As soon as I meet them, Waqas Shakeel, who goes by Shak, and his brother Farrukh— co-owners and founders of the innovative culinary food cart Halalish—begin showing me how to identify a counterfeit bill.
“You scratch the collar with your nail,” Farrukh says, holding out a folded bill for me to touch. “You can tell by the texture on the collar whether it’s counterfeit or not.”
It is only one of many lessons the two brothers learned while growing up in the food industry. After arriving from Pakistan, Shak and Farrukh’s parents opened a series of eateries in Queens, including a Pizza Hut and Au Bon Pain, and once operated all the concession stands in Battery Park. They remain one of the primary distributors of Halal meat (prepared according to Islamic law) to the food carts that have sprouted up all over New York.
Shak, only 23, speaks in the methodical voice of a person with twice as many years of business experience, though still with all the excitement of a young entrepreneur.
“We eat Halal food at home, but once you’re out, it’s either street meat or extremely greasy food,” he says, pointing to the nearby Halal carts. “We wanted to show people that there is so much more to Halal food than chicken over rice.”
It is no small task, and Shak hopes to gain momentum by staying open from 5 a.m. to 3 a.m.
Indeed, Halalish, a play on “Halal” and “Delicious,” serves lean chicken burgers, seasoned beef burgers, lamb dishes, and even tilapia. The menu is varied not just for a Halal cart, but for any restaurant. This is perhaps because Shak sees his cart, parked outside the Brooklyn Law School, not as an independent eatery, but as the first location for the Halalish brand. With it, he hopes to change the way people perceive Halal. For example, there are no clip-art photos of food plastered on the sides of the Halalish truck.
Halaish uses only fresh ingredients, which Shak buys every day. Here, too, Shak seems to have picked up another cunning business lesson—unlike many other food carts, Halaish offers complimentary sides and toppings. Which is to say, at Halalish the avocado isn’t extra.
“It’s Brooklyn,” Shak says, “people want to eat better here.”
And while many would be reluctant to eat fish prepared on a food truck, Shak puts a great deal of work into his choice of ingredients and mode of preparation.
“When we started selling fish, people realized that we take our ingredients seriously,” he says. “You really can’t mess with seafood. Food like this needs to be fresh, or people aren’t going to eat it.”
Shak has dreamed up a menu that speaks to the character of their whole operation. Yes, you can get lamb and chicken over rice at Halaish, but they also serve a Halal avocado chicken burger with chipotle sauce on a brioche bun.
“I was a fat kid,” he says, laughing and patting himself down. He has lost the weight, but still loves hamburgers. “We wanted to open a halal burger joint. It’s American food, but it’s Halal.”
It is hardly 9:30 a.m., but in the midsummer heat, Farrukh is replenishing the petrol-powered generator attached to the back of the red food cart. Soon, the brothers hope to open a second cart, and then eventually operate five at various points around the city.
Shak tells me that soon MOVE Systems, a company that specializes in innovative mobile food technology, will provide Halaish with four solar-powered food carts. Typically, businesses are allocated only one truck, but Halalish will get four, in part due to their prime location right off the 2 Train stop at Borough Hall. Halalish will be one of the first food operations in the city to receive these green trucks.
“The ultimate goal,” Shak says, putting a hand on his cart, “is to open a brick-and-mortar location.”
Between operating the Halaish cart and helping with his parents’ business, Shak is a bit of a hypomanic. Usually running on less than four hours of sleep a night, Shak pick ups the meat from a butcher and seasons it at least 24 hours before with a proprietary mixture of spices. The meat is hand-seasoned, not blended in a machine.
Shak takes this approach to all of his food preparation. As at higher-end burger joints like Five Guys, Halaish burgers are made on the spot. The cook pulls individual patties off of a large slab of meat, and shapes and cooks them as they are ordered. There is no deep freezer here. Even with the classic Halal cart dishes, Shak finds a way to enliven them, using grape tomatoes instead of tasteless tomato slices and romaine lettuce instead of iceberg.
Shak spends hours in the kitchen, tinkering with various dishes and ingredients—never following a recipe, working entirely on intuition—until he finds something that works. Even his chipotle sauce took a great deal of time to perfect. He wanted something that functioned similarly to a Big Mac sauce, but hotter and better suited to complement his burgers. Shak’s homemade hot sauce mixes fruit with peppers, in order to temper the heat with sweetness and to add a bit of texture.
The brothers know that Halalish must set itself apart from nearly a dozen other Halal carts operating within a few blocks, many of them also open late at night. And a branch of the beloved Shake Shack is just across the street. But neither Shak nor his brother are afraid of being so close to the much-loved burger institution. They are confident in their burgers, and that there is something for everyone on their menu.
As we are speaking, Shak hands a bottle of water from his cooler to a kid waiting for a breakfast sandwich and warns him to stay hydrated in the heat. “Trust me,” Farrukh interjects, before telling a story about nearly dying in the heat one summer day. Farrukh’s off-the-cuff banter and narratives sound like routines some comics might have spent hours shaping.
“He makes everybody laugh,” Shak says. “It makes running a 22-hour business much easier.”
Photo credit: Benjamin Baruch