Steakhouses and Wagyu Burgers Are Changing Britain’s Halal Food Scene

For a long time, if you wanted to eat halal food in Britain, you went to a Punjabi eatery like London's Tayyabs or one of the restaurant's lining Manchester's "Curry Mile" and the Birmingham Balti Triangle. Alternatively, you could make do with a late night fried chicken shop.

But as Instagramming British diners become more aware of what they put in their mouths, demand for halal food that goes beyond curry houses and fast food chains has increased. Many restaurants now cater specifically to British Muslims wanting to eat more adventurously as well as in accordance with Koran teachings, which state that animals and poultry are slaughtered with a clean cut to the major arteries and blood drained from the carcass.

Street food eatery Roosters Piri Piri, which uses only "high quality" halal meat in its dishes boasts 35 outlets across the UK while premium halal steakhouse Steakout has expanded to nine London restaurants since launching in 2008. With the Muslim community estimated to increase to 8 percent of Europe's population by 2030 according to the Pew Research Center and Muslims eating proportionately more fresh meat than the rest of the British population, the halal restaurant industry looks set to grow.

I visit Burgista Bros in West London, a halal burger joint with two outlets in the capital and plans for further openings this year, to find out more.

"It makes good business sense to be able to provide a halal product to a wider audience than a non-halal one, especially given the huge Muslim population," managing director Chris Large tells me. "People want to eat something that's different because it's mostly chicken shops that are catering to the halal food market. Whereas burgers are a little bit harder, they're not impossible. That's the reason why we're doing it."

I ask to try "The Australian," a Burgista Bros special containing Wagyu beef, a fried egg, applewood cheese, turkey bacon, onion marmalade, and beetroot. There's a lot going on in terms of taste—the saltiness of the beef contrasting with the sweet onion marmalade and earthy beetroot.

Next, I head to a franchise of the US burger chain Fatburger, opened in London by former city worker Arif Hussein after he visited outlets in Dubai and LA and "fell in love with the concept of the Fatburger brand."

Being Muslim, the chain's halal menu appealed to Hussein but the decision to open Britain's first Fatburger was also a business-minded one.

"I think I'm filling an important niche. We still love fast food but we're now more health conscious," he says. "Hearing stories about what's in McDonald's burgers, we don't want those preservatives. I felt that the whole Fatburger burger concept was good from a health-conscious perspective."

This time, I opt for cleanest sandwiches on the menu: the grilled turkey and chicken burger. Served on a whole wheat bun, it comes with a generous helping of salad but not so much as to overpower the taste of the tender meats.

I'm not the only one to enjoy the British food scene's growing array of halal options.

"When I was little, going out for dinner meant going to Tayyabs. If the queue was too long, we'd go to Lahore Kebab House across the road," remembers London blogger Ayesha Razak, who writes reviews of halal restaurants at My Big Fat Halal Blog. "As great as both restaurants are, it got a little boring. Now that the halal market has expanded so much we've been visiting so many new places, I think the last time we went to Tayyabs as a family was in 2012!"

Following 2014's tabloid furore over PizzaExpress serving halal chicken without diners' knowledge and the release of shocking video footage from a halal slaughterhouse last year, many people are still wary of the meat. But Razak hopes that the increasing popularity of halal restaurants shows that attitudes are changing—something fellow Muslim food blogger Layla Hassanali of Halal Girl About Town is less sure of.

"I would like to think that it is not necessarily the 'attitudes' that are changing—halal restaurants have been around for decades with little to no objection from the general public—but perhaps the awareness and knowledge of halal food is," she says. "'What is halal?' 'Why eat halal?' 'What is the benefit of halal?' These are all questions that people have started to look into."

With new halal burger chains, steakhouses, and street food joints opening across the UK, they won't have to look far.