When life gives Billy Alabsi lemons, he makes pretty much whatever he wants.
In the late aughts, when Alabsi lost everything in the real estate collapse, he moved on. He got into the limousine business, then went all in on blockchain. He built a token and an app and wrote a white paper.
After losing his limo company after a severe car crash in 2018, Alabsi needed steady income. He was “wandering” around Market Street near where he lived in the Tenderloin when he noticed the former Flying Falafel restaurant on Market and McAllister. Just like that, he decided to get into the restaurant business.
“I saw the concept, I liked it,” says Alabsi, who hails from the Middle East, clapping his hands. “I said, this is good, I could do that!”
Within a few months, he was a restaurateur. His restaurant Falafelland, first opened in 2018, quickly brought in rave reviews from food critics, and attention from companies like Twitter, which invited Alabsi to move his restaurant into its Market Street building.
“I was walking on 10th Street and telling my kids, ‘Look, we’re going to be in that building. It has two swimming pools,’” he remembered, certain he was going to make it big. “Whatever I owned, whatever — I put [it] all in the Twitter building, and I built the place myself.”
But again, lemons. He moved into the space in November 2019, shortly before the Covid pandemic reached San Francisco. He got his permit from the Health Department the same day that the city locked down in March, sending workers home and clearing the streets. Meanwhile, his landlord at the Twitter building demanded rent, and when he couldn’t pay, kicked him out.
“I knew I lost everything that minute,” Alabsi said, but hearing him talk you wouldn’t guess it. Last month he opened up a new Falafelland, back home in the Tenderloin, years after closing his first restaurant.
During the five years in between, he spent a stint homeless at a Los Angeles shelter with his wife, young children, and in-laws, traveled the country from Texas to Michigan looking for work, and suffered another series of injuries in another car wreck.
But Alabsi sees the path, and the steps that got him here, as his destiny.
“I realized that there’s nothing better than California,” he said. “And I realized there’s no better place, more comfortable and more aligned with my spirit and my heart as much as San Francisco.”
He smiles from a bench at Falafelland draped with deep red Middle Eastern patterns on velvet, beneath a wall-sized vinyl sticker of the old city of Sana’a, in Yemen — where Alabsi is originally from and left in 1988. (“I was active back home,” he said with a significant look. “For liberty and freedoms.”)
Alabsi’s seemingly boundless positivity, he thinks, comes from being raised by his single mother. Back in Yemen, the eldest of 10 siblings observed his mother cook for the homeless and adopt children who lost their parents. Now, at an age he refused to share — “I’m old,” he emphasized — Alabsi still tries to live his life in his mother’s way, helping his younger siblings and community wherever he can.
As you enter Alabsi’s shop, his enthusiasm is infectious. He hasn’t stopped at bringing back his acclaimed avocado-and-blueberry blended falafel. On Tuesday morning, he was workshopping his own take on Dubai chocolate.
“I’m gonna let you taste it,” Alabsi said, glancing over the top of his glasses with a marked twinkle in his eye. “I worked on it alllll morning! So, it’s awesome.”
His part of Golden Gate Avenue is quiet, and business is slow, but Alabsi won a sizable grant in November from the Office of Economic and Workforce Development to open the restaurant in a vacant Tenderloin storefront. Any setback, as always, he sees as a new challenge that only makes him stronger.
“I think that the future is brighter,” he said. “I just do whatever I do, to the best of my ability … what it comes out of it, it comes out of it.”