A taste of Jaffa, made fresh in Natick.

Yafa is the old Arabic name for Jaffa, the ancient port on the Mediterranean — and a word that means beautiful. Mo Alghool grew up with it, and brought it to Natick.

Mo came to the United States from Palestine in 1990 and spent years as a professional photographer. When that work fell away during the pandemic, he did the braver thing: in October 2020, in the hardest season the restaurant world had ever seen, he opened a café of his own.

First he called home — his mother, his aunts, his sister — and wrote down their recipes, translating each dish from the Arabic as he went. That handwritten menu is the one you order from today: falafel ground fresh, manakish from the oven, shawarma marinated and grilled, and mezze built by hand.

Come hungry, leave looked after. That's the whole idea.

As featured in The Boston Globe "A Palestinian cook is serving specialties from home in his Natick cafe" · March 2021