From BuzzFeed News
by Aisha Gani
After Zohra Khaku started reading up on where the food she was eating was coming from, she embarked on a year-long culinary journey visiting 700 restaurants across the UK.
The upshot of her nationwide tour was that she quit her job in finance and started her own business, Halal Gems, a website and apps reviewing her favourite halal food haunts.
Four years on, the company is about to launch Street Eats, which she describes as the biggest halal street food festival in Britain, hosting 24 traders cooking up a variety of cuisines in Old Spitalfields market, east London.
Street Eats certainly isn’t the UK’s first halal food festival, but with a growing number of halal-conscious diners – the market is now worth £800 million – sharing 34-year-old Khaku’s desire for better-quality, more ethically sourced halal food, she feels the timing couldn’t be better for a well-curated event for bona fide foodies.
Unlike similar events that are more of a celebration of all things Muslim, with stalls selling Islamic books and accessories, the star of Khaku’s festival is the food itself. It is part of a boom in the alcohol-free halal dining scene, driven by image-conscious, young people with disposable incomes who want an Instagrammable menu that matches their tastes and values.
Khaku, who is expecting 60–90,000 people to come through the gates on Friday and Saturday, says she wants to help change the way people think about halal food, which means “permissable” and approved by Islamic laws.
Sitting in a café in the Victorian market hall sipping a flat white, Khaku tells BuzzFeed News that lack of creativity when it comes to halal dishes is a pet peeve. “When you go on an airline and you order a halal meal, it’s always curry,” she says. “And that really bugs me because, to be honest, I don’t like curry that much. And if I’m going to eat curry, I might as well eat the curry that’s at home because it’s great.”
