With a background in the creative arts, Hassan had no plans to enter hospitality, but after moving from Lahore, one of Pakistan’s premier culinary cities, he was deeply underwhelmed by what he found in New York. The Pakistani restaurants he encountered were, by design and necessity, built to feed the city’s cab drivers for under $10, rather than sourcing and serving premium ingredients. After a series of patio grilling nights spent feeding his friends, Hassan came across a former pizza parlor in Bushwick. “I started learning on the go,” he told me. “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 trial and error, Hassan learned both the operational realities of running a restaurant and developed BK Jani’s menu, which focused on premium halal burgers rooted in Lahori flavors. The initial reception was muted. Two months after the formal launch, Hassan would open at noon and close at 10 p.m. without a single customer. He was close to accepting a buyout offer when Ligaya Mishan’s review in the New York Times landed, calling Hassan the “Midas of Meat.” “I’ve been busy since then,” he says.
Like his counterparts at Namkeen and Nishaan, Hassan was intentional in choosing the fast-casual format. His explanation was direct: “It’s easy. Very easy.” He also felt it kept the focus where it belonged: on the food. BK Jani was always about premium halal ingredients, done right.
As for the response to Shallwani’s bhel puri dog at his friend’s cook-off back in 2017? The praise was immediate. That spontaneous event was the genesis of Chaat Dog, the hot dog pop-up he launched in 2022, a joyous blend of his Chicago upbringing in the suburbs of the self-proclaimed hot dog capital of the country, with his Pakistani heritage. Shallwani was initially uncertain how other South Asians would react to chaat on a hot dog, but the response gets at the nerve of this trend. “They felt seen,” he says. Chaat Dog has since opened its first permanent brick-and-mortar location inside Time Out Market in Brooklyn, and continues to do pop-ups across the city.
Shallwani believes what is happening with Pakistani-American cuisine is not fusion so much as the continuation of a very 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.” Pakistan and its flavors are now firmly in the mix.
