Restaurant owner shelters and feeds
The owner of Ali Baba's Mediterranean Cuisine in New York has been creating shelter and donating food to people experiencing homelessness for eight years, and a video documenting the effort recently gathered 9,200 likes and 2,300 reposts. The clip highlights long-term community support rather than a one-off event, with social users amplifying the owner's sustained outreach work (x.com).
A Midtown Manhattan restaurant owner has spent years turning part of his business into overnight refuge for people sleeping outside. (thetablet.org) Ali Riza Doğan, who runs Ali Baba Mediterranean & Turkish Cuisine at 224 East 53rd Street, said he puts a sign in the window on very cold nights inviting people indoors to stay warm. Shelter seekers sleep in the restaurant’s heated vestibule, not the dining room or kitchen. (thetablet.org) Doğan told The Tablet he began the practice after his own first week in the United States in 1986, when he was 20, lost in New Jersey, and spent a winter night inside an unlocked building hallway. He said he still remembers that night and now keeps his vestibule open when temperatures plunge, including during a February 8 cold snap he described to the paper. (thetablet.org) The restaurant’s outreach has been public for years. In January 2018, PIX11 reported that Ali Baba was opening a vestibule with a heat lamp to people needing a warm place to sleep and saving food for homeless New Yorkers. (pix11.com) That 2018 report said two people slept there on one freezing Saturday night. It also said the restaurant had hosted a Thanksgiving dinner the previous year for about 100 homeless people. (pix11.com) Doğan said the effort continues beyond winter. The Tablet reported on March 12, 2026, that he joins other volunteers each Wednesday to serve food from his restaurant and other eateries to homeless people. (thetablet.org) Ali Baba remains an operating restaurant in Midtown, listing its address as 224 East 53rd Street in New York and taking reservations and orders through its website. That makes the outreach part of an ongoing business routine, not a one-day campaign tied to a fundraiser or holiday. (alibabany.com) The recent attention online landed on a practice that is already at least eight years old in public reporting and rooted, by Doğan’s account, in a memory from 1986. The story now circulating is less about a single viral night than a restaurant owner who kept doing the same work after the cameras moved on. (pix11.com)
