Whenever Muslim travelers are in a new city or town, they look for a Halal restaurant. One of the first things they do is type ‘Halal restaurants near me’ on a search engine and try to figure out if there are any such food outlets closer to where they are at a particular moment. To make their cities tourist-friendly, most administrators are ensuring that it has a good number of Halal restaurants to boast of.
The market for Muslim consumers is growing steadily all across the world and therefore, one should not have to face any difficulties in finding a Halal restaurant in any city or town in the world. However, there are a few things about Halal restaurants you should remember so that you can identify them easily.
Certification
To ensure their patrons that they serve Halal food, Halal restaurants obtain Halal certification from an organization or an independent third party. The certification given to them serves as testimony to the fact that they serve Halal food. Once a Halal certification body approves of a restaurant, you can be sure about the fact that it serves Halal food.
Apart from giving a certificate to the restaurant, Halal certification bodies also provide a certificate to the kitchen where all the food gets prepared. There are certain restaurants that wish to serve Halal food but also want to offer alcohol to their patrons. In such a situation, their restaurant cannot get a Halal certification but one of their kitchens can.
Ownership
If a restaurant proclaims itself to be a halal restaurant but you are not sure about it serving halal food, then you should try and speak to the owner. If the owner of the restaurant happens to be a Muslim, you can be quite confident about the fact that it is, indeed, a Halal restaurant. You can also request the owner to show you some certificate stating that it is a Halal restaurant.
It is not mandatory for Halal restaurants to be owned by Muslims. The owner of a Halal restaurant could well be a non-Islamic person. However, when a restaurant proclaims to be serving Halal food and its owner, too, happens to be a Muslim, there is little chance of it not being a Halal restaurant. If you are looking for Halal restaurants that serve high-quality halal food, you should check out the website myhalalrestaurants.com.
Seafood
According to Muslims, seafood is Halal. So, even if a restaurant has not been advertised as a Halal restaurant but serves only seafood, one can consider it to be a Halal restaurant. Even if such restaurants are not owned by Muslims and have not been approved by Halal certification bodies, one can go there to have Halal food.
The inclusion or exclusion of certain food items also serves as an indicator of whether a restaurant serves Halal or non-Halal food. Pork is considered to be non-Halal food. So, when you see a restaurant serving pork, you should know it is a non-Halal restaurant. Many Halal restaurants put a ‘No Pork No Lard’ board outside their premises.