Yes, when the kitchen is built for it, and ours on Baltimore Avenue is. Laurel sits on the Route 1 corridor between College Park and Fort Meade, which is one of the more diverse stretches of road in Maryland and one where a lot of people eat halal by default. The gap here has never been halal food. It has been halal variety. Between the Towne Centre and Main Street you can find plenty of grills and plenty of curry, and almost no Japanese. That is the gap we filled at 13600 Baltimore Ave.
The three questions that decide it
The word hibachi refers to a style of cooking, so it carries no halal status of its own. Whether the plate in front of you is halal depends on three decisions the restaurant made long before you sat down.
The meat supplier.Halal chicken, beef and lamb come from suppliers who slaughter to halal standard. This is a purchasing decision and it costs more, which is why most hibachi restaurants skip it.
What else is cooked on the grill.Hibachi runs on a single large flat top. A restaurant with pork on the menu has cooked pork on the same steel as your dinner, and no amount of scraping changes that for a diner who takes halal seriously.
What goes into the sauces.Mirin and cooking sake are standard ingredients in teriyaki and eel sauce. A halal chicken breast finished with a mirin-based glaze is not a halal plate, and this is the step most people never think to check.
Flame answers all three the same way at every location. The entire menu is halal. Pork is not served, stored or cooked anywhere on the property. Our sauces are made in house, not sourced from a distributor.
Those are the three questions worth asking any hibachi restaurant before you order: the supplier, the grill and the sauce. Most cannot answer all three.
At our Laurel location
We are at 13600 Baltimore Ave, Suite 310, Laurel, MD 20707, right on the Route 1 corridor. Towne Centre at Laurel is minutes away. Main Street Laurel is a short drive south. Laurel Park is close enough for a pre-race or post-race dinner. If you are coming off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway or I-95, you are a few turns off either.
That location matters for one group in particular. The Fort Meade workforce runs through this corridor twice a day, and halal lunch options on that commute are thin. Order ahead and it is ready when you pull in.
Hours are Monday through Saturday 11AM to 10PM and Sunday 11AM to 9PM. Holiday hours can shift around Eid and the major public holidays. We also serve Burtonsville, Beltsville, Savage, Jessup and the southern end of Columbia, all within about fifteen minutes.
Getting here, and the towns we serve
Baltimore Avenue is the Route 1 spine, which makes this store easy to reach from a wide radius. North Laurel and Savage are minutes away. Beltsville and Burtonsville are inside ten to fifteen. Jessup, Columbia’s southern end, Greenbelt and College Park are all reachable in twenty or less, and Fort Meade is a short run east.
If you are coming off I-95 or the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, Route 198 and Route 216 both feed straight in.
Lunch here runs hard from about eleven-thirty to one-thirty, driven by the Fort Meade and Route 1 workforce. Everything is cooked to order, so a walk-in inside that window will wait longer than a pre-order will. Ordering online before you leave the office is what most of our regulars do, and pickup takes about a minute once you arrive.
What to order in Laurel
Chicken and Beef Bento, $13.85. Comes with hibachi, vegetables, rice or noodles, a 4-piece California Roll, 2 dumplings and 2 spring rolls. The best value on the menu for a full lunch you can eat at a desk.
Chicken Hibachi, $9.85. Under ten dollars with two sides. The default weekday order here.
Shrimp Tempura Roll, $7.85. Halal sushi, which almost nothing else on this stretch of Route 1 offers.
Catering from $15.99 per person. Office lunches along the corridor are a real part of what this store does.
How the plates are built: every hibachi comes with your choice of any two sides — fried rice, white rice, lo mein noodles or vegetables. Bento boxes arrive loaded already, with hibachi, vegetables, rice or noodles, a 4-piece California Roll, two dumplings and two spring rolls. Extra chicken is $2.95 and extra salmon, beef or shrimp is $3.95, which is usually the cheapest way to stretch one plate across two people. Individual sides run $2.95 to $4.95, and Yum Yum sauce is $0.50.
For a desk lunch on the Route 1 corridor, the bento is the better call than a hibachi plate, because it travels closed and holds heat. If you are ordering for a team, catering from $15.99 per person is cheaper per head than fourteen individual boxes.
Visit us
Halal hibachi on Route 1, ready when you get there. Flame Japanese Hibachi Laurel, 13600 Baltimore Ave, Suite 310, Laurel, MD 20707. 240-360-5080. Mon to Sat 11AM to 10PM, Sun 11AM to 9PM.
