When Jereis Khawaja launched Truboy BBQ with nationwide shipping in 2020, he wrote a mission statement for the website that promised to give everyone in the U.S. the opportunity to enjoy Texas barbecue. The Houston native read the statement every day, but he eventually realized it wasn’t true for many Muslim and Jewish customers because of cross contamination with Truboy’s most popular item, pulled pork. “By eliminating one product from my menu, my mission statement could become a true statement,” Khawaja says. In March 2021, he switched to only smoking halal meats, including brisket, lamb, and chicken.Last month brought the next big transformation of Khawaja’s business. Truboy BBQ Market, the first physical location for the brand, opened in Missouri City, outside Houston. Inside, a wall…

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Salahodeen Abdul-Kafi remembers traveling from his home in Columbia, Missouri, to Kansas City as a boy. As Muslims, his family kept to a strict halal diet at home, but when they traveled, the rules were relaxed. “Back then, there were literally zero halal options at any restaurant,” he says. They usually sought out beef, and he was fond of the brisket at Oklahoma Joe’s BBQ (now Joe’s Kansas City Barbeque). As halal options became more plentiful over time, the family stopped eating non-halal. Abdul-Kafi recalls the burnt ends he ate as a fourteen-year-old with a unique sort of reverence, because it would be another fifteen years before he would eat barbecue again.In 2019, Abdul-Kafi was living in the Bay Area of California, where he had…

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Mohamad Kharboutli had an established restaurant chain overseas before he opened Levant BBQ, in the Galleria area of Houston, late last year. Born in Syria, he owned several locations of Saltenas restaurant in Moscow, Russia, and Amman, Jordan. After moving to Texas in 2009, he brought three locations of Sult’an Pepper, serving a halal Mediterranean menu, to various Houston food courts. Despite the punny name perfectly suited to reference the typical smoked meat rub, Sult’an Pepper doesn’t serve Texas barbecue. Kharboutli chose the moniker Levant BBQ for his first restaurant serving fully halal Texas barbecue.“We put everything for the service in front of the people,” Kharboutli told me when I asked about the lineup of smokers directly behind the serving line. Customers can watch as…

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