While living in Portland, Oregon, I was commissioned to write a piece about Ramadan food traditions in America. It was 2017. Donald Trump had just been inaugurated, and an editor wanted to publish more sympathetic and rounded images of Muslims in the face of Trump’s “Muslim ban.” As I visited mosques and community centers across the city, I kept hearing the same thing from Muslim teens: During Ramadan, especially after leaving the mosque late at night, they love to visit Portland’s famed doughnut chain Voodoo Doughnuts. Why? They love the cheekiness and the idea of eating something seemingly haram—it is not—at a place that serves doughnuts with a Satan sign on it, and another called the “Cock-N-Balls.”
I was certain the editor would love this angle and dispatch a photographer to capture Muslim teens eating doughnuts next to Portlanders exiting the club. Instead, he went in a different direction: He asked me to write about kebabs.
This happens just about every Ramadan. A publication—often with the best of intentions—will treat Ramadan food as if it is a pristine relic imported from abroad, the implication being that Muslims are foreign and exotic too. I was happy to see that The New York Times has dedicated a section for Ramadan recipes, but I wish it included more of the cultural mash-ups that many Muslims adore during iftar. There is one for lamb biryani, and another for carrot maqluba, but not one for such as keema on cheese pizza, a dish my brother adores. Pottery Barn even started selling a collection of Ramadan dinner plates decorated with green palm trees photographed with baklava on top.
As a California-born Indian American Muslim, what I crave most in Ramadan is a plate of nachos, smothered with extra cheese and sour cream, topped with my mom’s ground beef keema. Sure, Ramadan food can be kebabs and baklava, but Ramadan food, especially in America, defies boxes and is its own delicious, mischievous thing.
Life as a Muslim in America, for me at least, has always been about rules. Don’t be too loud. Condemn this. Condemn that. But for one month of the year, my parents allowed me to be naughty, to be big, to be contradictory. I have slipped in my faith, but I get it back each Ramadan, if only because the month is so damn fun. And yet, articles on Ramadan food in America are often dour and boring.
I wanted to capture the playful side of being a Muslim in America, to show how Muslim American life and cuisine is an ongoing process of reinvention, negotiation, and subversion. I reached out to Muslims across the country and asked them about their Ramadan food traditions. I heard variations of foods that surprised me, amused me, and made me eager to emulate.
Mash-Up Foods
Farhan Mustafa grew up in North Carolina and won a James Beard Award last year for his essay “Immigrant Spaghetti” that explores how immigrants doctor up spaghetti in unique ways. In Ramadan, his mother would serve Campbell’s Chicken Gumbo soup mixed with Pakistani-style bhindi to him and his brothers. These days Mustafa’s Ramadan cravings include adding Ruffles potato chips to daal and rice and eating Arby’s roast beef sandwiches, since they had a 5-for-$5 promotion that happened to fall during Ramadan when he was a kid.
Rima Zalghout, who works at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, said that her Ramadan spread always includes the traditional Lebanese tabbouleh salad, along with steak, hamburgers, and noodles.
A few years ago, Dearborn started a festival to celebrate suhoor, the meal Muslims eat in Ramadan before the sun rises that is a local draw and this year attracted close to 15,000 people. I went a few years ago, and joined roughly a thousand families from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. in a hotel parking lot eating, gossiping, and praying. The runaway hit last year was a grilled cheese sandwich layered with sujuk sausage from a place called “Corn on the Corner.” Houston recently launched its own all-night suhoor fest with items like waffle on a stick, shawarma, and, of course, Texas-style BBQ.
Muslims in California told me that In-N-Out Burger is quintessential Ramadan food. Many said they only go to In-N-Out during Ramadan as a sort of treat they give themselves one month a year. For Zara Zaidi, a Pakistani American who lives in the Bay Area, goes further saying that In-N-Out’s animal-style fries—fries covered with cheese, grilled onions, and secret sauce—“hit with the same satisfaction that pakoras or samosas do.”
Inventing New Traditions
Zaheer Maskatia, who lives in DC, observes something he calls “Fat Friday,” in which he eats as unhealthy as possible the Friday before fasting begins. Can Anbarlilar, a Turkish American Muslim, loves to hang out at diners in San Francisco during Ramadan. “I love being around post-partyers, EMTs, cops, and other city creatures of the night. I enjoy contributing my own spin on suhoor to the mix of vibes in one of the only 24-hour establishments in the city,” he said. Teresa Kane, a convert to Islam, hosts a pizza iftar party for queer Muslims in Portland, Oregon. “I don’t have to pretend to be something I’m not just because I’m Muslim,” she said. One person in Los Angeles told me that she hosts an iftar where signature mocktails (and sometimes cocktails) are served with cheeky names like “the Angry Muslim” and “72 virgins.” In Sacramento, they recently started Cars and Iftar, where young Muslims show off their tricked-out cars while breaking the fast over halal BBQ and chai.
Embracing Nostalgia
Zara Chowdhary, an author who lives in the Midwest, said that growing up in India, her dad would treat her to pizza after fasting. She now recreates that tradition by going out for pizza with her son and partner. She also thinks of Chinese food as an essential Ramadan meal, because when she first moved to rural America, the only food that could give her the spice she missed from Indian food was a Chinese restaurant.
Cornbread seldom shows up in articles about Ramadan food, which is odd, given that African American Muslims make up around 20% of the Muslim population in America. The acclaimed historian Sylviane A. Diouf writes in her book, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, that enslaved Muslims in the Brazilian state of Bahia would break their fast with cornmeal, milk, and honey, a tradition that continues today in cornbread as a Ramadan food. Her work seeks to push back on the way that Black life is erased from stories of Islam in America—an erasure sometimes done by Muslim Americans themselves, especially from immigrant backgrounds.
Edward Curtis, who studies Islam in America, says that for some African American Muslims, Ramadan food “might include halal soul food, bean pies, greens, fried fish.” He also points out that religious traditions are dynamic, which is why “many Black Muslim families have incorporated rice dishes they have adopted from other Muslim groups.”
Today, businesses are learning that creating a Ramadan menu is not necessarily about cooking anything different—it is about creating a welcome space for Muslims to gather. Cracked and Battered, a Palestinian-owned chicken and waffle place in San Francisco, serves halal meat and opens early for suhoor.
“That small shift makes a big difference,” owner Waleed Hamdan says. “It tells people they belong. They’re home. They’re safe. They’re vibing.”
The Late-Night Coffee Shop
A good vibe is, of course, what everyone is chasing, and for many Muslims one of the most dramatic changes to American Ramadan culture is the rise of the late-night Yemeni coffee shop. This gave Muslims a third spot to hang out at during Ramadan, aside from the home and the mosque. Ibrahim Alhasbani, the founder of the chain of now 19 Yemeni coffee shops known as Qahwah House, told me that his original location in Dearborn is “like a club after iftar” and that Muslims text him all day to see if they can get in. (Full disclosure: I might have done that once too.)
Curtis says that religious communities in America are always negotiating ideas about home, and that “religion in the United States has always been tied to ethnicity.” Muslims Americans are, by some estimates, this country’s most racially and ethnically diverse faith groups, and that diversity is perhaps most visible on the Ramadan dinner plate.
Muslim American food is American food and ever evolving, so what we crave always changes. Doughnuts are my latest Ramadan crush. Last year my four-year-old son Mirza and I made up a song that goes, “It’s Ramadan. It’s Ramadan. Dada doesn’t eat doughnuts all day long.”
Mirza is growing up in Maine, and I suspect he might associate a lobster roll with Ramadan. Whatever the case, I want him to see that Ramadan is a month when he can and should blur categories and identities. This year he is obsessed with the movie Frozen and told me that he might wear an Elsa dress for Eid prayers.
“What do you think about that, dada?” he asked. “Mashallah,” I said. “That is exactly what Ramadan is about.”
