Abdul Elenani, the CEO and founder of New York City’s popular Palestinian restaurant Ayat, learned resilience from a young age.
The outgoing entrepreneur remembers defending his headscarf-wearing mother and sisters from abuse while growing up in a post-9/11 New York City.
“They (his mother and sisters) were all wearing the hijab, and it wasn’t easy growing up in a religious Muslim household which upheld their values proudly, loudly and publicly,” Elenani told Middle East Eye outside Ayat’s Astoria location in Queens.
“They were always harassed when going to the train station and going to school. I first remember hearing my mom being called a terrorist when I was around five-years-old.”
He recalls stepping up to defend his family from harassment around the age of eight, and this later extended to others around him, such as headscarf-wearing classmates at school.
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“There’s a code of ethics you just got to follow no matter what. If I see anyone being oppressed or injustice being done to them, I just throw myself into the fire. I don’t stay quiet about it. A lot of my arrests as a kid were because I was jumping into fights that weren’t mine.”
It’s that passion for justice that led him to set up Ayat, a Michelin-guide featured restaurant.
“I wanted to communicate the occupation of Palestine through food and culture,” the Egyptian-American entrepreneur said.
Although in 2014 he used to have a restaurant in NYC’s Meatpacking District that was “Palestinian-oriented”, he says he didn’t have “the balls” to call it Palestinian.
It wasn’t until the Covid-19 pandemic hit and he had to close his coffee chain, Cocoa Grinder, which had more than 20 locations, that he reoriented his personal and professional mission.
‘I wanted to communicate the occupation of Palestine through food and culture’
– Abdul Elenani, founder of Ayat restaurant
“Going through Covid and seeing how fast things can change, and losing everything overnight, it built a thick skin,” he recalled.
“I was like, I’m not getting back into this psychotic industry,” he added, laughing. “And if I do, I’ll go back into it in a way where I’m actually doing it with purpose and with impact.”
At the time, he was opening a supermarket in Bay Ridge, and a neighbour asked him if he’d like to rent a former tanning salon across the road from his supermarket.
He initially thought about opening a Middle Eastern restaurant, but then decided to make it a Palestinian eatery.
“I remember thinking I’ll just be very bold about Palestine and not care about what will happen after.”
That is how the concept for Ayat was born.
Awareness
The restaurant was named after his Palestinian-American wife, Ayat Masoud, who is popularly believed to be a co-founder of the business, but is actually a lawyer by profession.
He didn’t tell Masoud in advance that he was naming the restaurant after her. She only found out when he showed her the signage.
Masoud told Middle East Eye that she was so touched that she cried when she saw her name on a sign above the restaurant.
While Elenani formulated the restaurant menu with dishes common to both Palestine and the wider region, he said his wife suggested adding traditional dishes, which he incorporated over time.
Masoud came in and showed the chefs how to make dishes such as maklouba – a flavorful dish made with layers of rice, meat and vegetables. It is traditionally a one-pot dish that is flipped upside down when served.
‘Palestinians are the masters of party slash family meals’
– Abdul Elenani, Ayat
Masoud said the recipes are her mother’s, which were passed down to her.
“They are very traditional Jerusalem recipes,” she said.
“Palestinians are the masters of party slash family meals,” she said. “That’s why you may notice that most of our traditional dishes are heavy. But they’re heavy in a good and rich, complex way. Many ingredients are included, and all the traditional dishes are meant to be made in a way that serves large groups of people.”
Since the first Ayat opened in 2020, it has gone from strength to strength. Ayat and a couple of other restaurants, as well as a range of catering services, fall under the umbrella of Elenani and his wife’s hospitality group, Anani Group.
During Israel’s genocide in Gaza, it gained further exposure and support.
Elenani has noticed a greater awareness of Palestine since he opened Ayat. He recalls it wasn’t a word people were used to hearing.
“The first few months after Ayat opened, people would say, ‘Oh, it’s Pakistinian cuisine.’ I’m like, ‘No, it’s Palestinian cuisine.’
“They had no idea what the word Palestine was, and would confuse it with Pakistan. We love Pakistan, but it just showed how many people had no idea what Palestine was. I think that was the first moment where I thought I’m going to drive myself to the max to make sure I open up as many locations as possible to communicate that culture and tradition,” Elenani said.
Ayat currently has eight locations, mostly in New York City, and one location in New Jersey.
However, it plans to go national in 2026, with new openings in Washington DC, Philadelphia and Dallas slated in the next few months. The Dallas location will be the first to open at the end of January.
New York will see a new branch open up near Columbia University at the beginning of February that will honour five-year-old Hind Rajab, who, along with other family members, was shot to death in a car by Israeli troops while fleeing Gaza City in January 2024. It will be called Ayat-Hind’s Hall.
Hind’s name garnered global attention after Columbia students renamed the campus building, Hamilton Hall, after her.
“I think it’s a beautiful thing to honour a little girl that was shot with 300 bullets,” he said. “Her voice is the voice of every single child of Gaza that was lost. So honouring her, is honouring every child”.
Harassment and intimidation
Ayat’s commitment to Palestinian food and culture has not come without challenges. Since Elenani opened its doors to its first location, he and his staff have faced harassment and intimidation both locally and globally.
Elenani has had to rely on his fighting instincts to defend his business and employees, whether it be on the receiving end of anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim graffiti or continuous verbal and online harassment, exacerbated by the start of Israel’s war on Gaza in October 2023.
Ayat doesn’t just highlight Palestinian culture. It actively tries to depict the political realities of a country under occupation through a menu header paying homage to the protest slogan “From the River to the Sea” to hand-painted murals that depict various aspects of Palestinian life.
The Bay Ridge location featured a mural depicting a Palestinian woman crying and Israeli soldiers pointing guns at children imprisoned under the Dome of the Rock. That was the same mural that Elenani says led to Ayat receiving more than 3,000 negative reviews online after the New York Times food critic Pete Wells published a review in December 2020.
When Elenani saw the barrage of negative reviews, his first thought was that something terrible had happened at the restaurant. But then he noticed that many of the reviews posted were from Tel Aviv, and he realised he had been the target of a smear campaign.
He was able to get Yelp to block people from posting any reviews for two months, but it was just an early glimpse into the backlash that would continue in every venture he took part in.
When Elenani co-founded another Middle Eastern restaurant, Al Badawi, on the Upper East Side in 2023, he said people would come to the restaurant and block the front door as well as verbally abuse and harass his staff.
His staff continue to be verbally abused at all locations of the restaurant, both in person and over the phone.
“You can’t protect them from that, obviously,” he said. “I think they understand. They know what the mission is. And they’re all down with spreading peace and love through food and culture.”
During Thanksgiving week last year, a staff member found anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim graffiti scrawled on a wall in the basement of the Ditmas Park location. The slurs included “Free Israel from terrorism and “Mohammed was a paedophile”. Elenani believes that attacking an entire faith group is a step too far.
While other people might crumble, Elena says he lets it wash over him – something that his life experiences have prepared him for.
He says Ayat continues to receive strong support from people, including the Jewish community.
“In 2023, we had an insane amount of support from Jewish people,” he says.
He hosted a free Shabbat dinner at his Ditmas Park location as a way to break barriers and foster dialogue with both the Jewish community and others. More than 1,300 people attended.
Elenani said the dinner was symbolic of the multicultural Brooklyn he had been exposed to all his life. He grew up in the largely Jewish neighbourhood of Bensonhurst, where his father ran a kosher-certified business. As a child, he would go into his father’s place of work and interact with customers and witness a rabbi regularly inspect the store.
He also recalls his mom would give him gifts to present to his teachers at Christmas. “I grew up in a household that respected all other religions,” he said.
Giving back
Elenani also tries to incorporate free meals as part of his business, which fits squarely within common Muslim traditions. He held a free Thanksgiving dinner so that people who were alone for the holiday had somewhere to go.
One of the diners who attended the dinner, Johanna Griese, told MEE that she had come from Brooklyn to Queens for the meal.
‘For every piece of hate we get, we get ten times more love’
– Hanifa Abbasi, Anani Group
“I wasn’t doing anything for Thanksgiving, and it was nice to be part of a community.”
The restaurant also held a free dinner at its Bushwick location to celebrate Zohran Mamdani winning the Democratic nomination for mayor in July.
More than 4,000 people attended, prompting Elenani to shut down every restaurant kitchen in the city to focus on delivering food via Uber to Bushwick.
“We ended up feeding everybody. The last person literally got the last spoon of food!”
Akram Nassir, Elenani’s business partner at Al Badawi, which is named after one of the world’s oldest olive trees, located near Bethlehem, told MEE that feeding people was important to both him and Elenani.
“Many people suffer from food insecurity, and offering free meals is one short-term way to address it,” he said.
When asked, Elenani says that giving back is informed by his faith.
Elenani’s giving back is not just related to food. He also likes to give back to the community in other ways.
Hanifa Abbasi, who started working as head of communications for Elenani in November, says he offered her the job after she told him she had lost her job due to speaking out about Palestine.
“I think a lot of us are very grateful for Abdul,” Abbasi told MEE.
“He’s very unapologetic in his stance for Palestine. Not only does he stand up for Palestine, but he stands up for people of oppressed backgrounds. People see that authenticity in us, and I think that’s why they support us. For every piece of hate we get, we get ten times more love.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
