Fulfilling Dreams, Building a Community, and Giving Back Through Habibi’s Hot Chicken
As a young girl, my dream was to be a chef and open up my own restaurant one day.
I was faced with many challenges and many people opposed me going to culinary school and fulfilling my dreams. I thought about it a lot and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to pursue a culinary career anymore so I decided to just take it up as a hobby. I loved cooking and baking probably as young as the age of six. I learned a lot about cooking from my mom and my grandma and watching the cooking channel is what I spent most of my days doing.
In 2020, the pandemic hit and my dad became unemployed, while my mom was getting treated for cancer and on disability leave. In November of 2020, my mother passed away. May Allah grant her the highest level of Jannah and forgive all her sins, Ameen.
After she passed away, I picked up cooking again as a hobby to distract myself and as an escape. I started my own food instagram and posted some of the recipes I was trying out or some of the recipes that my mom had taught me how to make. I slowly started getting busy so I wasn’t able to keep up with food instagram but I still have it as a space to come back to whenever I want an escape or if I want to reminisce on the time I spent building that space.
As the pandemic started to calm down and society started opening up again, my dad thought of what source of income we needed since my mother, even when on disability leave, was the breadwinner of the family.
In the past, my dad has owned many businesses, but we have never considered having a restaurant. We had been looking for a location to open a business for a while and then it came to us, Why don’t we open up a Halal Hot Chicken restaurant? Why Hot Chicken you may ask. After my mother passed away, we would visit her every weekend and afterwards we would go out to eat as a family. There were never any halal restaurants around us so we would always drive out an hour to have halal hot chicken from different places. It was so sad to see the lack of halal options in the San Gabriel Valley/ Inland Empire region.
It occurred to us that instead of waiting for halal food options to come to our area, we can create that option for our community.
During Ramadan of 2021, we found a location in Glendora that had everything we were looking for. So by the will of Allah, we were able to secure the location, and for 1 month we developed the recipes, renovated the entire store, created the logo, started up the social media, put together a menu, advertised, etc.
On May 21st 2021, we had the grand opening of Habibi’s Hot Chicken and we had a huge amount of support from the Muslim community. Not only did we want to help our community by providing them with halal food options and a space where their families feel welcomed and comfortable coming, but the Muslim and non-muslim community helped us more by showing us endless amounts of support and love.
Above all, we couldn’t have done any of this without the blessings and permission from Allah Subhana Wa Ta’ala and my mother who sacrificed everything for us. Even though she is not here to physically be a part of Habibi’s Hot Chicken, everything was done with her in mind and our most popular item, Shosho’s loaded fries, is named after her. The full story of Shosho’s loaded fries can be found on https://habibishotchicken.net/.
This is just a reminder that we plan but Allah has a greater plan that we could not even have imagined.
I went from giving up my dreams of becoming a chef to actually becoming one in my own family restaurant. Finally I just want to also take a second to thank the MSA West community as you guys have supported Habibi’s Hot Chicken in so many ways and my family is forever grateful for this beautiful community of young Muslim leaders.
InshaAllah, we plan to give back to the community more than what Allah has given us because at the end of the day, everything belongs to him, The Almighty. Alhamdulillah.
