Haraz Coffee opened its second Detroit store on Wednesday, June 11, on the ground floor of The Brooke on Bagley at 1501 Church Street. Mayor Mike Duggan cut the ribbon. The line wrapped down the block. Henna artists worked a folding table by the door. There was live music, merch giveaways, and free Yemeni lattes for the first hour.
The Corktown shop is the 30th Haraz location in the United States, and the fifth in Michigan after the original Dearborn store, plus Warren, Livonia, and East Lansing. The first Detroit-proper Haraz opened on Michigan Avenue in 2023; this is the city's second. Hamzah Nasser, who founded Haraz in Dearborn in 2021, has built it into one of the fastest-growing Yemeni coffee chains in the country. The company website refers to him as The Face of Coffee.
The beans come from the Haraz Mountains, a coffee-growing region in western Yemen that produces some of the oldest cultivated arabica in the world. Drinks brew with hawaij, the cardamom-forward spice blend with ginger and cinnamon, almost nothing in metro Detroit serves it outside Dearborn. Haraz also runs Adeni-style spiced milk teas, sweet pastries (croissants, baklava, date treats), and a menu of cold and seasonal drinks. A collaboration with Dearborn's JJS Custard Co. brings ice cream into the menu, the brand's signature departure from the standard café format. Yemeni coffee has had a years-long boom in metro Detroit, where Dearborn's significant Yemeni-American population built the customer base before the rest of the city caught up.
The Corktown space is designed for sit-and-stay, with soft lighting, clean lines, a long communal table next to the window, and the kind of layout that absorbs both the coffee meeting and the laptop worker. The Brooke on Bagley is one of Hunter Pasteur's mixed-use developments along the Michigan Avenue corridor that has reshaped Corktown over the past two years. Haraz fills the ground-floor café slot the building was designed around.
The original 2023 announcement of a Corktown Haraz had it landing in the Perennial Corktown apartment building a few blocks east, alongside an adjacent Corktown Market grocery store also from Hunter Pasteur. That arrangement did not happen. The Brooke deal came later. The grocery store was supposed to open early 2024. It did not. Haraz did, eighteen months later. The result is a slightly different shop in a slightly different building than was first promised, with the same coffee at the center.
Nasser has framed Detroit's reputation for soul and resilience as matching what Haraz tries to project. He has 142 locations in the pipeline.
Haraz Coffee House, 1501 Church Street, Corktown.
