Mohammed Aqlan Brings Classic Yemeni Flavors to Philadelphia with Malooga

Lauren Abunassar

Chef Mohammed Aqlan, left, participated in the Old City Eats Block Party in June. Photo courtesy: Mohammed Aqlan

Mohammed Aqlan is a big dreamer. The Yemeni-born owner of Malooga, a Yemeni restaurant in Philadelphia’s Old City, is quick to admit this if you ask him about the genesis of Malooga. “I want Yemeni cuisine to be known as one of the top ten or top five cuisines in America,” Aqlan told Al-Bustan. He’s carved out a space for himself in Philadelphia’s culinary community, putting his own flair on his beloved grandmother’s recipes, injecting Yemeni spices and flavors into Middle Eastern classics, and transforming the dining room into an extension of his home. “I want people to know [Yemeni] culture right through our food,” Aqlan said.

His approach to cooking, as such, sounds equal parts culinary and curatorial. For guests — because he is careful to emphasize that restaurant patrons are guests, not customers — Aqlan is recreating recipes that form core childhood memories. There’s foul: creamy fava beans with sauteed onions and tomatoes. There’s lamb haneeth: slow-roasted lamb with nuts, raisins, and sahawig, a homemade signature sauce. “Kids, they watch a lot of Cartoon Network, right?” Aqlan said. “Me? I was watching cooking shows.”

Malooga is located in Philadelphia’s Old City, at 134 Chestnut Street. Photo: Lauren Abunassar

Growing up with his grandmother in Yemen, Aqlan would spend hours in front of the television watching Fatafeat, a Yemeni cooking channel. The first dish he cooked was an Indian biryani he saw on the channel. He made it for his grandma and her friends. “I closed the door of the kitchen and told her: ‘Just leave me alone for now,’” he laughs. When he finally let them try the dish, they loved it — cementing his childhood passion for toying in the kitchen. Still, it never occurred to Aqlan that he could make a living through cooking.

So, he turned to another childhood dream: to become a pilot. It was a dream that needled him through his studies in Egypt and finally to New York in 2014, where he arrived intending to study aviation engineering. Though a starkly different career than cooking, Aqlan’s passion for avionics was fueled by that same dreaminess he speaks of embracing today. Landing in America, however, brought a degree of culture shock that quickly brought him down to earth.

There were the astronomical fees he faced as a foreign student — the sudden reality of paying rent and supporting himself. “When I’m depressed, I go to the kitchen,” Aqlan said. In this case, the kitchen was his cousin’s restaurant in Boston, sandwiched inside the Cambridge Mall. While visiting his cousin and the restaurant, he began bringing customers food, making dishes, casually eyeing an open chef position he knew he was not yet qualified for. One day, when the restaurant’s chef did not show up for work, Aqlan saw his chance. He jumped to fill in cooking for the day.

“In my opinion, that day, I made the worst food ever because it was so stressful, so busy,” Aqlan said. “But I also realized that this passion for cooking could support me.”

If Boston helped him find enlightenment, it was returning to New York City that helped him find his first customer base. He began cooking and selling meals from his house. Working with local grocery stores that served the Yemeni community, he was struck by the realization that these people worked for 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Who was cooking for them? “I knew that this was my target audience,” he said.

Initially, Aqlan hesitated to feature Middle Eastern classics like falafel, hummus, and baba ghanouj on the menu. After all, he said, these dishes are not popular in Yemen. However, recognizing the community’s hunger for such dishes, he experimented with injecting his own Yemeni spices into these staple items. Malooga’s new Adventure Platter features a sampling of all of them — a resoundingly successful fusion of flavors. Photo: Lauren Abunassar.

The success of his work led to some interest from investors curious if Aqlan would ever open a restaurant. Overwhelmed by the competition of other New York Yemeni restaurants, Aqlan began to consider Philadelphia as a “small New York,” where Yemeni food hadn’t yet found its foothold in the culinary community. The idea of opening a restaurant here was another dream that began to rear its head. He took the money he had left from the school fees he no longer had to pay, along with some small contributions from new investors, and — ever the dreamer — he opened Malooga, a name referring to the Yemeni flatbread widely featured on the menu, in 2021, smack in the middle of the pandemic.

“It was the worst plan ever,” he admitted. But he was buoyed by a simple desire: “I want people to know our food.” He called his grandmother, gathered some recipes, and learned to add his own twists and adaptations to the food. Though Aqlan’s grandmother has since passed away, her memory is etched into Malooga’s menu. “I want people to taste the flavor that I tasted from my grandma,” Aqlan said. “In Yemen, there’s a lot of cities and in every city, they do the food differently. That’s why, if any Yemeni not from my city [Taiz] eats the food, they may say: ‘Oh, that’s different.’ And that’s normal. If you go to a restaurant, you should taste the chef.”

Malooga’s lamb haneeth is perfectly tender, accompanied by classic Yemeni rice and signature sauce. Photo: Lauren Abunassar

Today, Aqlan calls Philadelphia the best thing that has ever happened to him. And he credits that to the strong community ties he has forged here. “It’s because [with Malooga] I focused on the community. I wanted a restaurant. I wanted Yemeni cuisine. But I wanted it for the community. I don’t mind where you are from. You are from the community? Then you’re welcome.” Aqlan often visits with guests, talking with them, he admits, for perhaps a bit too long.

“Often, when I talk to people about Yemen, they only see war in Yemen. And that’s true,” Aqlan said. “But there’s so much good stuff too. People are so nice. The food is so nice. And one of the things I want is that when I say, ‘Yemen,’ people say: ‘Oh, they’ve got the best food.’”

At Malooga, Aqlan is doing his part to inch people towards this understanding one dish at a time. “Maybe it will take 10 years, 20 years,” he said. “But I don’t count years. I will just work on my dream. And when it happens, it happens.”

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Lauren Abunassar is a Palestinian American writer and journalist. A Media Fellow at Al-Bustan, she holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MA in journalism from NYU. Her first book Coriolis was published as winner of the 2023 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize.