Ambitious chefs are cooking plays on piri-piri chicken, birria, kimbap, and all kinds of nachos for Muslim diners with a late-night craving.

“WE BLEND THE CHEETOS, the finer the better, for coating purposes.” It’s the end of the second week of Ramadan on an arterial stretch of Coney Island Avenue, a five-lane highway linking one remote, mainly residential section of Brooklyn to another. The screaming thoroughfare is littered with fix flat shops amid storefront law offices, mosques, the usual fast-food chains (with actual drive-throughs), and produce stands with Arabic writing across the rusted, faded awnings. Inside one colorful storefront, over a soundtrack of reggaeton remixes of Afrobeat classics, I’m discussing fabricating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos dust with Tariq Abdul, a 29-year-old of Pakistani descent from Coney Island, who co-owns and operates the Brooklyn location of Fatima’s Grill, a viral halal fusion restaurant with six more franchises across the country, including several locations in California, one in Cleveland, Ohio, and one in Livonia, Michigan.

Cheetos are a foundational item on the Fatima’s menu. They add a textural element when stuffed in carne asada burritos as whole pieces, laced into bowls of mac and cheese, and wedged between spicy chicken tenders in a sandwich. They can be pulsed into dust (my lesson this afternoon) that Fatima’s uses for flavoring sprinkled over tacos or disco fries, or rolled onto the side of a smashed beef cheeseburger that has been dunked halfway in liquid cheese as a binder. I ask Abdul what kind of crowd he typically gets on nights like this Thursday, leading up to the weekend, when Fatima’s stays open until 3 a.m. “In the evenings until 9 to 10, it’ll be families, groups of friends. But late night, honestly, it’s a lot of drunk and stoned kids.”

Those kids are participating in a ritual now several generations old in New York: eating “halal” when you’re fucked up. For decades, late-night partiers all over the city have exited from bars or hotboxed apartments and headed to sidewalk carts and bodegas to order griddled chicken or lamb on flatbread, or over rice, or with fries, or perhaps with a wilted mesclun salad if they want to exercise restraint, which is then slathered in a yogurt-spiked white sauce (heavy on the garlic) and latticed with molten-red hot sauce. It is a rich fourth meal for the inebriated folks powering through a long night of consuming mind-altering substances—or a relief for someone just getting off an all-night shift.

Halal is, of course, not a cuisine in principle. It translates from Arabic as “permissible,” and in culinary terms, it refers to how meat is processed and treated according to standards laid out in the Quran. But in New York, “halal” has become a shorthand for describing a specific portable comfort cuisine produced by a Muslim diaspora, prepared with heart and a healthy dose of MSG, by chefs primarily from the Middle East and South Asia. It was food predominantly by and for immigrants seeking quick and affordable tastes of home. “These restaurants weren’t opened to get a Michelin star or to get in the Times. They saw a need in the community for, like, taxi drivers to have a place for lunch or dinner during a 15-hour shift where they can grab something to eat off their lap in their car,” says Jiniya Azad, who runs the popular website and Instagram account Muslim Foodies.

That context changed in the late ’80s with the rise of halal street carts in New York, which birthed a class of curious lunch seekers after being popularized in the early 2000s by upstart food blogs like Eater and Midtown Lunch. Carts and stalls have always served as entry-level food businesses for immigrant populations in New York, and chicken over rice defined the ’90s, as carts began springing up around the city, where the dish took on the context of indulgent drunk food you’d eat out of a clamshell on someone else’s stoop. The last 30 years have seen the cuisine establish itself far beyond New York City, as some businesses used their popular carts as a springboard to build national brands—like the Halal Guys, which currently boasts locations in 18 states across the country and four other countries around the world. Now a generation of kids who grew up in this ecosystem are challenging, perverting, and redefining halal cuisine in America.

THIS SHIFT ARGUABLY begins with Fatima’s Grill, founded nine years ago in Southern California by Ali Elreda, a Lebanese chef who was born in Dearborn, Michigan, raised in Los Angeles, and began his culinary journey in the middle of an eight-year bid in a federal penitentiary for intent to distribute cocaine. “I grew up eating traditional Lebanese food in the house—hummus, lots of kebabs, shawarma. But in LA, around the Latino community, I fell in love with Mexican food, only I couldn’t find any that was halal, so I wanted to put those two cuisines together,” Ali says. “I saw a lot of similarities: The rice, obviously. They have al pastor, we have shawarma. The tortilla and the pita. It made sense.”

The resulting menu Ali created offered “traditional” iterations of both halal cart cuisine and Mexican food, mainly featuring shawarma stuffed into tacos, burritos, and quesadillas, but it was extraordinary for the instances of cultural bleed, offering falafel burritos with mac and cheese and shawarma crunch wraps, with the option (of course) to add Cheetos in some form to everything. A halal restaurant that was offering not just optionality of cuisine but that was willing to have fun with its menu immediately resonated with food-curious Muslims and the greater online food community enchanted by Fatima’s colorful fast food.

Today “halal food” is a rapidly expanding restaurant genre, pulling from cultures around the world. There are Mexican menu staples at restaurants like Tacobee’s, but also French bistros like Atelier December; hot chicken at Chick-N-Smash, Fluffies Hot Chicken, and Namkeen; Desi pizza at Union Food Mart; and pan-Indian and Chinese at Asian Flavors Halal Fusion Kitchen. There is latent recognition that restaurants catering to halal clientele outside traditional Middle East cuisines is a good business model, which can be seen at Fevy’s Korean Fried Chicken in Elmhurst, Queens, a halal restaurant owned and operated by four non-Muslim Korean friends who are serving Korean staples like tteokbokki, buldak, japchae, and, of course, wings and sandwiches with stoner-favorite add-ons like onion rings, tater tots, and truffle parmesan fries.

In fact, all of these restaurants embed unorthodox pairings and references in their menus, and the most exciting were founded in the name of genreless, madcap experimentation while allowing Muslims access to a spectrum of cuisines not typically served in a traditional halal setting. What is fascinating is the types of foods these chefs and the halal dining public have zeroed in on. It’s all Korean fried chicken, burgers, and burritos—cooking that is almost exclusively within the purview of greasy, fatty, delicious junk—dressed in rich sauces and presenting an array of textures that echo the halal cart experience while reflecting the “more is more” ethos of a kid who just smoked a blunt at 3 a.m. and has their parents’ stocked fridge and pantry at their disposal.

It is a case of chefs recognizing a cuisine’s application in culture and finding completely different but similarly utilized foods in radically diverse cultures all over the world and incorporating them into theirs. Unsurprisingly, this mutant, funky, playful, colorful food style has found fans and followers among Muslim and non-Muslim foodies alike on various social media platforms. It is a rapidly expanding vision of a global menu of munchies that has inspired imitators and innovators to continue fucking with the idea of what halal food is and what it can be.

“I’m completely sacrilegious,” admits Antony Nassif, the chef-owner of Hen House, which resides in a tiny railroad space on First Avenue in the East Village, the current vanguard of boundary-pushing next-generation halal. “In Lebanon, there’s been so much war, so much shit has been fucked up, they’re like, don’t change our fucking food.”

Nassif was born and raised in Montreal, and bred in kitchens with the decadent, stoned chefs from institutions like Joe Beef and Au Pied de Cochon, but an opportunity to run a restaurant in Lebanon, where his dad is from, exposed him to the authentic version of shawarma New York’s halal carts are riffing on. He fell in love and wanted to bring the experience to America. “I wanted people to be able to come and have shawarma lashed with toum and pickles that brings you back to Lebanon. But how many shawarmas can you make before you’re bored? So this is my science experiment, my laboratory where I’m working out all these ideas,” he says. Nassif’s regularly changing menus feature riffs on kimbap, piri-piri chicken, and birria, alongside Frankenstein monsters like falafel nachos, something he calls “pita pasta,” and a cheesy knafeh pancake that has gone viral on Instagram, TikTok, and traditional media sites like Eater and Grub Street for its perverse, decadent cheese pull, seemingly custom-designed for a post-wake-and-bake brunch.

Azad, of Muslim Foodies, has been following the halal scene her entire life. She sees its recent explosion as a movement, the full-throated expression of a restless second generation of kids and their melting pot–honed palates—of Muslim Americans finding their voices and expanding the definition of who they are through the diverse, colorful, spicy food they snuck while their parents weren’t around. “We’re tired. We’re tired of hiding. We’re tired of bottling up our identity. We’re tired of fitting into this cookie-cutter definition of what people expect us to be like or behave like post-9/11. We have built this halal community that is exploding with not just new restaurants but new kinds of halal restaurants, and it’s really exciting,” she says.

“But how many shawarmas can you make before you’re bored? So this is my science experiment, my laboratory where I’m working out all these ideas.”

ON A RECENT Sunday, I was fasting with my wife out of solidarity, and we live near Fatima’s Grill, so we decided to order delivery for iftar. It was the first day the fast was extended by the beginning of daylight saving time, and I was approaching psychotropic levels of hunger, which I decided to exacerbate. I haven’t smoked in years, but in the name of “journalism,” I hit an incredibly potent THC pen I bought from an unlicensed bodega in Flatbush. We ordered a double hot Cheetos burger, a birria crunch wrap, a Lebanon trio burrito with chile relleno, and mixed Cheetos-dusted tacos.

The crosscut burrito laid out in front of me was a fucked-up umami goulash of wilted fries cooked in curry spice and lamb fat. There was romaine, chopped tomatoes, steamed rice, macaroni, beans, hummus, and ripe avocado, all rolled in a flour tortilla and slathered in liquid cheese. All the dishes kind of tasted like permutations of the same idea, of Indian and Mexican and “halal” flavors mashed together, dosed with Fatima’s proprietary Lebamex hot sauce and covered with synthetic citric acid–spiked, cayenne-fired powdered cheese that all combined for a flavor bomb that nuked every quadrant of my tongue.

Halfway through the meal, I began sweating and crying and levitating several inches above the chair I was seated at, surrounded by my family. I could see myself cast across decades eating similar meals high off blunts and joints and bong hits, food from halal carts and taco stands and delivery app Indian, and I felt gross but I could also clearly see the true face of a monotheistic god worshipped under many names and recognized by as many faiths, who stared deep into my soul from the bottom of the ruined takeout clamshell I was picking morsels of glory out of with chopsticks. And God understood me and accepted me and loved me and relieved me of my gluttonous shame, and so I kept eating, bathed in ethereal, fat greasy fingers of holy light.