Bushra, a Halal-certified restaurant in Hong Kong’s lively Tsim Sha Tsui district, is full to the brim on a busy Wednesday evening as a group of people dressed in traditional Muslim attire ask for a table.
This time the would-be diners are lucky, a place can be found for them; an hour later and they may have been disappointed as the evening rush gets into full swing.
The chances of them finding an alternative in this city of more than 12,000 restaurants is slim. Despite an estimated Muslim community of 300,000, there are just 149 Halal-certified food premises in Hong Kong, according to the Incorporated Trustees of the Islamic Community Fund of Hong Kong.
It is a statistic that could leave city officials red faced after announcing a policy to lure moneyed visitors from the mainly Muslim Middle East and Southeast Asia to bolster dwindling tourist numbers.
Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu made it clear that it was important for Hong Kong to be able to attract new tourists during his third policy address in October. One way that the government aims to do that is to increase the number of Halal-friendly restaurants that can satisfy the needs of what they are hoping will be a rise in the number of Muslim tourists entering the city.
Fewer tourists
In August 2018, 5.9 million tourists entered Hong Kong, according to the Census and Statistics Department. During the same month last year, an estimated 4.45 million visitors were recorded having entered the city. While the majority of August 2018’s total came from mainland China, there were also more than 226,000 tourists from South and Southeast Asia and a little more than 14,000 from the Middle East.
Based on August 2024’s figures, the number of tourists from South and Southeast Asia stayed about the same. However, there were fewer than 5,000 from the Middle East.
A spokesperson from the Hong Kong Tourism Board said that it will continue to promote Hong Kong as a Muslim-friendly city by working with tourism-related sectors to enhance facilities.
“[We will be] inviting Muslim trade partners and media to visit Hong Kong in person for a first-hand experience,” the Tourism Board’s statement said.
“We will [also] be encouraging trade partners in tourism-related sectors to enhance Muslim-friendly facilities,” they added.
Encouragingly, the Incorporated Trustees of the Islamic Community Fund of Hong Kong hopes that hundreds more restaurants could be included on the list by the end of 2025 after several establishments expressed an interest in Halal certification following October’s policy address.
But official efforts so far have been lukewarm and those proposed have been ridiculed: a suggestion that the city’s taxi drivers learn basic Arabic so that they can converse with tourists from the two Muslim regions, for instance, was swiftly retracted after drivers angrily panned the idea.
Becoming more Muslim friendly
The absence of suitable eateries for the anticipated flow of visitors has the potential to handicap Lee’s policy before it has even been implemented. Maryam Khan, who has run a Hong Kong-based Instagram page that explores Halal food options across the city since 2019, fears the government’s plan will do little to alter a problem that has existed for many years.
“When I was growing up, finding Halal food was really difficult,” Khan says. “Things have improved quite a lot but there are still places where it might be difficult to find Halal food, like in the Eastern district.”
She said it is often difficult for Chinese restaurants to gain a Halal certificate because so many Chinese dishes contain pork, which, as per the rules of Islam, Muslims are not allowed to eat. Unsurprisingly, only five restaurants that serve some form of Chinese cuisine are Halal-certified, according to the Incorporated Trustees of the Islamic Community Fund of Hong Kong.
“For some restaurants, it may be hard to get a certificate for the restaurant because they’re serving a pork dish or there’s cross contamination,” says Khan, whose Foodie Explorerz account offers restaurant and snack recommendations to its 23,000 followers.
Hong Kong has three different categories of Halal certification. Halal Certified means that only Halal food is prepared and served. Halal Kitchen Restaurant-labelled premises only prepare Halal food in the kitchen and are allowed to serve non-Halal food. Halal Friendly Restaurants, meanwhile, prepare both Halal and non-Halal food but must adhere to strict measures to avoid contamination.
In late November the government introduced a new Halal-friendly accreditation framework for major hotels and tourist attractions, scoring them according to how well they served Islamic dietary requirements and cultural practices.
None of the reviewed hotels achieved the maximum score of seven set out by the accrediting organisation, Singapore-based CrescentRating. The Hong Kong Ocean Park Marriott Hotel and the Kowloon Shangri-La, Hong Kong scored the highest in the city but they only received a five-out-of-seven rating.
The government hopes, however, that the scheme will encourage restaurants to do more.
Having the right intentions
Restaurant choices aside, Hong Kong-born Muslims like Khan are frustrated, too, that Hong Kong focuses its language policy on Arabic. They would also like more to be done to provide facilities such as prayer rooms in shopping malls to make Muslims feel more comfortable in the city. Devout Muslims can be expected to pray as many as five times a day.
“Not all Muslims speak Arabic, and even in the Middle East, [there are] different dialects,” Khan says.
Southeast Asian Muslims, meanwhile, which make up a large proportion of Hong Kong’s tourists, speak a range of languages, including Malay, Thai and Vietnamese. There appears to be a lack of initiatives to attract these tourists in their mother tongue.
Some within Hong Kong’s Muslim community were surprised by Lee’s comments given that it goes against the culture of the Hong Kong they grew up in – it was a place where very little effort was made to understand minority faiths, despite their contributions to the city.
“It’s not just about religion,” says Samra Zulfaqar, a third-generation Hong Konger of Pakistani descent. “Race, classism, a lot of things should be considered as well when we talk about improving the way people are treated.”
On the question of language alone, there is deep frustration that officials have made little effort to accommodate them.
“If you come to Hong Kong, [there’s the belief that] you should know the local language rather than be accommodated,” Zulfaqar says, adding that she is sceptical about how many people would choose to learn Arabic simply because it is recommended by the government.
