Inside a Haraz Coffee House (Image: Haraz Coffee House)
It isn’t at the scale of the now-empty Capitol Hill Starbucks Roastery but 2026 brings new plans for a shuttered Pike/Pine corner to leap back to life as the neighborhood’s newest cafe.
Haraz Coffee House, a rapidly growing Yemeni coffee chain born in Michigan and recently focused on expansion around the San Francisco Bay Area and Northern California, is making plans to fill the long-empty southwest corner of Boylston and Pike with a new $200,000 cafe buildout.
Founded in Dearborn, Michigan in 2021, Haraz has been public about its expansion plans including efforts to add new cafes across Northern California. Its growth to “31 locations across metro Detroit and other cities with 185 in the pipeline” has included new cafe spaces and sometimes taking over shuttered spaces left behind by the likes of Starbucks.
Haraz is noted for its rich, flavorful coffee offerings and “organic, sun-dried beans from Yemen.”
While Capitol Hill has been known for its multitudes of cafes, coffee-focused shops are actually on an upswing after several closures coming out of the pandemic and a shifting focus to formats like bubble tea. 2025 openings included the Palestinian heritage and community of Mintish Coffee House on Harvard Ave and “Persian daytime cafe” Open Form also on E Pike.
The arrival of Haraz will add a company growing quickly with a franchise strategy. The E Pike cafe has backing from Ahmed Ali al-Biesery, the franchisee for Haraz’s first two San Francisco shops, according to the Seattle paperwork.
Early permit documents filed with the city show plans for the major new Capitol Hill cafe project with around 1,300 square feet of space plus a 400-square-foot mezzanine. The space has hosted a mix of businesses over the past decades including the long-gone Kiss the Sky cyber cafe and head shop.
Today, the ground floor future cafe space in the 1999-built condo building neighbors the three-year-old Capitol Hill location of the Pink Gorilla video game retailer. Across the street is the neighborhood’s busy Salt and Straw ice cream shop — and two of the largest examples of empty Capitol Hill commercial space in the form of the former E Pike Amazon Fresh and the 2025-shuttered Redhook microbrewery.
2025’s big shutdowns including the Broadway Whole Foods, the Redhook brewery, and Melrose’s Starbucks Roastery, by the way, were voted by CHS readers as one of the most important stories of the year.
Smaller revivals like a new Capitol Hill Haraz might be the story of 2026.
Haraz Coffee House is making plans to open at 617 E Pike. Learn more at harazcoffeehouse.com.
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