Keeping it halal: How two friends are making it easier for Muslims to find a place to eat in Calgary

Their idea started out as a conversation, two friends looking for a place to eat on a night off. Very quickly, it became something much bigger than they expected.

Within a week of launching Maaza, a user-created Google map that shows more than 100 restaurants offering halal food in Calgary, Usman Cokar and Fazal Khan have already seen thousands respond to their data set.

Halal is an Arabic word that roughly translates to "permissible" in English. In the Islamic faith, there's a widely accepted belief that any meat a person consumes must be prepared in a certain way that makes it halal.

"I would have expected maybe a couple hundred [views]," Khan said in an interview on CBC Calgary's The Homestretch.

The morning after they launched, around 1,700 people clicked on the map, he noted.

"I know we're in a city of one million, but it seems like the demand to know where the next halal food spot is growing."

Maaza, Khan explained, is an Urdu word that means "fun" or "delicious."

Social media pages dedicated to finding halal restaurants in Calgary have existed for a while, answering questions for hungry Muslim foodies like "where do I find halal pizza that doesn't taste like cardboard" and "where can I find halal Lanzhou-style noodles."

What was missing, however, Cokar and Khan said, was a place where the community can easily find anything and everything they're looking for.

"Fazal and I both have identified and seen that the demand for a centralized database and an easily accessible information base is there," Cokar said.

Cooking up the concept was a lengthy process, but for the pair, their combined technical backgrounds and pre-existing knowledge of Calgary's food scene simplified it all.

Khan, an accountant by trade, has been keeping tabs on halal restaurants in Calgary for several years. 

He'd call places he was curious about, and if they confirmed they offered halal options, he noted them. Any time a friend would suggest a spot to him, Khan said, that would go into his notes as well.

Then came the map and Cokar took over.

"It felt like my school lab days.… Google has some really great tools for creators, it was really easy to get a map started," said Cokar, who is a geomatics engineer. 

"That effort, with Fazal's knowledge, it was the perfect storm to put all this together."

With the map made and ready to be populated, Cokar went back to his data that he'd combined over the years, organizing everything into categories like steakhouses, burger joints, fried chicken spots and even hot pot restaurants.

There are restaurants on the map that some might not find surprising, such as Afghan street food joint Taj Kabob — and others that might be unexpected like downtown hot spot Major Tom and Regrub in the Beltline.

"Even through making this map and adding in the data and all the different restaurants, I found out so much new information I never knew before," Cokar said.

"It's been a really fun and interesting experience."

The map also allows users to input ideas and make suggestions, giving it more of a community-initiative feel. So far, they've been flooded by notifications.

If the success continues at this rate, the pair said, they are hopeful the map could evolve further and become an app or something even bigger.