group of young men in prayer-friendly sweats and kufis. Of course there is; they’re sitting next to a table of visibly Muslim women, the targets of some stealthy glances.

Three chains – Haraz, Qahwah and Qamaria – originated in Michigan, a state that’s long been an Arab-American hub. They have opened more than 30 franchise locations since Qahwah House debuted in 2017, expanding to California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Texas. Everywhere I go where there are Muslims, a Yemeni coffee shop is not far.

With their rapid expansion, Yemeni cafes are shaping how Muslim social spaces look in modern America.

Since that day at Qamaria, I’ve been thinking about the social functions of Yemeni cafes throughout America. One interpretation is that these coffee houses are an extension of Muslim peoples’ historical roles in exporting tea and coffee for centuries. The first cafes – a third space outside home and mosque – are widely credited to the Ottomans. Yemeni partisans argue their homeland is the “true” birthplace of coffee, spread from the port of Mokha, even in the face of pretty persuasive scholarly evidence that at least the bean came from Ethiopia or elsewhere in the Horn of Africa.

However, the Yemeni coffee house – American style – is something new altogether. It echoes the Taiwanese bubble tea houses that proliferated first in California in the 1990s and then spread across the nation. Other Asian ethnic subgroups could go there and feel they were among their own. (Indeed, my college romance with my future wife frequently included teetotaling group hangouts at Bubble Island in Ann Arbor, Michigan.)

The Yemeni business model hinges upon a few key innovations. Open absurdly late for a cafe (Ramadan hours can stretch to 2am). No alcohol. Yemeni coffee beans. Spiced drinks named after Yemeni cities: Jubani, Harazi and Sanani coffees, Adeni chai. Drinks brewed in a single vessel with Indian Ocean trade spices such as cardamom, cinnamon and cloves. Communal kettles that facilitate conversation. And lots and lots of Muslims, both young and old.

“I think it’s very different from the American institution of the cafe in terms of its look and its feel,” said Grewal. In American cafes, “seriousness, studiousness, efficiency is the mode”. Whereas at Yemeni cafes, “it’s relaxed, no one’s pushing you out”.

Franchisees such as Taha Monasar of Qamaria Chicago Ridge said they previously owned or worked in liquor stores or smoke shops. Monasar described that work as dangerous and not aligned with his values. On the other hand, promoting Yemeni culture fills him with pride. That pride can be claimed by others as well. “It’s a movement,” Mohammed Abuzir, a Palestinian customer, who is Palestinian, said as we sat in Monasar’s store. He and his friends have ramped up their visits to Yemeni cafes since Israel’s invasion of Gaza. “We’d rather give our money to Qamaria and Qahwah and Haraz rather than big corporations like Starbucks and Dunkin’ [Donuts].”

The vibe is different in each coffee house, even if they’re all highly social. At night, Haraz in Orland Park, Illinois, is like a shisha lounge without the shisha. Qamaria is the most chain-y of them all. Think Starbucks meets Arab hipster. The Chicago Ridge location features a mix of low, pillow seating next to leather chairs and Yemeni decorations. The original Qahwah House in Dearborn, Michigan, still feels like the pioneer, a product of the longstanding Arab community there. The baristas boil coffee husks, beans and tea mixes in jazwas during the day, giant containers of blond and chocolatey-looking coffee beans on display above.

Many regulars said going to their local Yemeni cafe quickly became a weekly routine, simply because they knew they would run into someone or meet someone new. On a typical weekend night at Qahwah House, the line snakes out the door. Tables are stalked and claimed, and groups who can’t find tables will sit on the curb outside and converse for hours at a time.

American mosques are primarily places to pray, but they may also offer meals, classes or a basketball court. Outside of the mosque, many Muslim communities have limited spaces to socialize in public. Grewal argues that third spaces like the cafe fill the social gap. And in a faith where many believe marriage is half your religion, hopeful single Muslims frequently struggle to meet prospects.

So there is a new tone of social contact being developed at the Yemeni cafes. The writer Najma Sharif described how in her Somali Minnesotan community, the masjid and the cafe have always been connected. Muslims, she said, “appreciate … grounded ritual practices like making dhikr and prayer. Coffee becomes part of that.”

And importantly, Muslims are a historically surveilled community, so meeting in person allows sensitive conversations to take place away from the eyes of informants or police.

The tradeoff is community surveillance. “It’s a secular and connected social space,” added Sharif. But “that still comes with its religious judgment and shadiness,” she said.

“Young people in Lombard [Illinois] love to go to Qahwah House just to experience the drama,” K, a local resident who prefers to be anonymous, told me one day after breaking fast for Ramadan at a local Islamic center. “On Friday night, they’re like, ‘Where can we see some nonsense happening?’”

I know what she’s referring to: memes roasting lovesick Muslims at Qahwah House mutated into TikToks of two fistfights. The rumor was that some of the fights started “over a girl”, though I was unable to confirm that either way.

K and her friend, Zahra Ahmed, frequently receive mass AirDrop requests to share images at Qahwah House. It’s nothing lewd: memes, requests to go on dates, commentary on patrons at the cafe. The AirDroppers don’t know who they’re flirting with, but are taking their chances that the random, unwanted sharing might lead to new connections. It’s not working; the two women say it’s just annoying.

Many people I spoke to said that the infamy of Yemeni cafes makes them a risky place to date in a close-knit community that mostly hides premarital relations. Some even laughed when I asked them if it was a spot to take a date. In Muslim communities, it’s common to not know people are “talking” until they share their engagement.

“Consider it a soft launch; if you’re [with a date] at Qahwah House, it’s serious,” the lawyer Haseeb Hussain said over Zoom.

Humza Khan said he had been in a relationship for more than a year now, but had an embarrassing early date at Qahwah House. “I heard it kind of morphed into a dating spot, [but] I got there and it was just aunties and uncles.” The implied judgment – of elders observing him alone with his partner – prevented him from using it for future dates; he now prefers the cafes for group hangs. When he goes out with his partner to restaurants, he said, “It’s always in the back of my mind. I was watching the door like Tony Soprano at the end of the show. Anyone you know can walk in at any moment.”

He tells me the older generations know that dating happens and young Muslims have to meet. But they’d prefer to “sweep it under the rug”. Yemeni cafes show the truth: young Muslims want to flirt, hang out and flex in their best fits.

For those who are willing to go public, the cafes do provide opportunities for romantic connections, either building new ones or deepening existing ones. “It feels like a growing institution that’s filling a need,” Darien Alexander Williams, a Boston University assistant professor, said. Williams met his current partner of a year at the restaurant Bab Al-Yemen. They made eye contact across the table of their mutual acquaintances and stayed so late that they were eventually the only two left. “He just offered to walk me home … across the Charles [River].” Williams said. “That was the spark. And we do definitely acknowledge [Bab Al-Yemen] as the place that brought us together.”

I asked the Qahwah House founder, Ibrahim Alhasbani, what he thought about his coffee house’s reputation as a dating hotspot. He said, as a policy, he avoids discussing religion and politics. But he also argued Qahwah House was “not for dating” and was “a family place”. His discomfort reflects the way in which young-romance stories have overshadowed the other forms of socializing happening there. “How you want to think about it is your story,” he added.

I didn’t stumble across any obvious courting on my many trips to cafes around the country. But here’s what I did observe. Four middle-aged women who flew in from Florida to see what the fuss was about at 11pm on a weekend. A married couple on a day date while their children were at school; he came for the coffee and she for the chai. Two undergraduate students meeting after class to pore over notes; I didn’t ask them if they were together, but there was definitely a feeling in the air. A very friendly Palestinian family who invited me to gather over honeycomb pastry; they were saying goodbye to relatives who were moving to Jordan. And two media professionals meeting up to talk shop at midday; I walked over and said hi before returning to my own chai with a fellow journalist.

I’ve heard from Muslims across the spectrum that the late-night social scene at Yemeni cafes is “wild”, “out of control”, even “crazy”. It may simply be because nothing like this existed on a national level before. But it might also be that at the Yemeni coffee house, your business becomes everyone else’s gossip.

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