Hollis Johnson/Business Insider
- The Halal Guys is a New York City-based chicken, gyro, and rice chain that's quickly expanding nationally.
- Mediterranean food is becoming increasingly popular in the US, with chains like Cava and Noon finding success in cities all over.
- We visited one of its locations and found its good, cheap meals to be a tremendous deal.
New York City is home to so many iconic cultural institutions, it's difficult to count them all: Central Park, Seinfeld, the Statue of Liberty, the charmingly disintegrating subway system - the list goes on.
But one revered New York icon is something a little unexpected: The Halal Guys. What started as a hot dog cart on the streets of Midtown Manhattan in 1990 has exploded into a hugely popular nationwide chicken-and-rice chain.
And The Halal Guys is striking while the iron is hot, setting its eyes on further franchising and expansion as America's taste buds become more interested in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisine. Despite having started as a business to feed late-night Muslim cab drivers at the end of their shifts in NYC, Halal Guys executives now say that roughly 95% of the chain's customers don't even follow halal diets, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The chain has 61 US locations - plus a handful more internationally - scattered fairly liberally from coast to coast. But as it aims to further saturate America, one wonders: does it have what it takes to make it in Milwaukee as well as in Miami, in Sioux City as well as in San Francisco? We visited the chain to find out.
