Clichy-sous-Bois, France – Faiza Guenineche huddled with two friends in the booth of a fast-food restaurant across from her high school recently eating two all-beef patties, special sauce, cheese, pickles and onion on a sesame-seed bun.
But this is not the McDonald’s where she and her friends used to eat. This is Beurger King Muslim, a fast-food clone with an important difference: It is halal, serving hamburgers and fries that conform to Muslim dietary laws.
“I used to go to McDonald’s once a week, but all I could eat was the Filet-O-Fish sandwich,” said Guenineche, a fashionable French-Algerian girl in low- slung jeans and a tight top who, despite wearing her long hair loose, eats only halal. “Now I come here.”
American fast-food restaurant chains have long tailored their menus to local tastes and habits around the world, but one market they have largely missed is the growing Muslim population in Europe, 5 million strong in France alone.
Europe’s observant Muslims have had to thread their way through a world laden with pork-filled wursts and bloody beefsteaks, taking meals outside their homes at the occasional kebab shop instead.
Now there is Beurger King Muslim, whose name is a play on that of the famous American hamburger chain and the French slang word beur, which means “Arab.”
The restaurant’s logo is a globe with a burgundy ring around it and the Arab world covered by the letters BKM, which are also the initials of the restaurant’s three founders, Morad Benhamida, Abdelmalik Khiter and Majib Mokkedem.
It is the latest sign that France’s Muslim population, largely French-born second- generation immigrants, is coming into its own.
“En Faim!” declares the cover of the restaurant’s menu, a pun that means “Hungry!” but sounds like “At Last!”
There have been other efforts to serve up Western-style halal fast food. A restaurant called MkHalal has been serving halal burgers for years outside the southern French city of Lyon, and a British man from Pakistan has opened a string of halal chicken sandwich stands in Britain and France.
But Beurger King Muslim has the look and feel of the multinational restaurant chains it wants to give a run for their money.
“We’re playing in the big leagues,” said Hakim Badaoui, 37, manager of the Clichy-sous- Bois restaurant, adding that the company already has 30 would- be franchisees waiting in line, mostly in France.
The owners are working on a second outlet that will be double the size of the first and feature a drive-through window.
The restaurant adheres strictly to Muslim dietary laws, which prohibit consumption of alcohol or blood, as well as pork. The bacon on the bacon cheeseburgers is made from smoked turkey.
All of the meat used in the restaurant comes from animals slaughtered according to Islamic rituals and hung upside down to drain before butchering.
The various sauces and seasonings used by the restaurant are also scrutinized to ensure they do not contain traces of alcohol or fat from animals not slaughtered according to Muslim rules.
Representatives from an independent certification service visit the restaurant three times a day to make sure that all is halal.