It’s the last Friday of Ramadan and people are lining up at Maya Halal Taqueria in downtown Oakland. There is almost a constant flow of people ordering at the window, or picking up their to-go orders as the sun goes down. The restaurant always stays open until 3 a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights, but they’ve been advertising these late hours during the past month with a focus on Ramadan, a holy month for Muslims that involves community, prayer, and fasting from sunrise to sunset. For the East Bay Muslim community, halal restaurants that stay open late provide an important way to break their fast after a long day, or to fuel up before dawn.
The Bay is peppered with halal restaurants serving all types of cuisines. While more halal Mexican spots have opened recently, Maya Halal was the first of its kind in the area when it opened in 2018, a restaurant born from the East Bay’s unique mix and collision of cultures. Now, it is expanding hours at the downtown Oakland location and a second restaurant is in the works.
Maya Halal taqueria
346 14th St., Oakland; instagram.com/_mayahalaltaqueria_
Open Monday through Thursday 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays 10 a.m. to 3 a.m., and Sundays 1 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Lulu Safi, the owner of Maya Halal Taqueria, was raised in Union City in a conservative religious Muslim family, eating halal. Growing up in the Bay Area, she didn’t eat Mexican food since there were no halal options. When she was 17 years old, Safi was over at a friend’s house, and the family, who was Mexican, offered her sopes. While she knew she was breaking halal, she also didn’t want to be rude, so she ate it.
“And I was like, oh my god, what is this?” Safi said. “And, why do we not have this in our community? We’re missing out—Mexican food is amazing.”
Around that time, Safi stopped eating halal for a bit. She started trying lots of different Mexican restaurants, and the idea to open a halal Mexican restaurant started to grow. At first, she would just order fish or veggie burritos. Wet burritos with fish were her favorite. Slowly but surely, she started exploring the range of options available.
“I really fell in love with the Mexican culture, the cuisine,” she said. “And I always, after that, dreamed about opening up a halal Mexican restaurant.”
Maya Halal is currently found on the corner of 14th and Webster streets in downtown Oakland. Originally, this spot was owned by Safi’s father, Sayed Pacha, who owns Kamdesh Afghan Cuisine, which is now located a couple of doors down on 14th Street.
Pacha opened up his spot in 2012. Safi remembers him taking her and the rest of the family to see the location, asking what they thought. She remembers that none of the high rises, bars, or restaurants there today were around. But Pacha had been a taxi driver in the area for 18 years, so he knew the area was a hot spot.
When he moved Kamdesh a couple of doors down to its current location in 2017, he thought about getting rid of the corner spot, but Safi, picturing the Mexican halal restaurant of her dreams, asked if she could have it.
“I was like, ‘Please, let me run it, let me full-on takeover, I will take responsibility,’” Safi said. “‘You don’t have to worry about anything, I will take care of everything.’”
So, Pacha gave her a loan to get started in 2018, and the first halal Mexican restaurant in the Bay Area was born. Now, six years later, the place is only growing in popularity. Safi recently decided to open on Sundays, meaning Maya Halal operates seven days a week. She is also launching a new location in Union City with a tentative opening date of May 10. For years, Safi felt that she was too busy at the current location ever to imagine expanding but recently, she’s felt she has more time to spare for a new spot.
“Now that I have good staff, a good team, I feel like I can take myself and I can put myself somewhere else,” Safi said. “For a very long time, I didn’t think I would be able to because I was working so much.”
She was doing everything on her own, but now she has her team and her husband, Moner Afschar, with her, allowing her to focus elsewhere.
“It’s really nice to have him by my side,” Safi said of her husband.
Safi also said that there were a couple of reasons they decided to open on Sundays, including customer requests and because there are lots of families out on Sundays. But the most significant reason was that her staff was requesting more hours.
“So, when they said that,” Safi said. “I’m like, ‘I want to open Sundays, you guys need more hours? Let’s do it then.’”
They’ve had their ups and downs over the years, especially during the pandemic when Safi spent her own money on marketing for the restaurant and managed to keep it afloat. She said they feel the general ebbs and flows of the restaurant industry.
During Ramadan, which ends this week on Tuesday night or Wednesday night depending on the sighting of the first crescent moon after the new moon, their business decreases as many of their Muslim customers aren’t coming during the day. They always receive an uptick in calls around 6 p.m., with a surge in business around 7 p.m. with people picking up orders. While Maya Halal is open until 3 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays all year round, the late-night hours become more essential to the business and its customers during Ramadan.
Safi is also big on supporting their communities and standing up for the causes she cares about, such as Black Lives Matter. A couple of months ago, Safi did a fundraiser to support Palestine and Afghanistan, giving all of her sales that day as donations, and paying for the food and staff wages out of pocket for that day.
Safi says that she doesn’t like to heavily promote these fundraisers and the other support she gives to the community, but Afschar and the designer of the new location have been encouraging her to speak publicly about this important aspect of both her personality and business.
“I am very, very proud of it,” Safi said. “I just feel like I should speak more about it because that is a really big part of who I am.”
