The Halal Table: The Couple Turning Mall Food Courts Halal

The Halal Table

The only burger vendor in the food court, and every single thing on the menu is halal.

The Halal Table is our weekend tour of halal food worth talking about. Good food, good people.

Here is a sentence we did not expect to write in 2026: a halal burger chain is about to become the only hamburger vendor in a major American mall's food court.

That mall is Eastridge Center in San Jose, and the chain is iniBurger, opening its sixth Bay Area location at 2200 Eastridge Loop in late August with a grand opening set for early September.

The part where they lost everything

Abdul and Leeza Popal are both tech people. Both have MBAs. Both came to the United States from Afghanistan as children. Abdul spent years as a senior executive at CafePress and helped take the company through its NASDAQ listing.

They also happened to be franchisees of Burgerim, the slider chain whose corporate collapse left hundreds of local operators stranded with restaurants and no brand behind them. That is the kind of thing that ends most people's restaurant career in a single quarter.

Instead the Popals rebranded their own locations and built a new concept from scratch, launching iniBurger in Pleasanton in June 2020. In the middle of a pandemic. From the wreckage of somebody else's company.

Halal all the way down

The thing that makes this worth a Saturday morning read is how far they took the standard. It is not just the beef. The chicken sandwiches, wings and strips are halal-certified too, and the certification extends to every menu component, including the custom-baked buns, with auditing at sourcing, slaughter, processing and packaging.

The beef is USDA Choice Angus. The chicken is cage-free, all-natural, hormone-free and antibiotic-free. The two best sellers are the Americano and the smash burger, and the sides run to crinkle-cut fries, sweet potato fries, onion rings, mac and cheese bites, milkshakes and about a dozen house-made sauces.

Even the vocabulary is theirs. A full-size burger is a b'igi and a small one is an m'ini, built off the word ini, which means "this" in Farsi, Indonesian and Malay.

You shouldn't have to give up quality, creativity or ambiance just because you keep halal.Leeza Popal, co-founder, to the East Bay Times

Six locations and counting

Pleasanton in 2020, Fremont the same year, Santa Clara in 2023, Campbell in 2024, Berkeley in 2025, and now San Jose. Hayward is the next confirmed step. Two virtual brands, iniWings and iniSliders, run out of the existing kitchens to pick up delivery orders without new storefronts, which is a very tech-founder way to grow a burger company.

They have also been generous with it. Back in August 2021, iniBurger donated a portion of sales across its East Bay locations to relief and rehousing funds for Afghan refugees.

We keep coming back to the food court detail. A generation ago, the halal option in an American mall was a bag of fries and a private calculation. Now it is the anchor.