Clichy-sous-Bois Journal

The Market McDonald's Missed: The Muslim Burger

By CRAIG S. SMITH

Published: September 16, 2005

CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, France

- Faiza Guenineche huddled with two friends in the booth of a fast-food restaurant across from her high school here on a recent day eating two-all-beef-patties-special-sauce-lettuce-cheese-pickles-onions-on-a-sesame-seed-bun.

But this is not the McDonald's where she and her friends used to eat. This is Beurger King Muslim, a fast-food clone with an important difference: it is halal, serving hamburgers and fries that conform to Muslim dietary laws.

"I used to go to McDonald's once a week, but all I could eat was the Filet-O-Fish sandwich," said Ms. Guenineche, a fashionable French-Algerian girl in low-slung jeans and a tight top who, despite wearing her long hair loose, eats only halal. "Now I come here."

American fast-food restaurant chains have long tailored their menus to local tastes and habits around the world, but one market they have largely missed is the growing Muslim population in Europe, five million strong in France alone. Europe's observant Muslims have had to thread their way through a world laden with pork-filled wursts and bloody beefsteaks, taking meals outside their homes at the occasional kebab shop instead.

Now there is Beurger King Muslim, whose name is a play on that of the famous American hamburger chain and the French slang word "beur," which means "Arab." The restaurant's logo is a globe with a burgundy ring around it and the Arab world covered by the letters BKM, which are also the initials of the restaurant's three founders, Morad Benhamida, Abdelmalik Khiter and Majib Mokkedem.

It is the latest sign that France's Muslim population, largely French-born second-generation immigrants, is coming into its own. "En Faim!" declares the cover of the restaurant's menu, a pun that means "Hungry!" but sounds like "At Last!"

There have been other efforts to serve up Western-style halal fast-food. A restaurant called MkHalal has been serving halal burgers for years outside the southern French city of Lyon, and a British man from Pakistan has opened a string of halal chicken-sandwich stands in Britain and France. But Beurger King Muslim has the look and feel of the big multinational chains that it wants to give a run for their money.

"We're playing in the big leagues," said Hakim Badaoui, 37, manager of the Clichy-sous-Bois restaurant, adding that the company already has 30 would-be franchisees waiting in line, mostly in France. The owners are working on a second outlet that will be double the size of the first and feature a drive-through window.

Behind the counter at what Mr. Badaoui hopes will be the flagship of a fleet, several veiled women in yellow-collared burgundy shirts with the logo on their backs shuffle fries into paper containers and pack steaming hamburgers into boxes while a movie about the life of the Prophet Muhammad plays on a flat screen television over their heads.

"What does your religion demand of us, emir?" a bearded man asks a band of desert Arabs on the screen. "It demands that you believe in one God," one of them replies.

The cash register lights up with "Salamalekum," Arabic for "Peace Be With You," after each sale.

Sabah Kilijanski, her round face framed in a beige veil, sat down with her two children. She was having a Double Koull Cheeseburger (Koull, is a play on the American slang "cool," and the Arabic word "to eat"). "I feel at ease here, because I'm wearing a veil myself," she said as her toddler, Adam, peeked into his colorful children's meal box decorated with a cartoon clown. The meals come with brightly colored plastic toys, just like at McDonald's.

She said it also made her happy to see veiled women working. Muslim head scarves are banned in French public schools, and women working for the government are not allowed to wear them to work on the theory that such overt religious symbols are divisive. Many private employers also avoid hiring veiled women, making it hard for strictly observant Muslim women to find jobs.

The restaurant has other details to make French Arabs feel at home, from the Arabic-style font on the menu to toilets fitted with hoses for people unaccustomed to using paper. The restaurant is open from 11 a.m. to 11:30 p.m., daily except Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, when it starts business at 4 in the afternoon and closes at midnight.

Most important, the restaurant adheres strictly to Muslim dietary laws, which prohibit consumption of alcohol or blood, as well as, of course, pork. The bacon on the restaurant's bacon cheeseburgers is made from smoked turkey.

All of the meat used in the restaurant comes from animals slaughtered according to Islamic rituals and hung upside down to drain before butchering. The various sauces and seasonings used by the restaurant are also scrutinized to ensure that they do not contain traces of alcohol or fat from animals not slaughtered according to Muslim rules.

Representatives from an independent certification service visit the restaurant three times a day to make sure that all is halal.

Mr. Badaoui, who once ran halal pizza shops, said the restaurant had hired a halal company to make a secret sauce for its signature burger, a Big Mac look-alike called a BKM.

He said a lot of people wanted to put a political spin on the place, but added that - unlike the creator of France's Mecca Cola, who wanted to give people angry at the United States an alternative to Coke - Beurger King Muslim's owners did not have politics in mind.

"It's business," he said. "We're here to make money."

It seems to be working. So far, the restaurant is averaging 800 transactions a day. The only thing on the horizon that looks like it could derail the expansion is Burger King, which Mr. Badaoui said had been in touch.

"We've heard from them, but I don't want to say more," he said. "Right now it's between the attorneys."

Ariane Bernard contributed reporting from Paris for this article.