The Halal Guys began their fast-casual Middle Eastern chain with a single food cart on a New York City street corner. Boy how times have changed.
The restaurant opened its first brick-and-mortar location in 2014, and now it's taking the next step by turning to delivery-only "cloud kitchens' in Redwood City, California to meet growing customer demand.
The rapidly-expanding chain hopes that it will help the brand reach a new customer base without waiting for a franchisee to nail down a property.
"It removes a lot of the tension or pressure to open a brick-and-mortar," The Halal Guys CEO Ahmed Abouelenein told Cheddar.
Cloud kitchens, sometimes called ghost kitchens, are essentially fully-equipped commissaries or commercial kitchens that allow a company to prepare food off-premises.
The company will partner with Redwood City DoorDash Kitchens, the online food delivery services' first shared commissary. The delivery area will cover much of Silicon Valley, including Redwood City, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Atherton, San Carlos, Belmont, and Woodside.
"We've been looking for sites in Redwood City for over two years now," Abouelenein said. "The real estate is really high there, so it was beneficial for us to open a cloud-kitchen first. "
The Halal Guys, which still operates its original hot dog cart on West 53rd and 6th Avenue in New York City, is no stranger to trying new ways of serving customers. The company has expanded to four carts and 95 franchise locations, with 400 more in development.
Fransmart, a franchise development company, has worked with The Halal Guys throughout its expansion and has supported the move to cloud kitchens as the delivery market expands.
"The Halal Guys has an incredible reputation, and its franchisees are always eager to expand into new markets," said Dan Rowe, CEO of Fransmart, in a press release. "But no two territories are exactly the same, and it's important to grow in a way that's strategic and profitable. The small footprint and flexibility of cloud kitchens enables franchisees to unlock opportunities in desirable markets, while avoiding typical barriers like high rent or infrastructure costs."
The company has also experimented with the cloud-kitchen concept in Los Angeles and Pasadena.
"We are the best at what we do, I'll tell you that," Abouelenein said.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Restaurants are struggling with record-high U.S. egg prices, but their omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros may be part of the problem. Breakfast is booming at U.S. eateries. First Watch, a restaurant chain that serves breakfast, brunch and lunch, nearly quadrupled its locations over the past decade to 570. Fast-food chains like Starbucks and Wendy's added more egg-filled breakfast items. In normal times, egg producers could meet the demand. But a bird flu outbreak that has forced them to slaughter their flocks is making supplies scarcer and pushing up prices. Some restaurants like Waffle House have added a surcharge to offset their costs.
William Falcon, CEO and Founder of Lightning AI, discusses the ongoing feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and how everyday people can use AI in their lives.
U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum “will not go unanswered,” European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen vowed on Tuesday, adding that they will trigger toug
The Trump administration has ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to stop nearly all its work, effectively shutting down the agency that was created to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis and subprime mortgage-lending scandal. Russell Vought is the newly installed director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought directed the CFPB in a Saturday night email to stop work on proposed rules, to suspend the effective dates on any rules that were finalized but not yet effective, and to stop investigative work and not begin any new investigations. The agency has been a target of conservatives since President Barack Obama created it following the 2007-2008 financial crisis.
