Yemeni Food Is Finally Coming to the Seattle Area

Tawfik Maudah says that for years, people have been asking him, “When are we gonna open a Yemeni restaurant? When are we gonna open a Yemeni restaurant?”

Well, the answer is next month.

That’s when Maudah, an entrepreneur from Yemen, is planning to open his latest venture, a full-service restaurant called Marhaba (Arabic for “welcome”) in a former Pizza Hut on Sunset Boulevard in Renton. It will be the second Yemeni restaurant in the Seattle metro area to open this year following a Kent business called Taste of Yemen, which claims to be the first Yemeni restaurant in Washington State.

Maudah says this lack of places to get Yemeni food was a glaring need in Western Washington. It’s a cuisine found all over the U.S., including in metro areas like Dallas, Chicago, and Detroit, where Maudah worked in restaurants for a couple of years. It’s popular not just among people from Maudah’s home country, he says, but among people from all over East Africa and South and Southeast Asia.

“There is a big community that grew up eating Yemeni food,” he says. “Ethiopians, Kenyans, Somalis… like Pakistanis, Indians, they love Yemeni food. Malaysians, Indonesians — there is a big presence of Yemeni food in those countries. So all these communities are here in Seattle, and they are longing for Yemeni food.”

Yemeni cuisine, Maudah says, is centered around meat, which can be cooked in underground ovens or on rocks and is often served with sahawiq, which has cilantro and garlic and which he likens to salsa but with more greens and tomatoes. Marhaba’s menu will include items like zurbian, a variety of biryani, and a lamb stew called fahsa. Marhaba will bake its own flatbread — Maudah hopes to be able to get a brick oven for that purpose eventually, but the space won’t accommodate it right now. Marhaba will even serve breakfast along with lunch and dinner. Shakshuka will be on the breakfast menu along with bean dishes known as fouul and fasoulia.

All of the meat served at Marhaba will be halal and organic, sourced from a farm in Oregon, Maudah adds. Some portion of the proceeds will be donated to people in Yemen, which has been embroiled in civil war for over a decade.

Maudah is anticipating that the restaurant in a nondescript part of the Eastside will become a destination for East Africans and others who have been longing for Yemeni food; many of them live in Bellevue or Kent or Redmond, he says. He wants to hire landscapers to turn a little patch of vegetation on the property into a garden, “so this will become a site that people will come to take pictures at and visit and enjoy.”

“It will be a very unique experience,” he adds. “Like, ‘Oh, we’re going to that restaurant with the beautiful garden outside,’ or, ‘Oh, I like the flowers of this restaurant.’ Something that sticks in their minds.”

Marhaba will open at 2705 Sunset Boulevard in Renton sometime in April. Follow it on Instagram for updates.