You can stand on 5th Avenue in Bay Ridge between 67th Street and 78th Street and smell three different kinds of slow-roasted lamb without walking a block. This is the densest Yemeni food corridor in New York City — a six-block stretch of restaurants, sweet shops, and clay-oven bread bakeries that turned a Brooklyn neighborhood into the city’s most fully realized Yemeni culinary district. If you have never eaten Yemeni food in NYC, this is where you start. If you have, you already know it is where you keep going back.
Quick Bites
- Yemenat — 7721 5th Ave. Michelin Guide listed. The lamb haneeth is the move. Reserve on Resy ahead of weekends.
- Yemen Café & Restaurant — 7317 5th Ave. The 1986 original. Free tandoor bread, broth, and pickles arrive before you order. Lamb haneeth and fahsa are both classics.
- United Yemen Restaurant (Wahdah) — 6726 5th Ave. Family-run since 1988, relocated to Bay Ridge. Bone-in lamb haneeth over rice with stewed vegetables. Affordable.
- Famous Yemen Sweets — 6708 5th Ave. The bakery stop. Honey-soaked bint al-sahn, harissa, halwa.
- Average lamb haneeth price across the strip: generally affordable — most full lamb plates are designed to feed two.
Why Bay Ridge Became Little Yemen
Yemeni immigrants started settling in Brooklyn in significant numbers in the 1980s, with the first wave concentrated around Atlantic Avenue and the second wave pushing south into Bay Ridge as the community grew. Yemen Café opened on Atlantic in 1986 as one of the first Yemeni restaurants in the entire United States. Four decades later, the original Atlantic Avenue location is still operating, and the Bay Ridge outpost on 5th Avenue has become the anchor of a much larger Yemeni food economy that now stretches from roughly 65th Street down past 78th.
The cuisine you find here is mostly southern Yemeni — Hadrami and Adeni traditions — built around long-braised lamb, deeply spiced rice, clay-oven flatbreads, and bubbling clay-pot stews. It is some of the most generous, sharing-friendly food in the city. You almost never eat alone at one of these places, and you almost never leave hungry.
The Strip, From North to South
Yemenat — 7721 5th Ave
The newest of the headliners and the one with the most acclaim attached. Yemenat earned a New York Times nod in 2024 (Pete Wells’s final review tour) and now sits on the Michelin Guide. The dining room is small, family-run, and built for sharing. Start with shafoot — a yogurt-soaked flatbread dish layered with herbs — and order the lamb haneeth, the standout dish, served as braised lamb shoulder over hadrami rice tinted golden with the kitchen’s spice blend. The lamb sughar (a spice-rubbed grilled preparation) and the shakshoka Adeni — a southern-Yemeni-style egg dish that has nothing to do with the North African version — are both worth ordering on a return visit. Book ahead on weekends. Reservations actually move here.
Yemen Café & Restaurant — 7317 5th Ave
This is the institution. Same family, same recipes, nearly four decades of practice. Every table gets complimentary fresh-baked tandoor bread, a small bowl of broth, and pickled vegetables before you have ordered anything. The lamb haneeth — slow-cooked for hours until it pulls apart with a fork — is the order, but the fahsa is the dish that long-time regulars come for: a bubbling clay pot of saltah (Yemen’s national stew) combined with shredded lamb, served scalding hot with the clay-oven bread to scoop. The chicken mandi is the lighter option if you are easing in. Open 9 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. seven days a week.
United Yemen Restaurant (Wahdah) — 6726 5th Ave
“Wahdah” is Arabic for “unity,” and this family has been feeding people since 1988 — originally on Court Street downtown, now resettled in Bay Ridge. The cooking is unfussy, generous, and priced affordably. The house recommendation is the haneeth — bone-in lamb roasted slow with their imported spices, served over rice with stewed vegetables. Vegetarians get a real menu here, not an afterthought: mixed-vegetable tehbeek, mixed-vegetable slatah, and a house salad with their dressing. Hours run 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily. This is the relaxed neighborhood option of the three.
Famous Yemen Sweets — 6708 5th Ave
You do not finish a Yemeni meal in Bay Ridge without dessert, and this is where dessert lives. The signature order is bint al-sahn — Yemen’s iconic honey cake, built from multiple paper-thin layers of dough brushed with ghee, baked until gold, and finished with a generous pour of honey at the table. In Yemeni hospitality tradition, the host pours the honey in a circular motion across the cake, making sure to load the guest’s side. Beyond bint al-sahn, the case holds harissa (a chocolate-peanut-flour mush, nothing like the North African spice paste), halwa, and Turkish-delight-style candies. Bring it back to the table at Yemen Café or take a box home.
How to Order If You Have Never Eaten Yemeni Food Before
Yemeni food rewards a sharing approach. A reasonable two-person order at any of these restaurants looks like this: one lamb haneeth to share (it is the gateway dish for a reason), one fahsa or saltah to scoop with bread, a shafoot or salatat (salads) appetizer to brighten the table, fresh tandoor bread (usually comes free), and a glass of cardamom-spiced black tea or Yemeni coffee at the end. You will probably leave with leftovers. That is the point.
If you are vegetarian, lead with United Yemen — their vegetable preparations are taken seriously rather than treated as default. If you are eating alone, Yemen Café’s chicken mandi is the most approachable single-plate order on the strip.
What to Skip and What to Watch
Shibam Yemen Cafe at 6801 5th Ave is closed. Hadramout Cafe at 172 Atlantic Avenue is excellent but lives in Brooklyn Heights, not Bay Ridge — worth a separate trip if you are working that side of the borough.
The Bay Ridge strip itself is still growing. New Yemeni-run bakeries and coffee shops have continued to open along 5th Avenue over the last two years as the community has expanded. The neighborhood is one of the few places in New York where a cuisine is still in its actively-building phase rather than its preservation phase — meaning you can taste the present and the future of Yemeni food in NYC on the same block.
Getting There
The R train at Bay Ridge Avenue (69th Street) and 77th Street stations puts you on the strip. The B63 bus runs the length of 5th Avenue. From downtown Manhattan, plan on about 45 minutes door to door — which is roughly half the time it would take to fly to literally anywhere else serving food this good.
Bring an appetite, bring people, and bring small bills for the bakery on the way out. Bay Ridge’s Yemeni corridor is one of the most distinctive eating neighborhoods in New York. Treat it that way.
