In the summer of 2017, journalist and chef Pervaiz Shallwani and his wife, Laena McCarthy, hosted a casual hot dog cook-off for a friend’s birthday. Their contribution to the menu was an unconventional creation: a classic hot dog topped with bhel puri, a popular South Asian street food snack made from crispy puffed rice, diced red onions, tomatoes, and a vibrant mix of tangy and spicy chutneys. The combination—essentially a meeting point between a Chicago hot dog and Karachi street food—was a happy accident, but it served as the conceptual seed for something much larger that would materialize years later.
That creative spark mirrors a broader evolution happening across the United States. For decades, the Pakistani culinary footprint in America existed quietly, often tucked away within specific immigrant enclaves or masked by broader cultural labels. Today, a new wave of Pakistani-American chefs, restaurateurs, and pitmasters is stepping into the culinary spotlight. By channeling bold, authentic South Asian flavors through familiar, fast-casual American formats—such as Texas barbecue, Nashville hot chicken, and New York bodega-style chopped cheeses—this emerging movement is redefining what Pakistani cuisine looks like in the U.S. and finding mainstream success in the process.
To understand the magnitude of this shift, it helps to look at the history of the Pakistani diaspora in America. Shallwani’s father migrated from Karachi to the United States in 1971, arriving as part of a growing wave of Pakistani immigrants who established roots in major urban centers. These communities concentrated heavily around New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles, later expanding to metropolitan areas like Washington, DC, and Houston.
During the 1980s, the small number of Pakistani restaurants that emerged in these immigrant hubs faced unique economic and cultural realities. To appeal to a broader public, many chose to operate behind the blanket labels of "Indo-Pak" or "Indian"—categories that had already secured mainstream acceptance through popular takeout staples like butter chicken and chana masala. Alternatively, establishments catered exclusively to the concentrated populations living within immigrant enclaves, such as Hillcroft in Houston, Little Pakistan in Coney Island, and Devon Avenue in Chicago.
For many years, the Pakistani community lived largely in the shadow of the far larger Indian American community, which stands as the second-largest immigrant group in the United States. However, the demographic landscape has changed dramatically. From a modest diaspora population of just 32,600 in 1980, the Pakistani-American community has grown to nearly 680,000 today. As this population has expanded, Pakistani restaurants have increasingly stepped out from behind broader labels and into the culinary mainstream.
While a few landmark establishments managed to cross over to wider audiences prior to this recent wave—such as Aga’s in Houston, which has been recognized as one of the busiest single-location restaurants on Uber Eats, and the beloved, James Beard Award-nominated Zareen’s Kitchen in Palo Alto—they were long considered the exception rather than the rule. Much of the broader shift in the landscape has accelerated in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Unlike previous eras, the Pakistani restaurants emerging in recent years are not strictly high-end contemporary fine-dining concepts in the mold of the West African food movement or the Filipino dining boom of the 2010s. Instead, they are taking a scrappier, fast-casual approach. They introduce bold Pakistani flavors through distinctly American formats: hot dogs topped with spicy, tangy chaat; New York-style chopped cheeses made with chapli kabab; and crispy, buttermilk-brined hot chicken seasoned with a medley of South Asian spices. Welcome to the modern Pakistani-American kitchen.
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In Fort Worth, Texas, pitmaster Zain Shafi found his entry point through barbecue. Growing up in Texas, Shafi had rarely eaten barbecue because finding halal options was exceptionally difficult. But when he finally tasted it, the experience "blew my mind," as he recalls. While simultaneously supporting his family’s furniture business, Shafi dove headfirst into the world of barbecue, eventually training at the acclaimed Goldee’s before launching his own food truck, Sabar.
Operating from 2023 to 2025, Sabar offered halal, Pakistani-inspired barbecue creations that challenged convention. The menu featured items like smoked sausage seasoned with seekh kebab spices and smoked tandoori turkey, served alongside traditional accompaniments such as tangy yogurt raita, lentils, and fresh naan. For Shafi, the medium was as much about cultural bridge-building as it was about food. Operating in Texas amid regional challenges with Islamophobia, he found that food served as an effective stepping stone to introduce Pakistani culture to new audiences. "It broke the ice," he notes.
Remixing familiar favorites has indeed become the central strategy for breaking the ice across the country. Usman Chaudhry, an accountant by training who immigrated to the United States from Pakistan with his family in the early 2000s, had long considered opening a restaurant. When a commercial space became available in Chatham, New Jersey, in the fall of 2020, he, his wife Amena, and his brother seized the opportunity to launch Namkeen.
The family’s goal was simple: bring high-quality halal hot chicken featuring bold flavors to the Tri-State area within a casual dining environment. The tight, focused menu centered on creative variations of Nashville-style hot chicken. Offerings included the signature Clucking Waffle Sandwich—hot fried chicken layered between jalapeño-and-cheddar Belgian waffles—alongside the Tikkaville Sandwich, which combined fried chicken with a rich tikka sauce, coleslaw, pickled onions, and mint chutney on a brioche bun. They also served Chicken Tikka Mac & Cheese, fusing a classic comfort food with savory tikka sauce.
Launching a restaurant during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic might have seemed like a high-risk endeavor, but Namkeen drew masked lines out the door almost immediately. While its takeout- and delivery-friendly model suited the demands of the moment, its streamlined, replicable menu also translated naturally into a franchising framework. Namkeen has since expanded to 10 locations across three U.S. states and Canada, while the Chaudhry brothers have also launched a second concept, Ori’s Cheesesteaks, in Chatham, serving premium halal ribeye cheesesteaks.
While Shafi utilized Texas barbecue and Chaudhry leaned into Nashville hot chicken, Zeeshan Bakhrani took inspiration from a New York City bodega staple at his East Village restaurant, Nishaan. Spanning just 600 square feet at 160 First Avenue, the tiny counter has quickly become one of the city’s most talked-about culinary openings. Nishaan’s signature dish is the Pakistani chopped cheese: heavily seasoned chapli kebab meat chopped on a flat-top griddle with peppers and onions, then finished with a lime-cilantro sauce and tamarind chutney. The menu also features bihari barbacoa tacos, Pakola soft-serve ice cream as a nod to the iconic green soda beloved across Pakistan, and elote chaat, which draws on the Mexican flavors Bakhrani encountered during his childhood in Chicago.
Bakhrani’s path to opening Nishaan was winding. After being laid off from his IT product management job in 2024, he began creating food content and experimenting with inventive culinary mashups like mango lassi pie and elote chaat. He secured a booth at Smorgasburg before earning a spot on Season 18 of the Food Network’s The Great Food Truck Race in 2025. Describing the television experience as a rigorous bootcamp, Bakhrani notes that half the items he currently sells on his menu were refined during the show. The Nishaan team ultimately won the $50,000 grand prize, making history as the show’s first all-halal food truck to win. The competition provided the crucial proof of concept needed to secure a lease on his first brick-and-mortar location.
Since then, Bakhrani has emerged as an energetic and visible champion of Pakistani cuisine in New York City, which has solidified its status as a primary hub for this new generation of restaurants. He actively builds community through frequent collaborations, Pakistan Day block parties, and a rotating menu of nostalgic yet inventive takes on Pakistani flavors. When questioned during the competition whether leading explicitly with the Pakistani label might hinder his success, his perspective was pragmatic: "It won’t hurt me either."
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Embracing the "Pakistani" label openly represents a stark 180-degree shift from the approach of the previous generation. Saud Khan, founder of Kaafi—a Pakistani chai café in Harlem—was raised within the restaurant industry. Born in Peshawar, he moved to the United States at the age of five and spent his youth helping out at his father’s restaurant in upstate New York. Though he initially had no intention of following in his family’s footsteps, a casual afternoon sitting in a café led him to wonder why there wasn’t a dedicated Pakistani space centered around chai and South Asian snacks.
That question eventually prompted Khan to open two cafés in upstate New York before relocating to New York City, where the cultural market felt increasingly receptive. Kaafi welcomed its first guests to its Harlem location in 2024, and the reception was immediate. "As soon as the doors opened, it was a success story," Khan says. He believes the city has never been more welcoming for South Asian restaurateurs, pointing to a broader cultural momentum within local food and public life. "We are having a moment right now, we just need to lock in."
Long before Kaafi, Nishaan, and Namkeen opened their doors in New York, there was BK Jani—a name that translates roughly to Brooklyn Sweetheart. Founded by Sibte Hassan in 2015, the restaurant served as an early indicator that New York City was poised to become the heartbeat of this culinary movement.
With a background in the creative arts, Hassan had no formal plans to enter the hospitality industry. However, after moving from Lahore—widely regarded as one of Pakistan’s premier culinary cities—he found himself deeply underwhelmed by the existing Pakistani dining options in New York. Most establishments were built by necessity to feed city cab drivers quickly and affordably for under $10, rather than focusing on sourcing premium ingredients.
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After hosting backyard grilling sessions to feed his friends, Hassan stumbled upon a former pizza parlor in Bushwick and decided to take a leap. "I started learning on the go," he recalled. "I didn’t even know what grill to get. I would go to shops and ask them, and they would make fun of me." Through persistent trial and error, he mastered the operational realities of restaurant management and developed BK Jani’s menu, which centered on premium halal burgers infused with Lahori flavors.
The initial reception was quiet; two months after opening, Hassan would regularly open at noon and close at 10 p.m. without serving a single customer. He was on the verge of accepting a buyout offer when a review by Ligaya Mishan was published in The New York Times, praising Hassan as the "Midas of Meat." "I’ve been busy since then," he notes. Like his industry peers at Namkeen and Nishaan, Hassan intentionally chose a streamlined, fast-casual format because it kept the primary focus where it belonged: on the food and quality halal ingredients.
As for Pervaiz Shallwani and his spontaneous bhel puri hot dog from the 2017 birthday cook-off, the public response was similarly enthusiastic. That single afternoon event laid the groundwork for Chaat Dog, the hot dog pop-up Shallwani launched in 2022 as a joyful homage to his Chicago-area upbringing—the self-proclaimed hot dog capital of the country—blended with his Pakistani heritage.
Shallwani admits he was initially uncertain how other South Asians would react to chaat piled onto a hot dog, but the reaction tapped into a deeper sentiment. "They felt seen," he says. Chaat Dog has since expanded, opening its first permanent brick-and-mortar location inside Time Out Market in Brooklyn while continuing to operate pop-up events across the city.
Reflecting on the broader trend, Shallwani views the rise of Pakistani-American cuisine not simply as a culinary fusion experiment, but as the continuation of a well-established American tradition. "You know what you know, you take what you can find, and you adapt it over time," he says. "Every immigrant group that comes here makes American food their own. That’s what defines American food." With this new generation making its mark, Pakistan and its distinctive flavors are now firmly part of that ongoing story.
