Yemeni coffee shops are decidedly on trend, and in that sense, Rumi Coffee, the third local business venture from Yemeni-born Hamed Alghazali, fits right in. Yet for Alghazali, who also owns and operates Fabiano Coffee Roasters and Rumi Baklava, there’s a vision for Rumi Coffee that goes beyond just being on trend, or being at the right place at the right time.
“I mean, [Yemenis] have had coffee shops,” Alghazali says. “Yemen is the birthplace of coffee, it’s where it was first cultivated. There’s also been a wave of specialty third wave coffee shops. But we haven’t had coffee shops that open until 9 pm, 10 pm, midnight.”
Alghzali has a plan for Rumi, located on Fresno Street and Alluvial near the Kaiser Permanente complex, to stay open late — 9 pm on weekdays, 11 pm on Fridays and Saturdays – and it isn’t Alghazali’s intuition as a businessman that’s driving the effort. It’s a sense of trying to build community.
Asked if coffee and sweets are more important to the Middle Eastern lifestyle because of the lack of a drinking culture, Alghazali agrees.
“But it’s not just that Muslims don’t drink,” Alghazali says. “A lot of young folks are also not drinking as much. It’s not just me saying this, there’s a lot of studies that show this. So part of the mission is providing that non-alcohol late night, for everyone. We built this space to be a sit-and-linger kind of a space.”
Indeed, while Alghazali acquired Fabiano Coffee Roasters in 2023, and opened his bakery, Rumi Baklava, in May, it was the coffee shop that was always his passion project.
“We signed the lease here in November of last year,” Alghazali says “My vision was clear from the start. I wanted to build something myself, design it, craft it. I didn’t want anyone else’s idea of what it should be. We took great care in choosing furniture, in crafting the menu — designing everything in this space. Everything in here really is created for a certain type of experience.”
Rumi Coffee offers traditional espresso drinks and Yemeni mofawar (coffee steeped in water, then mixed with milk and spices, sort of like a mix between Chai and Arabic coffee) alongside a vast selection of pastries and baked goods. It’s similar, in many ways, to YAVA Bakery, which Jordan-born restaurateur Abdallah Qawadri opened just up the Palm corridor in 2022. Yet Alghazali’s sense of mission, to provide a place for quiet reflection and fellowship for the community, wouldn’t be out of place with Kuppa Joy, The Well Coffeehouse, Sanctuary, or any number of Christian-themed and/or Christian-church-run coffee shops in Fresno and Clovis. The connection between coffee and community is arguably more overt here than in most places.
Typically, Alghazali is more apt to emphasize the connections between those communities than their differences. It’s something reflected in his pan-Middle Eastern, pan-European menu. Alghazali comes from Yemen, having also spent much of his life working in international affairs, both in the UAE and for 10 years at the UAE’s UN mission in New York. His pastry chef is Syrian, who spent time in Michigan before training in Damascus. His baker is Armenian.
“The kunafa is from Syria. There’s some stuff from Palestine, some from Yemen. There’s an Armenian borek puff pastry,” Alghazali says “We have mortadella, which is like Italian, cold cut beef. The sumac chicken, with sort of a Palestinian-style spice. So it’s a criss cross of different countries and cultures in the Middle East. This region isn’t nearly as separated as people want to think.”
Right now, one of Rumi’s main business challenges would seem to be keeping the line moving for caffeine-deprived customers when people inevitably get to the front of the line, see the extensive selection of pastries, and invariably pause to ask, “What’s that? …And what’s that? …And what’s that?”
Rumi’s daily selection of sweet and savory small bites, made with endless combinations of fillo, nuts, honey, fruit, puff pastry, cheese, etc., is equal parts inviting and bewildering.
“The three main flavors of Yemen are date, cardamom, and rosewater,” Alghazali notes.
Their perennial items include four types of fancy toast (I had the fig labneh, which was a delicious combination of creamy and mildly sweet) and two sandwiches – mortadella (made with beef rather than the traditional pork) or sumac chicken on focaccia. The sumac chicken in particular is different from anything I’ve had in Fresno or elsewhere (and I’ve put in some work when it comes to Middle Eastern sandwiches and wraps).
Between crunchy sliced focaccia, the filling is like a gourmet take on chicken salad, mixing nearly equal parts shredded white chicken and sweet caramelized onion, spiced with so much sumac that it’s visibly purple. Then it gets a layer of creamy garlic sauce, a generous slice of gorgeously ripe tomato, and some greens. It tastes somehow decadent and light at the same time, and would probably make the shortlist of best sandwiches in town.
However well Rumi’s vast selection and long hours end up working on the business side, they’re pretty attractive from the consumer side. It’s conceivable that there’s a limit to how many great coffee shops and bakeries one city can support, but it seems that Fresno and Clovis are still a ways from reaching it. And so Rumi is already a crucial addition.
Which means that, despite a journey that has taken him all over the world, from Yemen to the UAE to the UN mission in New York, Alghazali has, of late, built himself a nice little niche as a Fresno business owner.
“Fresno has this way of just making you stay despite you not planning on it,” Alghazali says. “It’s a sticky place.”
