Palestinian Restaurant Ayat to Open Outpost and 'Nonprofit' Cafe in Bushwick

Popular Palestinian restaurant Ayat is expanding to Bushwick’s Knickerbocker Avenue with a new outpost, and next door on Starr Street it is debuting what it describes as a nonprofit cafe that supports humanitarian causes locally and across the globe.

Brownstoner stopped by last week and saw the signage going up for the restaurant at 242 Knickerbocker Avenue, on the corner of Starr Street (albeit with a slight spelling mistake in the neighborhood’s name), and confirmed with a spokesperson via Instagram that the popular eatery will be opening its doors there in the coming months. Work was also going inside the building, where the space is being built out to hold the new venue.

The rep said the Bushwick location was chosen to add to the neighborhood’s culinary scene and said bringing Palestinian cuisine in any neighborhood “unifies the people during a time when a lot are divided.”

Ayat, whose first outpost remains open in Bay Ridge, recently opened a new location in Ditmas Park, and it also has spots in New Jersey and Connecticut. The Bushwick restaurant will be its eighth outlet.

The establishment is known for its authentic dishes including shawarma, falafel, and mansaf. Menu items at its other locations include fattoush for $9, beef shawarma at $12, and a $21 vegan platter with falafel. Mansaf, a dish with lamb and rice, is the most expensive item on the menu at $38.

The new location at 242 Knickerbocker Avenue includes an extension that runs along Starr Street where Ayat’s owners, married couple Abdul Elenani and Ayat Masoud, are opening a cafe called Giving Grounds. The exterior of the single-story space has been painted white and has signage that states the name and “100 percent of profits for humanity.”

According to the its website and the spokesperson on Instagram, the cafe will provide full transparency of its sales, reports, bank account statement, and profit and loss statements to the community via screens in the cafe. The aim is to show that all of its proceeds are being donated to organizations that are aiding in humanitarian crises.

As well as Ayat and the new cafe, the couple also own Al Badawi in Brooklyn Heights, Fatto Mano in Bay Ridge, and other businesses including three Cocoa Grinder coffee shops, halal butcher Falahi Farms, and fry shop Fritebar, according to the New York Times.

The duo opened the original Ayat in Bay Ridge in 2020, during the height of the pandemic. Ayat’s website says Elenani, a restaurateur, created the restaurant in honor of his wife, who is a lawyer with a passion for food. “Seeing this passion in her and experiencing her delicious food, it was clear to me that the community needed to experience this too,” the site says.

Since its opening, the proudly Palestinian business, whose owners invite people to explore Palestinian culture and urge understanding and peace, has gained a big following in Brooklyn, but has also faced a slew of online criticism. Earlier this year, it hosted a Shabbat dinner to encourage unity.

The storefront where the restaurant is opening, across the road from Maria Hernandez Park, was most recently a video and video game store called Madrid Video. The game store had been in the location since at least 2007.

City records show the longtime landlord sold the four-family house to an LLC for $2.3 million in late 2023, which has since renovated the building, Department of Buildings records show.

It’s unclear whether the former landlord’s tenants remain in the renovated building, but there is one two-bedroom unit listed for rent on Streeteasy for $3,995 a month.

[Photos by Anna Bradley-Smith, unless noted otherwise]

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