In 2017, Rahim Hashim was living in San Francisco, dismayed to discover that city’s near-total lack of the New York halal carts he loved. Feeling he had no other choice, he returned east, partly to pursue a Ph.D. in neuroscience at Columbia University but also, and more crucially, to get a decent platter of chicken and rice again.
It was at a favorite cart near Columbia’s campus that he had an idea. “I remember giving the guy a $5 tip and he was almost crying,” Hashim says. It was 2020, during the pandemic, and “he’d been working his ass off trying to just stay in business.” So, in January of the following year, Hashim launched his Instagram blog, The Halal Guys Guy, offering a mission statement of sorts: “Starting this Instagram to help local halal truck owners gain visibility and support,” he wrote. “I also just love halal food so taking any opportunity possible to eat more and share my passion with others.”
In New York, “halal” has two meanings: There is halal food, made according to Islamic dietary laws, and there are halal carts, the rice-and-meat stands that are ubiquitous on city streets. The cuisine — chicken, lamb, rice, red sauce, “white sauce” — is a mishmash of cooking from Trinidad, Egypt, Pakistan, and Greece, remixed into its own thing. The carts’ origins go back to 1990, and the most famous purveyor is the Halal Guys, which has expanded from a midtown cart to dozens of restaurants around the world. (Hashim’s review: “They used to have solid chicken, and now it’s just the driest,” he says. “You can’t throw enough white sauce on that stuff.”)
Since launching his blog, Hashim has published reviews of 50 different carts, and his map of halal vendors has received more than 300,000 views. For every review, Hashim posts photos of the food, the vendor, and a rating card that includes overall taste (out of five squeeze bottles of red sauce), cost (out of ten dollar bills), and freshness (up to five heads of romaine lettuce). Each offers some insight into Hashim’s tastes (“the lamb was more charred than I usually prefer”) and perspective. “I’m always a bit skeptical of trucks on higher-foot-traffic streets, and this truck unfortunately deserved the skepticism” is a typical note from his reviews. Hashim doesn’t claim to be a scholar, only an enthusiast, but with its earnest, passionate analysis, the Halal Guys Guy has shades of Zach Brooks’s Midtown Lunch (estbd. 2006) and Adam Kuban’s single-subject pizza blog, Slice (estbd. 2003). As one fan of Hashim’s, Michael Berry, tells me, “He is doing a great service.” He’s got a following on Reddit, too, where users tag him whenever someone posts about a halal cart (“It’s like a bat signal,” Hashim says), and he hosted a 30-person halal crawl down 14th Street last summer.
With all of this in mind, I reached out to Hashim to ask him about his top-five carts and to see whether he’d break down for me why they’re so impressive. With some exasperation, he admitted there were still many places he needed to go and whipped out a long list of vendors — the work of the Halal Guys Guy is never done — but he did offer his picks:
1. Mido’s
On the corner of Sixth Avenue and West 18th Street
This is the rare cart that Hashim goes to for both chicken and lamb — usually carts are noticeably better at one or the other. As the meat is prepared, Hashim points out how the meat gets a spritz of spicy oil on the griddle. He also likes the jalapeños, Cajun fries, and freshness of the rice. The spot does grilled onions well, so he always gets extra.
2. Farook Halal Food
East 14th Street btw. Third Avenue and Irving Place
Plate for plate, Hashim says that Farook has the best lamb in town. What makes the cart stand out for him, though, is how Farook himself builds his platters’ layers: rice, followed by meat, then white sauce, then chopped-up pita, then more white sauce, and finally a little more chopped-up pita. “A lot of places do pita, but they don’t actually add the second layer of white sauce,” Hashim says. Now, he asks other halal guys to build his plates in the same fashion.
3. Hooda Halal
On the corner of West 116th Street and Broadway
Like other utilitarian foods (see pizza), one of the most crucial qualities for judging halal is proximity. And Hashim is not above a bit of homerism. “I think the nature and the spirit of halal is to get things while you’re commuting or while you’re in passing,” he says. When he lived on 114th, Hooda was where he’d go on the way to work. He nevertheless ranks the lamb as one of his top three in the city and considers the rice to be especially fresh. “It’s underrated how good the rice is here,” he says. A small handful of Cajun-style fries thrown on top is like his version of icing on the cake. (And there are two locations, at both 116th and 115th Streets.)
4. Middle Eastern Halal Cart
On the corner of 86th Street and Fifth Avenue, Bay Ridge
The name of this street cart, which posts up outside Citibank, is as generic as it gets. The food, Hashim says, is anything but. A big reason why is the falafel. “I wouldn’t actually say anyone’s in the same league in terms of falafel,” he argues. Here, it’s oblong, not circular. “It has a perfect crunch, and they lather the white sauce on it,” he adds. On top of that, he gives the lamb a 10 out of 10.
5. Halal Kitchen
On the corner of 14th Street and Union Square West
In Hashim’s experience, the green sauce at most carts is missable. “It just makes the food more watery,” he says. Not so at Union Square’s Halal Kitchen. “It’s almost like the color of slime from Nickelodeon — it’s vibrant,” he says. The contents are a secret, but he’s deduced that there’s some jalapeño in there. “There’s no place that has green sauce quite like it, and I think that’s what makes it unique.”