The smell reaches you before the signs do. One block of Steinway Street in Astoria carries a scent found nowhere else in the borough: apple-tobacco smoke drifting off sidewalk hookahs, charcoal and grilled fish, cardamom coffee thick enough to chew. After dark the folding chairs come out, the glasses of sweet mint tea keep arriving, and conversations in Egyptian Arabic run long past midnight. This is the heart of the Egyptians on Steinway Street, the stretch New Yorkers have come to call Little Egypt.
It is one short, dense block, and yet it functions as a town square for tens of thousands of Egyptian New Yorkers. Men play backgammon under awnings printed with the Eye of Horus. Bakery windows stack trays of basbousa and konafa. A butcher hangs a hand-lettered halal sign in the window. For a community spread across Queens, Brooklyn, and New Jersey, this is the place everyone comes back to.
Steinway Street: The Place
Steinway Street runs north to south through Astoria, the western corner of Queens that sits across the East River from Manhattan. For most of its length it is a busy retail spine, the kind of street where chain stores and old family shops share the same block. The Little Egypt section is the northern end, near the elevated tracks and the Astoria Boulevard subway station that puts Midtown roughly fifteen minutes away. It is walkable, loud, and almost entirely first-generation in feel.
How Steinway Became Little Egypt
Before the Egyptians
The street takes its name from a piano. In 1853 a German cabinetmaker named Henry Steinway, born Heinrich Steinweg, started building instruments in Manhattan, and within a decade Steinway & Sons was one of the largest employers in the city. In 1870 his son William bought roughly 400 acres of then-rural northern Astoria, drawn by cheap land, water access for shipping, and distance from the labor unions organizing his Manhattan workers.
By 1873 William had built a factory there, and around it he laid out a full company town. Steinway Village had worker housing, a kindergarten, a library, a post office, a firehouse, and trolley lines, all serving the men who made the pianos. The factory still operates today, and the street that ran through the village kept the family’s name long after the village itself dissolved into the wider neighborhood.
For most of the twentieth century this was a working-class corner of Queens, German at first, then heavily Greek and Italian. By the time the next chapter began, the upper end of Steinway Street was so Greek that locals sometimes called it Little Athens, its windows lettered in the Greek alphabet, its tavernas and groceries serving the largest Greek community outside Greece.
The Egyptians Arrive
Egyptians had been trickling into the New York region since the 1960s, after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act reopened the country to arrivals from outside Europe. The first wave skewed highly educated: doctors, engineers, accountants, and teachers, many of them leaving in the unsettled years around the 1967 war. A great number landed in white-collar careers, but plenty of others, degrees and all, took the jobs that were open to new immigrants, waiting tables and, in large numbers, driving the city’s yellow cabs.
The turn onto Steinway itself came at the end of the 1980s. In 1989 a chef from Alexandria named Ali El Sayed opened a tiny restaurant called Kabab Cafe at 25-12 Steinway Street, Arabic lettering on the glass, in a neighborhood that was still mostly Greek, Italian, and American. It was among the first Egyptian-owned storefronts on the block, and El Sayed, who calls himself the godfather of hookah cafes in New York, is widely credited with bringing shisha culture to the corridor.
What followed is a textbook case of chain migration. One Egyptian business drew Egyptian customers, who drew more businesses, each new arrival pointing the next toward the same block. The transformation was fast enough that longtime residents describe it as nearly overnight: through the 1990s, Arabic and Egyptian signage spread storefront by storefront where Greek lettering had been. The local Steinway Astoria Partnership, the merchants’ group, was itself organized in 1991, as the street’s commercial identity was visibly shifting.
The economics were straightforward. Rents on this end of Steinway were affordable, the subway carried you to Manhattan in minutes, and a critical mass of Arabic-speaking neighbors meant a newcomer could find work, worship, groceries, and a familiar plate of food without ever needing much English. Egypt’s long economic stagnation under Hosni Mubarak kept the pipeline full through the 1990s and 2000s, and the Egypt-born population across metro New York climbed into the tens of thousands.
Little Egypt at Its Peak
By the 2000s and into the 2010s, the block had become something singular in American life: an Egyptian main street, hummed into being on a Queens side street. Hookah lounges lined both sidewalks, and on warm nights the chairs spilled out under the streetlights. Restaurants grilled whole fish to order, bakeries sold pastry by the kilo, and grocers stacked imported tea, dates, and dried molokhia.
The community kept arriving. Between roughly 2000 and 2015, Egyptians settled here alongside Jordanians, Yemenis, and Moroccans, all of them drawn to what newcomers described as a flourishing neighborhood a quarter-hour from Manhattan. The Egyptian presence was the anchor, though, and it shaped the street’s rhythm, its food, and its language.
Nowhere is that rhythm clearer than during Ramadan. Each evening through the holy month the block fills after the sunset call to prayer, when fasting ends and the cafes, restaurants, and bakeries do their biggest business of the year. The street stays awake into the small hours, families and friends moving from table to table, and the energy carries straight through to the celebrations of Eid.
The Change
The block has weathered real pressure. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the NYPD ran a Demographics Unit that placed plainclothes officers inside cafes and near mosques in Muslim neighborhoods, listening in on ordinary conversations. Community members on Steinway describe the surveillance as a lasting wound, even as it pushed many to organize and look out for one another.
The newer threat is money. Astoria has become one of the most gentrified neighborhoods in New York, with average rents climbing sharply and luxury buildings filling in around the old corridor. Rising commercial rents squeeze the small, family-run shops that gave Little Egypt its character, and longtime organizers warn that the community’s foothold in the city is thinning.
So a younger generation has stepped up. Egyptian American organizers, among them Rana Abdelhamid and Raniem Abdelaziz, have built efforts focused squarely on this stretch of Steinway, pushing for census participation, small-business support, and the kind of commercial-rent protections that some other parts of the city enjoy. Their aim is plain: to keep the block Egyptian for the next wave of arrivals.
The Landmarks of Little Egypt
Kabab Cafe (25-12 Steinway Street) is the spot that started it all. Roughly 800 square feet wedged between a barber shop and a storefront, it has been run since 1989 by Ali El Sayed, who grew up in Alexandria, studied agriculture, and wandered through Eastern Europe before settling in Astoria. There is no fixed menu; he often cooks alone, building each day’s dishes from whatever looked best at the markets that morning.
Mombar (25-22 Steinway Street) sits a few doors down and is run by Ali’s younger brother, Moustafa El Sayed, also from Alexandria. The restaurant is named for the spiced sausage dish, and Moustafa, an artist as well as a cook, built much of the interior by hand. The facade is a mosaic of sculpted tile centered on the Eye of Horus, the ancient symbol of protection.
El Khayam Cafe (25-72 Steinway Street) is often called the oldest Arab-owned business on the block. It was opened by Gamal Dewidar, who arrived in New York in 1979 with an early wave of Egyptian immigrants, and it pours imported Egyptian tea and fresh juice alongside rice pudding and basbousa, the semolina cake soaked in syrup.
Sabry’s Seafood (24-25 Steinway Street) brings the coast of Alexandria to Queens. Chef Sabry, who came to the United States in 1985, made his name in the community cooking fish, and the room works the Alexandrian way: you choose your catch off the ice and it is grilled to order. It is one of the longest-running Egyptian seafood houses on the street.
Al-Iman Mosque (24-30 Steinway Street) anchors the block’s spiritual life. Its prayer schedule sets the daily clock for many of the businesses around it, and during Ramadan its calls to prayer mark the moment each evening when the fasting ends and the sidewalks come alive. It serves both men and women, with separate spaces for ablution and prayer.
Duzan (24-11 Steinway Street) represents the quicker, counter-service side of the corridor, turning out wraps, pita platters, and bowls for the lunchtime crowd. Down the way, the seafood house AbuQir (24-19 Steinway Street), named for the bay near Alexandria, rounds out a block where a visitor is rarely more than a few steps from a grill, a hookah, or a tray of pastry.
Where the Steinway Egyptians Came From
The thread running through Little Egypt is Mediterranean. A striking number of the street’s founding figures, the El Sayed brothers and Chef Sabry among them, come from Alexandria, Egypt’s great port city, where seafood, grilling, and cafe life are woven into daily habit. That coastal heritage shows on every menu that grills a whole fish to order and in the unhurried, sit-for-hours pace of the lounges.
Beyond Alexandria, the community draws from Cairo and the towns of the Nile Delta, the densely populated farmland north of the capital. Their reasons for leaving were rarely dramatic: an economy that stalled for decades, professional ambitions that outran the opportunities at home, and the simple gravitational pull of relatives already settled on one block in Queens. Each arrival made the next one easier, which is how a single street came to hold so much of one country.
Steinway Street Today
The block is still unmistakably Egyptian, and on a warm evening it can feel as busy as it ever did. The hookah lounges glow, the bakeries sell out of konafa, and during Ramadan the street now hosts an organized night market, launched in 2024 and back the following year, that closes the road to traffic and draws crowds well past midnight. For sheer visibility, this remains one of the most prominent Arab main streets in the United States.
It is also a street under strain. Gentrification keeps pushing rents upward, some longtime shops have struggled, and the surrounding blocks fill steadily with newcomers who have no particular tie to the place. The crowd has broadened, too, with younger Yemeni, Moroccan, and Lebanese businesses adding to the mix, even as the Egyptian institutions remain the heart of it.
What holds is the sense that this block belongs to a people, not just a set of restaurants. The next chapter will be written by the children of the men who arrived in the 1980s and 1990s, and by the organizers working to keep the rent payable and the doors open. If they succeed, the apple-tobacco smoke and the late-night tea will be drifting down Steinway Street for a long time yet.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Egyptians settle on Steinway Street?
The Egyptians on Steinway Street were drawn by cheap rents, a quick subway ride to Manhattan, and a growing cluster of Arabic-speaking neighbors. Once chef Ali El Sayed opened Kabab Cafe in 1989, one Egyptian business attracted the next, and chain migration filled the block. Newcomers could find work, worship, and familiar food without needing much English.
Is Steinway Street still Egyptian today?
Yes. The Little Egypt stretch between Astoria Boulevard and 28th Avenue remains one of the most visible Arab main streets in America, anchored by Egyptian restaurants, bakeries, and hookah lounges. Gentrification and rising rents are real pressures, and younger Yemeni, Moroccan, and Lebanese businesses have joined the mix, but the Egyptians on Steinway Street are still the heart of the block.
What are the famous Egyptian restaurants and cafes on Steinway Street?
The best known is Kabab Cafe, the 1989 pioneer run by Ali El Sayed, and his brother Moustafa’s restaurant Mombar a few doors away. El Khayam Cafe is often called the oldest Arab-owned business on the block, and Sabry’s Seafood brings Alexandria-style grilled fish to Queens.
Where in Egypt are the Steinway Street community from?
Many of the street’s founding restaurateurs come from Alexandria, the Mediterranean port whose seafood and cafe culture shaped the block. The broader community also draws from Cairo and the towns of the Nile Delta, leaving largely for economic and professional reasons over several decades.
When did Egyptians first arrive on Steinway Street?
Egyptians had been coming to the New York region since the 1960s, but the Steinway Street community took shape at the end of the 1980s. The turning point was 1989, when Kabab Cafe opened on a block that was then still mostly Greek and Italian, and Arabic signage spread quickly through the 1990s.
Astoria’s Little Egypt is one thread in a much larger story of how immigrants remade New York street by street, from the Greeks who came to Astoria before them to the Arab community of Bay Ridge across the river. The Coptic Christian side of Egyptian New York is largely its own story, centered on the Coptic Egyptians of Jersey City. Every family that walked these blocks carries a route worth tracing.