Atlanta Ramadan Food Festival serves something bigger than dinner

We are all waiting.

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

The doors opened at 9 p.m. a little over a week ago on a Friday night at the second annual Atlanta Ramadan Food Festival. The festival ran for just nine hours, until 6 a.m. the next morning. During Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting, prayer and reflection, Muslims abstain from food and drink from sunrise to sunset. Nighttime is when this community eats.

Festival organizer Hasnain Lakhani, co-founder of the Atlanta Muslim Festival collective, said the event fills a simple need.

“On the weekend, the community likes to congregate and socialize, and basic restaurants and third spaces usually close very early,” he said. “It’s open for attendees after breaking their fast or before keeping their fast for the day.”

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

Last year’s festival was smaller. This year, more than 60 food vendors filled the Monte Carlo Ballroom parking lot in Norcross.

They sell savory items like shawarma, a marinated meat stacked in a cone shape and slow roasted. There are plenty of options if you have a sweet tooth, like kunafa, a buttery shredded phyllo pastry stuffed with a stretchy cheese and soaked in orange blossom syrup. There are fusion mashups that feel unmistakably American, like a smashed burger wrapped in paratha bread.

There’s also an artisan market featuring Muslim-owned businesses, a kids’ play area and a Waffle House waffle station, because this is still Atlanta.

When the gates opened, people surged forward, not frantically, but with relief. The sound rose with laughter, casual chatter and the low hum of a crowd finally allowed to eat.

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

What people ate at the Atlanta Ramadan Food Festival in Norcross

I walk past the henna booth, the kebab grills, the Taste of Palestine truck and Chuy’s Tacoz, following the smell of roasted chicken and spices. I land at Layaly, a Mediterranean restaurant’s booth.

I devour their musakhan roll, an appetizer version of the national dish of Palestine, loaded with shredded roasted chicken, caramelized onions and tangy sumac, a spice made from dried ground berries. The filling is wrapped in a thin flatbread and baked until crispy. The flavors hit in layers, and the texture play between the tender chicken, the silky caramelized onions and the slight crunch of the wrap is perfection.

Soon, everyone is holding plates. As I chat with vendors, the stories are about continuity and invention.

At one stand Zaid Jagrala, a young Pakistani cook, spoons a slow-braised stew onto burger buns. His pop-up, Spicy Stack, has been operating for five months.

“We make Indian food, Pakistani food, more of our culture’s food,” he said. “Growing up in America, we always had burgers and wraps. We mix both cultures and the spices of the Indian foods with the burgers and the wraps to show more of our culture every time.”

Credit: Monti Carlo

Credit: Monti Carlo

The burger he’s selling is built on nihari, a deeply spiced slow-cooked stew that originated in India and traveled through Muslim communities into Pakistan, where it became a national dish.

Traditionally eaten to restore the sick, the broth is rich with marrow from long hours of braising.

Here it’s stacked on a bun.

“No matter where you go, everyone enjoys food and needs it to survive,” he says. “If I am able to bring some level of familiarity to someone who has no clue what the culture is in the Middle East or Southeast Asia … I feel like that is very meaningful.”

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

A few booths down, Loqman Salem stretches a ribbon of ice cream so elastic it looks like taffy.

His Gwinnett County shop, WowBooza, specializes in Middle Eastern booza, a chewy ice cream made with mastic, a pine-scented tree resin that gives the dessert its distinctive stretch.

“I felt very happy seeing people smile when I gave them the ice cream,” Salem said. “Stretch ice cream is my specialty. I’ve been selling ice cream since I was a kid in Jerusalem, like 9 years old at weddings.”

The saffron flavor stops me in my tracks. It is floral, cool and strangely refreshing in the warm Georgia night.

He grins when I react.

“Being surrounded by community means a lot,” he said. “Especially letting people know my brand and my ice cream.”

Credit: Monti Carlo

Credit: Monti Carlo

Why Atlanta’s Ramadan food festival brought Muslim and non-Muslim neighbors together

The crowd was not one thing.

Women in hijabs stood beside men in work polos. College-aged students dressed in goth garb wandered the vendor rows. Grandparents sat in folding chairs. Toddlers slept in strollers.

Large public gatherings tied to the Muslim faith carry a complicated history in America. Mosques have been vandalized. Women have been harassed for what they wear. Men questioned for how they pray.

For non-Muslims, like myself, there’s often a different hesitation. For some it’s mostly worry about saying the wrong thing. For others, it’s stepping into a space that feels unfamiliar.

But suspicion softens when someone hands you a plate of food.

Lakhani said that was the entire point.

“I want them to remember the wholesomeness and the overall feel that can be brought by bringing the community together,” he said. “I want people to know how important having our community is, and seeing like-minded people and unlike-minded people to educate them and just get a good feeling from them.”

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

Atlanta vendors showcased global Muslim cuisine and immigrant food traditions

Some of the vendors represented the broader international food culture shaping metro Atlanta.

Notable stands included:

Events like this reflect the growing diversity of Atlanta’s dining scene, where immigrant chefs and pop-ups continue to reshape what the city eats.

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

While missiles fell in Iran, a moment of peace unfolded in a Norcross parking lot

I left the festival at 11:40 p.m.

At that same moment, across the world in Iran, the first missiles were falling.

Later that week, as headlines and images from the conflict filled every screen, I asked Lakhani how the community felt about the violence in a region where nearly the majority of the population is Muslim.

“We pray that everything works itself out,” he said. “We don’t want any nation, Muslim or non-Muslim, to be getting acts of violence, because from this, only innocent people get harmed. We actually think that, because of these conflicts, it’s important to have these events and to bring us together rather than tear us apart.”

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

For one long night in a parking lot in Norcross, people were doing exactly that.

Eating. Talking. Passing napkins and sauces back and forth.

Nothing historic happened there.

But Muslims gathered openly to break their fast without shrinking. Non-Muslims crossed a threshold and found warmth instead of suspicion.

People stood, crouched and leaned against cars, eating shawarma, nihari burgers, kunafa and stretchy ice cream.

I ate my booza sitting on parking lot cement because there was nowhere else to sit. Everyone was doing the same thing.

Perched there, watching strangers share food under string lights while bombs fell somewhere far away, I realized something simple.

Sometimes peace looks like a line of people in a parking lot, waiting patiently for the moment they are finally allowed to eat together.

And for a few hours in Norcross, that was enough.