Welcome to Mofawar City: How Dearborn Got Hijacked by Cloned Coffee Culture and Basement Sambusa Slavery

Once upon a strip mall in Dearborn, Michigan, coffee was simple. It was Tim Hortons. You knew what to expect: powdered creamer, burnt roast, and a maple dip if you were feeling fancy. That was the caffeine baseline. Then came Qahwah House in 2017, rolling in like a caffeinated cultural prophet from the south tip of the Arabian Peninsula. One sip of Mofawar—a deceptively simple concoction of black coffee, evaporated milk, and a diabetes-level pour of sugar—and suddenly Timmy’s became the drink of colonizers.

Qahwah House wasn’t just serving coffee. It was serving identity. And the city responded like it had been deprived of heritage for decades. Instagram influencers flocked. Headlines followed. Lines curled down the sidewalk. You couldn’t swing a miswak stick without hitting someone saying “wallah, this is authentic.”

But just as Dearborners were learning to pronounce “jubani,” something unexpected happened. Other Yemenis, perhaps waking from a long qat-induced nap, took a long, jealous look at Qahwah House’s line of Teslas and TikTokers and said: “Ya habibi… us too.”

And thus began the Yemeni coffee arms race.

What started with one café became two, then five, then an avalanche of copycat caffeine dens. Haraz, Qamaria, Qahwah, Shiban, and now Layali—each one claiming ancestral secrets, sacred beans, and a family recipe passed down from generations of high-altitude grandmothers.

But let’s be honest: they all serve the same stuff.

Mofawar. Adeni chai. Qishr. Sambusas shaped like anxiety. Honeycomb cakes soaked in syrup and shame. The only thing that’s different is the branding—and even that’s questionable. Slap some faux-vintage typography over a map of Yemen and suddenly we’re meant to believe this is a one-of-a-kind experience? Please. We’ve seen less replication in stem cell labs.

Dearborn didn’t just embrace Yemeni coffee. It franchised it—without the formality. What’s wild is how these cafés multiplied faster than mutabbaq recipes at Ramadan. Where did all this startup capital even come from? Is there a secret qat-to-latte laundering fund no one’s talking about?

And let’s talk about the unspoken miracle here: the Yemenis stopped chewing qat long enough to open businesses. For a community historically defined by four-hour chew sessions in dusty basements—accompanied by debates about which cousin is marrying beneath the family—this was a pivot of Olympic proportions. They traded leafy narcotics for Nutella-stuffed sambusas. That’s growth, technically.

But not all growth is progress.

Because while the men now sit in plush chairs sipping culturally correct lattes and talking politics, one thing remains conspicuously absent: Yemeni women.

Where are they? Not behind the counters. Not owning the businesses. Not profiting from the hype. No—if anything, they’re still in the basement, still unpaid, still told to roll sambusas and not their eyes. You can taste their labor in every crunchy bite, but you won’t see their names on any storefront. Tradition, they say. Modesty, they insist. Slavery with cardamom, we say.

Let’s call it what it is: cultural capitalism wrapped in gender oppression and deep-fried in nostalgia. You want to be authentic? Then let the women speak. Let them be visible. Let them own the thing their hands have been feeding for generations.

Until then, this isn’t innovation. It’s replication with a side of patriarchal denial.

You think it, I say it!

Habib