Photo by Jensine Sajan
Akram Nassir (Manager of the Atlantic Avenue Yemen Café)
Being Raised in the United States
Born in Long Island College Hospital and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Akram has lived in the neighborhood that Yemen Café is located in for most of his life. He went to school in New York and grew up as a second-generation immigrant. Akram felt there wasn’t as much discrimination due to culture until the fateful tragedy of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
“After 9/11, that’s when people started saying, ‘Oh they’re Muslims, they’re Arab…’ but back then nobody minded anybody. Before 9/11, it gave a bigger eye to the big picture.”
Issues with Immigration
As a second-generation immigrant, Akram has his family supporting him.
“If I was first generation, I would have worked at some store or something.”
Many Yemeni immigrants come here to go to college, and some already arrive with an education, but a lot of them have to put that aside to support their families, often both here and back in Yemen. Some of the workers at Yemen Café are in this position. One waiter is a CPA, and he had to give up that career to support his family back home. Another worker was a mathematician back in Yemen. Akram often used to make sure the worker maintained his mathematical proficiency:
“He would be washing the dishes and I would bring him my math work and he would do it for me while he was washing.”
Photo by Jensine Sajan
Growing up With The Yemen Cafe
Where do you see this restaurant in the future?
“At 176 Atlantic Avenue, in the same place.”
Photo by Jensine Sajan
Akram has been in the food industry all his life; the restaurant is a family business and continues to be a family business. His mother helped start the restaurant; she was the one who used to make the breads. He has seen the changes in the restaurant since the beginning, when it was located downstairs and first opened in June 1986 (from the restaurant’s current location). Back then, the restaurant only seated twenty people; at first it was just Yemeni customers–the community during that time was mostly Arabs. Now he sees customers from all different backgrounds enter the restaurant–Americans, Indians, Turks, Asians, etc. While the customers and the location of the restaurant have shifted, the food remains very authentic, and this is a reason why everybody comes to dine at Yemen Café.
“Dishes don’t change, the portions change. They get bigger. But the food has always been the same from day one. If you were there ten years ago and then you come now, it would still be the same.”
Akram and his family have also opened another restaurant in Bay Ridge. The Bay Ridge branch is also run by his family–specifically, his brother, Sideeq. He plans to keep it as a family-run business forever. The restaurant has done so well that there have been customers coming from Washington, D.C. to who came to eat here. They would take the Boston Greyhound Bus from D.C. and stop in New York to dine at the restaurant. People also come from California. In fact, in part because they often get customers who live in different states, the restaurant is now open until 2 a.m. (since April 1, 2014).
Photo by Jensine Sajan
The restaurant has acted like a lighthouse to incoming Yemeni immigrants. Akram’s dad would help them settle when they arrived from Yemen. He would give them a place to stay and a job at the restaurant until they could manage on their own.
“ People would get off the plane from Yemen and they would be given the address to the Yemen Café. Once people got off the plane, they would come straight to the Yemen Café and they sat there with their suitcases. Then restaurant owners would talk to them. My dad would talk to them in Arabic and give them food, a place to stay, and help them get jobs.”
Although Akram spends most of his time in the restaurant, he graduated from St. John’s University, and then afterwards pursued a license for piloting planes at a flight school. He loves traveling and flies a plane at least once a week. He is planning on working for the New York Police Department in the summer and hopefully will fly planes for them.
“If I want to go to Florida, I can go there. If I want to have lobster, I fly to Maine.”
Yemen vs. America: The Memories
“You can’t even compare Yemen to America, they are too different.”
The Struggle of Growing Up as a Second-Generation Immigrant
Akram didn’t feel the struggle here in New York as much he did as back home in Yemen.
“When you go back home they say, ‘You’ve broken Arabic, you talk funny, you have an accent.”
When he went back home, Akram taught himself Yemeni slang. In the Arabic community in Brooklyn, broken Arabic is common, but it gave Akram a base from which he could perfect his language skills. Akram travels often, approximately twice a year, and most of the time he goes to Yemen.
Yemen is a third-world country, he explains. “It’s not modern, but it’s beautiful.” Yemen is an old country; there aren’t any skyscrapers there.
Photos: Bab Al- Yemen, the Gates of Yemen
“People are still behind, if you look through modern eyes. Everybody there comes from a tribe. They ask you ‘what’s your last name’ and they can tell you which tribe you are from and where you are from. You go to your tribe and the tribe leaders/religious leaders before you go to government officials for problems.”
Sources:
“Yemen, Sana’a August 2008, Bab Al-Yemen ( The Gate of Yemen).” Flickr. Yahoo!, 06 Aug. 2009. Web. 14 May 2014.
