Like New York City itself, halal cart chicken and rice wouldn’t exist without immigrants.
This now-iconic meal of chicken, rice, crisp salad, and creamy sauce—which New Yorkers can buy from street carts in every borough—is an amalgamation of ingredients and flavors from all over the world, all meeting inside one hefty takeout container.
It’s impossible to definitively say which cart at which street corner was the first to make the dish when it emerged in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
What’s easier to pin down is why it was created: to provide round-the-clock halal fare for the many Muslim taxi drivers zipping around Manhattan.
But it didn’t take long for everyone else to catch wind of the charms of street cart chicken and rice. It was quick, portable, cheap, and substantial. “The best $2.50 lunch in the neighborhood,” New York Times food critic Ruth Reichl declared in a 1995 column, after visiting a Midtown cart.
Decades later, halal carts are still providing quick lunches, dinners, and late-night grub to New Yorkers of all stripes, from students to office workers to tourists to, yes, cabbies.
If I was going to replicate all the smoke, spice, and savor that makes this dish so iconic, I knew I had to taste the real deal for myself. So I hopped a train from Boston to New York and hit as many carts as I could across the city. Quickly establishing my go-to order—chicken and rice with white sauce and a bit of extra hot sauce—I sampled versions from old stalwarts like The Halal Guys to newer sensations like Adel’s Famous Halal Food.
Informed by that research, I returned to the test kitchen ready to capture the essence of the halal cart in a recipe. What follows is my strategy for getting each component just right. Go behind the recipe for halal cart chicken and rice.
