A Halal Guy
As crowds march up and down 6th Avenue in the West Village, a man remains confined to the same rectangle, six days a week, from eleven a.m. to midnight. Boxed inside a halal cart, he is either cooking and taking orders or waiting and cleaning. Or chatting. The man takes small talk seriously, has mastered it. Good manners, he believes, matter in his business as much as the food. When a Yemeni customer jokes about the hurdles of the immigration bureaucracy, he serves empathy alongside chicken over rice. When a homeless couple pockets two sodas but only pays for one, he pretends not to notice. “They have done this before, but what are you gonna do?” he says. “We share the streets; I want no enemies.”
This sixty-year-old man asked me not to use his name and to call him Iman instead. He is afraid his adult daughters back in Egypt might read the piece and recognize him. They know that, for approximately two decades, their father has been doing business in America, but he has not told them that “business” means driving limos, yellow cabs, Ubers, and FedEx trucks or working long hours at restaurants. Before Iman left Egypt in the late 1990s, he was not a driver; he employed one. The family owned three cars. Most importantly, he shared a roof with his daughters and his wife. Now he just visits, two or three times a year, and then retreats to his role as a remote breadwinner.
With the halal cart, Iman says he will save up. With more savings, he will become the business owner his daughters think he is.
Iman enters a tradition so established it is enshrined in a stereotype. The Egyptian immigrant running a halal cart has been a fixture of the city’s sidewalks for the last three decades. He knows the success story of the Halal Guys, the midtown cart that grew into an international franchise. For years, he was their loyal customer and now he is striving to migrate to the other side of the counter: to become a halal guy himself.
This ambition started brewing during the pandemic. Iman and his friend, one with a college degree on Political Science and the other in Accounting, Uber drivers by profession, did the math. In pre-Covid days, their earnings averaged roughly a thousand per week. A prolific halal truck with a long line outside could make the same amount of revenue in a day. “It is about quality, marketing, location, and personality,” says Iman. “You have to sell yourself.” And like chefs getting ready to follow a recipe, the pair began gathering these ingredients.
It took them a year to get started. Iman made shawarmas for a restaurant in New Jersey for a few months just to learn the recipe of the sauce that marinates the meat. Following a year of Zoom lessons and exams testing their knowledge of hygienic rules, the partners acquired a New York City mobile vending license.
The pair got in touch with a garage, by which Iman means both the physical place where idle carts sleep and its owners, middlemen of the New York food cart industry. This garage, located in Chelsea, offered a package deal: for between $400 and $700 a week, depending on the season, the partners could get a cart, parking for the cart, and a hard-to-obtain mobile vending permit. Moreover, the garage would sell them the ingredients and clean their cart for a fee. The upfront investment, which included three months’ rent of the cart as well as a U-Haul van to transport the groceries and a generator, added up to $5,000.
The partners then searched a spot for their cart, a place that would tick all the boxes. City regulations stipulate a certain distance from the nearest residential property, the street corners, and subway entrances. An honor code dictates a first-come-first-serve policy so that no two carts would sit on the same block unless owned by the same person. Access to a bathroom might be the most subtle and most imperative of all issues. Iman picked a spot, between Washington and Waverley Place, equidistant to two diners, so he could alternate. Each time, he purchases the privilege by paying for a coffee or tea.
Iman strives to sell only good quality. He takes pride in buying the most expensive lamb the garage has to offer. If a customer orders falafel but the oil has not been changed in a while (it lasts three days), he warns them that the taste might suffer and suggests an alternative.
He talks a lot about his “marketing strategy,” fancy jargon for trying to please. He offers free drinks to new customers and, when someone forgoes it, he looks perplexed. “But it is free!” he reminds them. Actually, almost everyone who orders food gets a free drink: new customers to make them return, returning customers to make them loyal, people in his “target” per definition of “target,” a group that encompasses drivers and the insomniac N.Y.U. students in the dorm close by. He courts them with flyers, which he distributes in his only day off, and a free meal for every five meals.
Drivers can make or break a mobile food enterprise. They need cheap proteins, served quickly, and the option to buy them without losing sight of their vehicles. In a perfect symbiosis, carts will offer them a separate, faster line and excellent deals in exchange for their loyalty and positive word of mouth. Have a steady base of customers in the driving cliques and you will have a line. Have a line and more people will get in line.
A grade from health inspectors can shape the cart’s fate, too. Iman knows that they are lurking, so he stands ready. He has the thermometer for chicken and the thermometer for lamb and the temperatures exceed the stipulated minimums. He keeps the stainless-steel surfaces pristine and the cleaning products in sight, just in case.
Three weeks into launching the halal cart, Iman’s partner quit. Compared to Uber driving, this line of work offered more excitement — higher risk, higher rewards — but also a more exhausting regimen. Now, Iman hires employees to substitute for him after midnight. When his partner, a younger man, abandoned the ship citing physical unfitness, Iman’s determination did not flinch. “I am not going to give up. I am older and I am tired, but I will make it.”
The word “halal” first popped out of the signboard of a New York food cart in the early nineties. Arabic for “permissible,” halal is to Muslims what kosher is to Jews. It means no to alcohol, no to pork and its derivatives, and yes to other meats as long as the animal was slaughtered compassionately (and hence more expensively) according to the precepts of Islam. For example, the butcherer must use a sharp knife to minimize the suffering, isolate the animal, and invoke a one-line prayer “In the name of Allah, the greatest.” (That some mass production halal slaughterers play a recording of this prayer on loop instead of reciting it has angered more than one organization.) For the observant diaspora, it boils down to searching supermarket items for a stamp from a certifying body and frequenting trusted eateries hoping that they do not pass haram, impermissible foods, for halal.
The Egyptian trio that ran the first food cart to make the halalness of the meat explicit eventually became The Halal Guys. In the early days of business, they did not sell halal or call themselves anything. They began in 1990 and belonged to a community of Muslim mobile vendors that fed a community of mostly Muslim late night cab drivers. But the food that changed hands between them was not falafel and chicken but hot dogs and pretzels.
Hot dogs and pretzels represented a legacy from migration waves of yesteryears. In this city, as anywhere, the menu of the street has long depended on the culinary imagination of the newly arrived, as the book New York a la Cart chronicles. The “Apple Marys” selling fruit in the streets of the Financial District were Irish women who had fled the great famine of the mid-1800s. A Coney Island man from Frankfurt named Charles Feltman defied the idea that eating sausage requires sitting down by inventing the hot dog. In 1940, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia tried to decimate street dining, which he found ugly and unhygienic, by pushing it inside the Essex Street Market and eight other new buildings constructed for this purpose. But then newer immigrants quickly reclaimed the vacant streets, most notably the Greeks who came with the 1965 Immigration Act, introducing gyros and souvlaki to the sidewalks of the city.
Still, by the late 1980s, hungry Muslim cabbies relying on fast street food lamented the lack of choice. In Food and the City, a book that compiles stories of New York’s iconic restaurants, Mohamed Aboulenein, one of the three original Halal Guys, recounts what the taxi drivers would say to them: “We want a bigger dinner, a decent meal. No hot dog and sausages every night. Make us something better.”
The partners got a bigger cart, placed it on 53rd street and 6th Avenue, in the heart of Midtown, and the Halal Guys began selling what their customers were asking for. The menu boasted rice, falafel, chicken, kofka, and salad. Topping everything, two innovative sauces became their staples: a spicy one that resembled the Egyptian shatta or “hot sauce” and a yoghurt mix that copied the Greek tzakiki. Customers simply referred to them as red sauce and white sauce.
Of course, the Halal Guys were not alone in the game. A married couple had combined the wife’s Trinidadian chicken to the husband’s Pakistani rice and founded a local favorite called the “Trini Paki Boys,” in Bryant Park. An Afghan man called Najib Popal would grill diced chicken, stuff it into a pita, and sell it outside Radio City Music Hall.
But none of these competitors came close to the sensational might of the Halal Guys. The owners eventually opened more carts, then a brick-and-mortar restaurant, then other brick and mortar restaurants in other cities. Now they have an international franchise with more than four hundred locations worldwide. The original midtown cart, with its recognizable yellow and red slogan, still commands its Midtown corner. On a recent sunny Friday at lunchtime, its line was longer than the one at the Museum of Modern Art. To accommodate the demand, the owners put another cart just at the other side of the street. Other carts around them display similar names (“the Halal Boys,” for example), presumably to profit from the confusion of tourists.
The Halal Guys pioneered a sub-culture among Egyptian immigrants, defined its ethics, became its folk heroes. In the period of anti-Muslim hysteria after the September 11 attacks, they introduced the term halal to the secular foodie lexicon. Many Americans now think of halal as a cuisine. In their minds, it is synonymous with colorful rice, lamb or chicken wrapped in unfamiliar spices, and a choice between two sauces.
Iman was born sixty years ago in Alexandria, the ancient Mediterranean port city in Egypt. The only son of a schoolteacher turned import-export businessman, he describes his family as “close to rich — [having] enough to live good without working too hard.” He says he grew up in a house where C.N.N. and the B.B.C. and Radio Montecarlo supplied a constant background noise. He says his father complained of having a son who preferred to listen to adults discussing politics at the table than playing with other children outside. Iman remembers receiving little encouragement when his father learned about his career aspirations. “If you study Political Science and become a journalist, you will be poor,” was the sentiment his father conveyed.
Still, he went ahead and studied Political Science in Alexandria. Then, he used his connections to land a journalism job at the Saudi Arabian newsroom of Asharq Al Awsat. He arrived in 1988, in his late twenties. Two years later, the army of Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Fearing an occupation, the Saudis requested the United States to bring troops into the Kingdom. The imprecision of the Kuwaiti missiles targeting American military bases around Riyadh gave Iman a lot to write about: He took part in the team that chased stories of civilian casualties.
In one trip to Egypt, Iman met the woman who would become his wife, drove her along the coastline in a convertible. He returned to Alexandria to marry her and settle down in 1993. His search for journalism jobs back home proved fruitless; all of them were in Cairo. Instead, he and his brother-in-law took over his late father’s business, importing chemicals for agriculture, exporting potatoes, strawberries, and other Egyptian staples. But his heart was not in it. “I was a bad businessman,” he says. “I only liked to be a journalist and talk about politics.” By the time he went bankrupt, he had four daughters and a wife depending on him.
Shame overpowered Iman. His daughters were so used to seeing their dad as a well-dressed businessman, an eloquent former journalist. Everyone in their upper-middle-class milieu looked down on the only jobs that were left for him to do. If he had to start from nothing, he preferred to do it elsewhere.
Iman first tried to make money in Europe. Starting in 1999, he toured many capitals — Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt — and took whatever job he could find, operating cash registries, painting houses, washing dishes. In London, while he worked in construction, he sought to freelance for the same publication where he had worked in Saudi Arabia. But he says the assignments they offered, covering occasional visits of Middle Eastern princes here and there, made him feel insulted. He wrote for the newspaper for six months and then quit because construction paid double.
New York City lured him with the prospect of more money. He moved in 2001, the year in which the twin towers collapsed, and he turned forty. An Egyptian friend found him a job at an Italian restaurant, where he began working as a cashier. The owners called him Giovanni, a name they deemed more fitting for the establishment. Iman made his way from the register to the kitchen and found out he liked to cook. So much so that in 2003, he opened his own Italian restaurant in Rosselle Park, New Jersey. He enjoyed being his own boss and making pizzas not as Giovanni but as Iman.
But the enterprise seemed doomed from the beginning: He had taken a predatory loan. After paying two employees, the monthly expenses, and the onerous interest rates, he could squeeze no profit. He closed after a year and his creditors took control of the property he had hoped to buy. Thus, he began driving for a living. First, he drove FedEx trucks, but this gig would not offer enough vacation days to visit his family in Egypt two or three times a year, as he wished. He then switched to renting taxis and limousines, which gave him more flexibility.
During his stint as a limo driver, journalism briefly beckoned him again. He says a broadcaster at C.N.N., his passenger, learned his background and put him in touch with the network. Serendipity had it that Anderson Cooper’s team needed a Middle East expert, and he received a job offer. The salary amounted to half of what he made driving limos, so he had to decline. “It was a classy job, but I am a father, responsible for many,” he says. “I chose a non-classy job but higher income.”
Little changed in the following years. Uber displaced limos and yellow cabs, so Iman began driving Ubers. Throughout all the time facing the steering wheel, the halal carts of Manhattan became his companions. The food was always warm and available past midnight. He noticed that the line of the Halal Guys, the original Midtown institution, had more tourists and fewer drivers every time. The faster the service, the more careless the cooking. During the pandemic, business slowed down in the streets and he considered venturing to the sidewalks to sell the halal meals he had so frequently bought. With a cart in every corner, he knows competition will be tough, but he is happy cook again.
As soon as Iman arrives at his usual spot on the Monday of his seventh week in business, he notices the plastic windows from the back of his cart were on the ground, lying against the wheels. Someone has unscrewed them. He has been robbed.
Iman remembers the unlucky chain of events leading to this moment. On Saturday, he had not planned to work nonstop from 11 a.m to 4 a.m. but he had not found any employee to fill in for him after midnight. He powered through because weekend nights are pivotal for a business that caters to the hungry and drunk. At 4 a.m. on Sunday, he locked the cart and left it on the street; his plan was to wake up that morning and take it into the garage for a cleaning. But he woke up too late. By the time he called the garage, it was already full, and no slots were available for cleaning. The cart stayed parked and unprotected for more than twenty-four hours. Instead of being cleaned, it was broken into.
Inside, everything looks upside down. The cash jar that he keeps on a shelf in the left wall was empty. He calculates that the money lost amounts to $50, what he usually leaves for his employee to use as change. (Of course, on Sunday, no employee was there to need this cash, but habit prevailed.)
After surveying the mugged cart, an agitated Iman drives to Best Buy to purchase a security camera, possibly one with a light that would turn on automatically when intruders approached. Already in Best Buy, he realizes that it is almost 10 a.m. and that he actually has no time to buy anything. He needs to clean the cart and prepare for the lunch shift. Hence, he drives back to his spot, unloads the groceries he had purchased from the garage that same morning, and starts cleaning. His miniature kitchen looks like a hangover feels, wrecked by poor hygiene and theft.
The cart is a human size stainless steel box standing on four wheels. High-resolution laminated pictures of menu items framed in aggressively bright colors dress the exterior. An electric carrousel of neon letters spelling “The King’s Halal,” a name that Iman did not pick and wants to change eventually, crowns the vehicle. The generator that powers electricity and the gas turbine that powers the heat hide in their designated cubes at both sides of the cart.
Inside the cart, claustrophobia reigns. An imperative that all things — the ingredients, the utensils, the disposable plates and cutlery, the napkins and aluminum foil — must be at an arm’s length dictates the arrangement of all objects. Hence, everything that can be placed on a shelf has a designated shelf; the walls look like an exposition of sauce bottles and knives and boxes of napkins. On the left sits a white mini fridge that, Iman complains, is so cramped in that he cannot take anything out without taking everything out. On the right lies the gas fryer where he makes the falafel, the pressure cooker where he makes the rice, and a plastic trash can. In the front, a triple purpose table holds the chopping board, the stainless-steel grill, and the metal containers of rice, chicken, and lamb.
Iman is in a hurry to chop all the ingredients before customers start arriving. He does not make it. A sleepy blond woman, who was walking with two frantic blond little girls, orders a pita with falafel. She asks the girls if they want anything, but they say no. Iman realizes the oil is not yet hot enough and offers to make some tahini sauce in the meantime. The sleepy blond woman accepts. As he makes the sauce, Iman narrates the steps he is following. Then, he explains that he will not make falafel balls, like the ones they sell in other halal carts, but disk-shaped falafel, like the ones street carts make in Egypt. When he hands her the aluminum-wrapped treat, she says thank you, pays in cash, and leaves.
Another customer, a tall construction worker, arrives. Then, another one. A line forms quickly but Iman is still not ready. He warns the first customer that the waiting time will be ten minutes, a street-food eternity, apologizes for the inconvenience, and offers a free beverage. He takes other orders and offers all customers the same apology and the same free beverage. Some graciously accept them; others cross the street to another halal cart one block south. (This stings. Iman is a friend to all, but the rival halal cart rubs him the wrong way. Sometimes he can be heard denigrating its cuisine.) When the construction worker tries to pay, Iman realizes the credit card machine is not working and tries turning it off and on as the people in line look impatient. This does not do the trick and the construction worker ends up receiving a free meal.
“This business is preparation, preparation, preparation,” says Iman. “I was not prepared today and look! I lost so many customers.”
On a busier day, Iman can deploy the full range of terms with which he addresses his customers. Men are “boss” and “brother”; women, unfortunately, are “sweetie” or sometimes “madam”; drunk or impolite college students are “sir.” But on this day, he manages only a few “brothers.”
The pace slows down after 3 p.m. Then, it is just the occasional buyer of a water bottle or a pedestrian asking for directions to the West 4th street subway stop entrance. Iman has developed an intuition for dividing people into these two categories and often tells members of the second type “one more block this way” before they even ask. He uses these quieter hours to clean up the cart, replace the gas turbine, point his portable chair in the direction of the Mecca, and say a prayer.
Usually, the bustle would resume after 5:30 p.m. but this evening seems tranquil. Iman decides to call it an early night at 10 p.m. He has earned just $200. But better, more industrious days will come; now he needs to bring the cart to the garage and get some sleep.
Owning a halal cart is not like composing music. A single song can reach an infinite audience but, for a halal cart to feed twice the number of people, it must make twice the amount of food. Also, since expectations and common sense dictate that prices of street food should stay low, preferably in single digits, revenue increases only if quantity does. A mobile vending enterprise is hence a cult of volume. The length of the line in peak hours serve as a marker of success so transparent it is cruel. Ask halal vendors how much they make in a garage in a Chelsea segment of 36th Street and they will first remind you to watch your manners and then tell you something that apparently everyone knows: the ones with sprawling lines can make $1,000 a day, the ones with few and sporadic customers make about $200 and most of them fall somewhere in between but please stop asking the specifics. Iman, a newbie, had no problem telling me he was averaging a daily $500 and hopes to reach $700 soon.
Revenue flows unequally, but costs spread democratically. The halal vendors can all buy the ingredients from the garage at the same price. If you need help, the wage of a daily worker will set you back $150, give or take. The regular cleanup of the cart costs $100 each time and you should do it at least twice a week but who is counting? A day’s worth of refills for the gas tank and gasoline for the generator cost roughly $40. All in all, Iman’s costs come to just over $3,000 a week; if he earns $500 a day, on average, he clears $1,000, the same as he did when he was driving an Uber. But those numbers, common for a beginner, might hike up as he gets better.
The most painful expense a food cart business in New York City must incur is the permit: circa $20,000 once every two years for the right to exist. (Iman rents his permit on a weekly basis as part of his payment to the garage.) It’s a sort of rent for mobile restaurants — mobile restaurants that barely move and whose wheels exist precisely to exempt them from paying rent. And yet the dollars that flow out of the entrepreneur’s pockets do not add anything to the municipal budget. Instead, they land in the bank accounts of rentiers who were lucky enough to secure their permits years, perhaps decades, ago, and have been shrewd enough to renew it biannually. In a similar scheme that the New York Post calls “rent-a-vent,” disabled veterans, entitled to a special kind of permits in select city hotspots, lease their permits at comparable rates or hire cooks instead of operating the carts.
“The person who gets this money probably doesn’t even own a single utensil,” said Morad Nawar, who runs the halal cart on the corner of 45th Street and 8th Avenue, as he connected the cart to the back of his SUV in the garage on 36th Street.
Permitholders — conventional or disabled veterans — do not need to own utensils to shape the industry. Because the trade takes place in legal limbo and because any fines will ultimately show up in their mailboxes, they choose their permit renters carefully. Their pickiness creates a need for trust and trust often comes in the form of middlemen who build a reputation for paying no matter what and then recruit and train cooks to run the carts for them. Mousa Ahmed, one such middleman born in Cairo who oversees all five carts in the square by the Hudson Yards subway stop, sees this as the reason why halal vendors have remained so disproportionately Egyptian. He himself hires mostly friends or friends of friends, all from his home country. “If the first Egyptian in New York had studied medicine, we would all be doctors,” he says. “But when I came, we were all doing halal so that’s what I ended up doing.”
(The bonanza for permitholders might end soon: starting spring 2022, the city government will start adding new permits for the first time since it set the cap at 3,000 in 1983. By the end of 2032, the total number will reach 7,000.)
A blend between a middleman and a manager is what most successful halal cart owners end up becoming. Even The Halal Guys themselves eventually stopped cooking and started franchising. The steps seem clear enough. First, you start your own halal cart. As the line gets longer, you hire assistance. Then, you realize that a single U-Haul or SUV that you use to buy groceries and transport the cart to the garage can also accommodate another cart. Having made good on the lease of the first permit, a second one becomes easier to get. Then, maybe another one. The transition from halal cart worker to halal cart capitalist ends when you become big enough to negotiate wholesale prices for the ingredients. Sherif Samy, a Cairo-born immigrant, came to invest in twelve halal carts and two garages in Manhattan two decades after selling his first falafel. With his tiny empire, he put his two kids through college and bought a Porsche that he parks next to his employees’ halal carts every time he stops by to check in on them.
The last time I saw Iman was a sunny mid-December afternoon. As I approached his cart, I sensed trouble from a distance. He was speaking with a stern, uniformed man, and smiled awkwardly when he saw me, then stated the obvious: “This is not a good time, let’s talk later.”
I did not see his cart on the spot when I returned, two days later, so I called him. Apparently, two complaints had accrued to his cart, so health inspectors would have to review his permit before he could operate again. They told him he might as well wait for January 22nd, the day of the appointment with the authorities that decided whether his permit could be renewed.
He told me that he knew, without evidence, who had placed each complaint. The first, alleging his generator was too loud, must have been a woman who lived close by in the West Village and furiously told him, on his first day, that he had no right to put his cart there. When I asked him why he thought this woman would behave with such careless malice, he said: “Do you know what a Karen is?” The second complaint caused even more resentment because it was, unlike the first, undeniably true. It stated that he often left the cart on Sundays, his day off, on the spot instead of taking it to the garage, thereby breaking the rules. Who would have placed such a complaint if not his closest competitor, the owner of the halal cart one block south?
Just before this incident, I had seen Iman thriving. He had evolved into a routine, faced occupational hazards more gracefully. On the first times I met him, he did not know what to do with Wahee, a homeless man that kept showing up during lunchtime to ask for food, making customers feel awkward. Iman finally stroke him a deal. If Wahee came only during idle hours after lunchtime, he would get some food in exchange for taking the garbage out of the cart and dumping it in a trash can a few streets away. Iman told me he would have preferred to give the food for free, since this form of garbage disposal breaks the rules, but worried that, if he did, Wahee would spread the word. By creating a sort of contract, Iman convinced Wahee that this opportunity was available to him only.
Iman had also built a more reliable roster of employees on whom he could rely for late night shifts. Two of them formed a father and son duo: his ex-business partner and a charming student at Rutgers University.
“I am just not looking forward to working during Ramadan,” said the college student. “Making food all day but not being able to eat anything.”
Sometimes, as Iman chatted with customers, especially those from the Middle East or North Africa, the journalist in him would reappear momentarily. He never shied away from discussing Trump, Biden, philosophy, or democracy, even as the steam from the grill hindered communication. “Everywhere in the Arab world, the people are weak,” he said once in a conversation. “Only sometimes, governments are strong.”
Iman stopped answering my calls. I do not know whether he managed to go to Egypt over the holidays, as he wanted, or how he made money as he waited for his appointment with the authorities that would decide the fate of his cart. On January 28th, the Friday after the date of this appointment, I walked down 6th Avenue searching his cart. For a second, I thought I had spotted it but then I noticed the street name. I had walked one block south and the cart in front of me was not Iman’s but the one whose owner, Iman suspects, tipped the health inspectors. All halal carts look so similar; perhaps nobody else will notice his is gone.
