The Motive and the Cue
Cue Point is a barbecue business with a difference, passionate about diversity and inclusion in the industry, as well as cooking the finest fire food. AMY NEWSOME reports.
Mursal Saiq is co-founder of British Afghan Guyanese BBQ joint Cue Point – famous for its 14-hour oak-smoked halal brisket, ‘nacos’, lamb ribs and aubergine borani banjan.
Currently running two London residencies and an event catering business, Cue Point also successfully fundraised to launch its corporate social responsibility arm, Cue Point Kitchen, which supports refugee and immigrant hospitality workers to build successful careers in the UK food industry.
“We all grew up in the UK, we want what’s here; it’s just that we can’t have it sometimes because of our dietary requirements. We’re sick of going into work and hearing people ask: ‘oh did you try that new fire restaurant?’ ‘No, I went to the same kebab shop.’ Everyone else is having the pork ribs and I’m just thinking that must be nice. Wish they’d do it with beef or lamb.”
Mursal Saiq is recounting what it’s like trying to enjoy British BBQ when you have religious dietary requirements that restaurants, caterers and street food pop-ups often aren’t catering for, such as halal.
Or rather, what it was like 10 years ago, before she and her partner, Josh Moroney, set up Cue Point to start selling inclusive smoked meats, inspiring a wave of minority ethnic-owned BBQ businesses to follow suit, sharing Saiq’s drive to bring barbecue to the many not the few.
Considering 3.8 million people identify as Muslim on the UK’s most recent census survey, it’s a huge market to enter. It’s also one that proves very lucrative when you do it properly.
Saiq consults with companies, such as supermarket Sainsbury’s, to make its products and marketing more inclusive.
“Businesses see a 43% profit increase when opening into the halal market. People wouldn’t be closing down if we were more inclusive,” says Saiq (right), referring both to the challenging climate of the oversaturated mainstream UK food industry, and the acute hardship many restaurants and food businesses experienced during the covid pandemic. Inclusivity and diversity pay.
An Afghan refugee herself, Saiq is creating the industry she wished existed when she first started working in food.
Cue Point Kitchen provides language classes, formal catering qualifications, networking opportunities and contract advice to immigrants looking to forge a successful career in the industry.
Saiq also offers “digestible D & I” training to businesses, which the board of Smoke and Fire festival undertook at the beginning of its journey to create the UK’s first inclusive BBQ event.
For Saiq, breaking down barriers to understanding and inclusivity is best done over a plate of delicious food. Enter Cue Point’s famous nacos – miniature fluffy Afghan naan tacos.
“We take two heavily appropriated foods, reclaim and reappropriate them to make the naco, and use it to start talking about what cultural appropriation means.”
Saiq believes in transparency and conversation, not cancel culture, translating headline-grabbing terms into practical decisions and ways of working to achieve inclusivity and racial equity for businesses that aren’t sure where to start. All while sharing some mouth-watering, 14-hour oak-smoked halal brisket with the perfect lean-to-fat ratio.
For years the UK barbecue industry has seen North American and European BBQ cuisines dominate, with ethnic immigrant fire cooking traditions not enjoying the same platform, so it is refreshing to see Smoke and Fire Festival working with Saiq to use its event platform to elevate the best of diasporic BBQ currently cooking in the UK.
Among the line-up at Smoke and Fire is Filipino chef Budgie Montoya of Great British Menu fame, bringing his hot-tipped London restaurant Sarap as a pop-up; MasterChef, The Professionals judge and BBC Saturday Kitchen regular Philip Juma is down from London’s Borough Market to showcase Iraqi BBQ cuisine with Juma Kitchen; while Rudie’s Jerk Shack will be cooking up slow marinade Jamaican food.
Cue Point itself, with Saiq a consultant to the festival, will be serving up lamb ribs, nacos, brisket, and borani banjan – a brined, charred and stewed Afghan aubergine dish in tribute to Saiq’s mother.
So, after training the organisers and curating a diverse line-up, what’s next in creating an inclusive BBQ festival?
Saiq says you start by ensuring the kitchen and serving areas respect staff and customer religious and cultural restrictions and requirements, such as keeping halal and non-halal food prep areas separate.
You offer separate non-alcohol bar areas with standalone soft drinks – that aren’t mocktails designed to taste as close to real gin as possible. Then you market to these communities in a nuanced way that doesn’t alienate or ‘islamify’ them.
For Saiq, it’s about giving options that reflect the diversity of immigrant communities in the UK today. Saiq describes Cue Point’s market as mostly ‘mipsters’ – Muslim hipsters – who want to eat Halal food but drink alcohol, reflecting the intergenerational differences, as children choose individually to retain or shake off the traditions of their parents.
Speaking of reflecting the reality of immigrant communities, Cue Point proudly describes its cooking as fusion BBQ, because it brings together Saiq’s Afghan heritage, Moroney’s Guyanese heritage, and their shared British identities.
For many years the word fusion in the restaurant industry has been met by many with a level of derision, assuming that dishes mixing two or more culture’s cuisines are inauthentic conceptually, and that for a true expression of a culture’s food you should seek out its purest form.
Saiq warns me not to fall into the ‘authenticity trap’, explaining that this view of fusion and authenticity is inherently colonial, undervaluing the legitimacy of migration and the historic cross-pollination between cultures and cuisines, which can leave immigrants and mixed-heritage cooks feeling ‘othered’ on all sides.
“I couldn’t be fully Afghan if I wanted to, I couldn’t be fully English if I wanted to, so that’s why I’m doing Cue Point.”
To find Cue Point at Smoke and Fire festival this summer, look for the Union Jack, flying next to the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan flag, wafting delicious scents of borani banjan and brisket over the crowds.