The Yemeni American News
Sometimes success is not measured by the prestige of the job, but by dedication and diligent work.
Abdul Alshabibi, a Yemeni American father of eight, knows that continuity is a great source of joy. Alshabibi has been working at Al Ameer restaurant in Dearborn for almost 28 years, showing up daily to work long hours in order to feed his family.
Alshabibi said there is strong mutual loyalty between the restaurant and its employees.
Even at 60 years of age, Alshabibi has no intent of quitting or slowing down. He still works for 12 hours a day, six days a week, ensuring the quality and cleanliness of the dishes and tables.
And although he immigrated from rural Yemen in 1990 with very little formal education, Alshabibi’s children are in schools and universities, with his oldest graduating as an engineer.
“I love my work, and the restaurant that I work for,” Alshabibi told the Yemeni American News.
In 2016, Al Ameer, which opened in 1989, won the James Beard Foundation Award for America’s Classics. The same year, it was named one of Eater’s 38 Essential Restaurants.
“This restaurant, with its rows of floral print booths, is a bedrock institution in Dearborn, Michigan, and one of the nation’s most welcoming introductions to the pleasures of Lebanese cuisine,” the James Beard Foundation said in a press release at the time.
The restaurant’s owners and managers credit its success to the way it is run as a family business, where the co-founders are always present.
“You can come in at any time of the day and you’ll see one of us standing there with an apron on,” general manager Abbas Ammar, son of co-founder Khalil Ammar, told the Detroit Free Press in 2016. “We’re not absentee owners by any stretch.”
As for Alshabibi he has used his commitment and strength to not only raise a family in the US, but also to contribute to the economy of his homeland in Yemen, where he has built a home and visits regularly.
