Why Some of The Halal Restaurants Are Actually NOT Halal At All

Recently, I got hold of a Muslim-friendly Guidebook published by the Japan Tourism Agency.  A large number of restaurants were listed as ‘Halal’ in that guidebook. As our mission is to list up all the Halal restaurants operating in Japan on our website, I decided to visit all of them. It has been only few days since I started the journey of discovering the Halalness of these restaurants.  However, there were some shocking  facts I wanted to face during my visits to these restaurants.

Now I am really in doubt whether to list these restaurants as Halal as some of them are violating the very basic norms of our Deen. I want to share my frank observations about the Halalness of these restaurants with you guys. First, most of the so called ‘Halal’ restaurants offer beer and wine in their menu although the meat they serve in their restaurants  is fully Halal. They give the usual argument that if they do not offer wine they can not survive as a business.

I found another type of restaurants which offer almost naked dance to please their guests during the night time although they also claim to offer Halal only meat in their menu.  It could be so dangerous to visit these type of restaurants especially with your family including kids. On my visit to one of these restaurants, I noticed they offer shisha, a type of water tobacco or hookah as they call it in the Sub-continent. Drinking Shisha could be interesting for some folks. However, it creates large volumes of smoke which could be dangerous for you or for your family if you decide to visit this type of ‘Halal’ restaurant.

My journey of discovering Halal restaurants has also taken me to still another type of restaurants which offer Halal meat along wit non-Halal meat including pork or without it.  As the kitchen size in most of the restaurants in Japan is too small, do you think the kitchen staff could take due care in making sure that Halal meat is not mixed with non-halal one, and, the utensils used to clean or cut the meat or cook it are actually kept separately. I can not imagine happening it like this in these types of restaurants as their sole aim is to maximize their profits.

Please give em your advice on what should be the minimum criteria for listing up restaurants as Halal in Japan. Any and all opinions no matter how absurd they may look in the beginning, are welcomed.