Halal Food Fest is a fusion of flavours
Foodie paradise aims to support small businesses
When Scarborough’s Shawn Johnson converted to Islam about seven years ago, there was one thing he really missed: Jamaican jerk chicken.
“Being a Muslim, you have to eat halal and what I find is that there’s no halal Jamaican food, really,” he said.
Halal meat must be slaughtered in a specific way, by a Muslim, and if Johnson didn’t cook it at home he had to do without. But with some help from his mom Rosemarie, he decided to “fill a niche” himself.
“It’s catching on, you know?” said Rosemarie, who came to Canada from Jamaica in 1975 and has been “cooking ever since.”
“We decided, might as well do a business out of it and let everybody get a taste of my cooking,” she added, standing beside a drum barbecue and a tent full of family members, busy serving up steaming plates of chicken and corn on the cob.
Rose’s Kitchen made its debut at the fourth annual Halal Food Fest, held in Mississauga over the long weekend, just one of the vendors combining different traditions for a unique, only-in-Canada multicultural mash-up.
Festival founder Salima Jivraj said she started it four years ago after her halal foodie blog exploded and she realized the market was “absolutely something that’s not tapped into.”
It’s now billed as the largest halal food festival in North America, attracting over 35,000 people last year.
From halal Mexican to Malaysian, Jivraj sees the event as a meeting place for different flavours, and a chance to support smaller businesses that might otherwise have trouble marketing themselves.
“One of our goals as organizers is to have diversity,” she said.
“People don’t want to see just the usual suspects.”