Arth Aljanatain, Arabic for “Two Paradises,” named after an ancient city in North Yemen, opened in late 2008. (Credit: Hope Zhu)
Walk into any restaurant, bodega or grocery along Bronx’s Morris Park Avenue and ask where to find the best Yemeni food, and the answer will come quickly: a corner storefront at Rhinelander and White Plains Avenue.
Arth Aljanatain—Arabic for “Two Paradises,” named after an ancient city in North Yemen—opened in late 2008 as the neighborhood’s first Yemeni restaurant. It occupies the ground floor of a 1970s three-story building shared with a mosque, anchoring the stretch between Van Nest and Morris Park. After prayer feeds the soul, this is where people come to feed their bodies.
“It’s the closest restaurant that makes it feels like you are eating in your home,” said Issaic Haya, who owns a Levantine shawarma shop in Brooklyn, but still travels to the Bronx when he misses the food he grew up with.
The restaurant opened amid rising demand. Between 2000 and 2011, the Bronx’s Arab-born population surged 200%, census data show.
Then in 2014, a civil war that the United Nations called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis displaced millions in Yemen. Families already in America brought relatives to safety, joining roughly 18,000 Yemenis in New York, according to 2020 census data, many pushed out of other boroughs by rising rents and settling in the Bronx. Halal markets, specialty stores, and gift shops soon appeared along Morris Park Avenue. Today, the neighborhood is densely populated with Yemeni-owned businesses and counts more than 500 businesses owned by people of Middle Eastern descent within one mile of Little Yemen, according to Data Axle Reference Solutions.
Arth Aljanatain’s manager, Hashim Alnaqeb, arrived in the Bronx in the early 2000s. Like many immigrants, he dove into the food business, opening a deli on Allerton Avenue. After years serving sandwiches and coffee, a new opportunity appeared: a pizzeria for rent beside the mosque on Rhinelander Avenue, the heart of the local Muslim community.
“We said, ‘you know what, let’s go even bigger,’” Alnaqeb recalled.
He and his business partners Aziz Albaydani pooled more than $50,000 to renovate the shop. They set out eight tables and chairs, and adorned the walls with murals of Yemen: the Saleh Mosque, Cairo Castle, and the rolling green hills of Ibb, the country’s traveling capital.
The flow of the day at Arth Aljanatin follows the rhythm of Muslim’s five prayers.
After the first prayer around 5:00 a.m. each day, Massad Al Jahm, who has worked at the restaurant since 2009, is the first to arrive. He slips through a side door, wipes down tables, heats up the steam table, and sets chicken to roast.
The room fills after noon and evening prayer. Delivery bags pile up. No music plays, just a chorus of Arabic, English, and occasional Spanish drifting through the dining hall.
On Sundays, children burst in after Quran classes. One recent Sunday, outside the restaurant, children wove past pedestrians under a Yemeni flag on a utility pole, while parents waited for takeout. They waved “salam” to cashier Majeb Ali, who juggled non-stop calls. Kitchen workers made and sent out lentil soup and lamb slow-cooked until it slipped from the bone.
Lamb over rice and lentil soup is a favorite dish at the restaurant. (Credit: Hope Zhu)
Al Jahm, the cook, insists that while every Yemeni restaurant serves a similar menu, their flavor is distinct. “Different,” he repeated in the few words of English he knew. “Each [of them], different.” The secret, he explained, lies in the proportion of spices.
He pointed to saltah, Yemen’s national dish, a bubbling stew of ground meat and chili-tomato sauce. Served in a stone bowl, it arrives at the table hissing.
Al Jahm once worked as an auto glass assembler in his home of Sanaa. He remembered stonemason chiseling rock from the mountains to cut the bowl into the width of an iPhone, sturdy enough to rest in fire and keep the dish hot for half an hour.
“It’s still hot,” Al Jahm said of the bowls. “Fizzing when you eat.”
Most dishes range from $15 to $26, remarkably affordable in an expensive city. “We try to keep it like that because the area itself is not high class,” Alnaqeb said. “People don’t have much to spend, so we try to work with the customer.”
Nearly 17 years in, the restaurant thrives on loyal patrons and its role as a place that always feels like home. Al Jahm recalled an old colleague who came from Brooklyn daily to eat at the restaurant, while his own boy sometimes popped in between shifts for pocket money. Alnaqeb remembered regulars from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sudan, Morocco, Latino communities gathering around the tables.
“It’s fun to cook, and I love it when people come and enjoy the food,”Alnaqeb said. “It’s not only work I earn money from.”
About the author(s)
Hope Zhu is an M.S. student at Columbia Journalism School and has previously covered topics including immigration, retail, and travel.