Kitab Cafe is what you want in a coffee place if you’re looking not just for caffeine but for a welcoming environment, literally for everyone, from rough-hewn old white guys to teens in hijab. Counter workers might be showing some shoulder (it’s warm inside) or be in hijab themselves. Traffic is steady, with lots of tables taken by singletons at work. Huge windows let the sunshine in.
Food prices, if not coffee prices, are lower than many others’. And the baked goods and baguettes for sandwiches are from Zingerman’s. Say no more.
Wife and husband co-owners Asma Almulaiki and Ahmed Alwhysee, born and raised in Hamtramck, opened Kitab in January 2023 with the idea of creating a space for the diverse Hamtramck community, and that’s what it is. They thought they’d be more of a bookstore, but quickly learned coffee would rule. They thought 5% of their sales would be food; now it’s more like 50-50. Close to a year in, they moved to full halal.
Certainly not alluding to any billion-dollar, 9,000-shops, union-busting coffee shop chain you may have heard of, Almulaiki said the goal was to make their store as unpretentious as possible, both fast for those seeking a quick in-and-out and welcoming for those who want to stay. “We invested in good electric outlets, good Wi-Fi,” she said.
Each sandwich is put together when ordered and can be customized. Eggs for the breakfast sandwiches are scrambled in a skillet, not turned into rubber in a microwave.
I found my caprese sandwich memorable, with generous amounts of basil pesto and melty fresh mozzarella on a toasted baguette — lots of bright flavor. Pastrami was underwhelming, with not enough pastrami flavor. But a breakfast sandwich with turkey on a crisp-ish croissant was fresh as could be, with a tomato slice actually playing a noticeable role — virtually unheard of for a winter tomato; I’d upgraded from American cheese to chipotle gouda. For an egg-and-cheese on baguette, a steal at $4, we added some chipotle sauce for 50 extra cents, and that produced a nice kick. Other sandwiches offer Buffalo chicken, turkey, provolone, pepper jack and mozzarella in various combinations, with spinach as the green, a good choice. Baguettes are the usual sandwich bread but some days there’s sourdough or Zingerman’s rolls. Regulars should not get bored.
Zingerman’s vegetarian soups change every few days; they are thick enough for your plastic spoon to stand up in with no wobble. Butternut soup was welcomingly nonsweet, with a little spicy buzz; tomato was summertime pure-tomato flavor.
Anyone familiar with the Zingerman’s oeuvre will know to expect the best from the pastries. New to me was Bostock, a version of French toast made with a tall slice of brioche, brushed with orange syrup and sprinkled with toasted almonds, then baked. I thought I could detect a hint of anise, though it wasn’t on the ingredients list. Apricot rugelach (this was during Hanukkah) was many-layered and cinnamony. Olive oil cake was beautifully moist; it uses orange juice and orange liqueur. Zingerman’s calls the texture “luxurious” because “olive oil retains more moisture than butter.” No argument from me. Expect a good variety of Zingerman’s favorites, including the humble brownie.
As to coffee, you can of course get regular La Colombe espresso in all the variations or a list of dessert-like lattes with caramel, salted caramel, milk chocolate, white chocolate, honey, vanilla, cayenne, brown sugar, or cinnamon. If it’s sweet comfort liquid, it’s here. The double shots come with a generous 10 oz. of milk.
A Spicy Mocha Latte, for example, was mild, my friend said “more spiced than spicy,” with notes of ginger and molasses. A Five-Spice Latte with almond milk (the other choices are cow’s milk and oat milk) was also mild, with clove and ginger out-competing the cardamon, cinnamon and nutmeg. A creamy Chai Latte was plush with foam. None of these were sickly sweet, thank god. But the people do like their sugar. Most popular latte for fall was salted caramel.
Kitab has a kegerator to keep iced lattes on tap; various syrups (vanilla, caramel, five-spice, brown sugar) are infused with coffee and oat milk for a foamy result. They’re popular even in winter for those spending the day.
The shop was temporarily out of Adeni Chai, a Yemeni tea, when I visited, but it’s my next pick: the five iconic spices steeped with sugar and black tea, plus milk.
Kitab means book. The café’s book collection is....specific. Most of the titles relate to Islam, in English, with a smattering of others mostly of the self-help or uplift variety: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s autobiography, Cheryl Strayed conquering the Pacific Coast Trail, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Marie Kondo. There’s a big children’s section with titles like This Is My Hijab. But there’s a lot more laptop work going on than traffic in paper-and-ink books.
I first visited Kitab December 1, when it hosted a showing of the documentary From Under the Rubble with the Handala Coalition, about destruction in Palestine in an earlier war. The woman sitting next to me lived down the street and frequented the café all the time. Almulaiki plans more such events, working with the neighbors.
Kitab will soon open a second location in the former Avalon Breads space at 422 W. Willis St. in Midtown. I predict it’ll be just as neighborly in a different kind of neighborhood.
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