Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

The Woes of a Halal Restaurant in Lyon, France

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Its name is “Seven Times.” Non-Muslims will miss the reference. “Seven times” refers to the number of times that a Muslim, making the Hajj to Mecca, should circle the Kaaba counter-clockwise: “They must walk widdershins seven times round the magic wonderstone” is how I like to put it.

This Seven Times restaurant, “halal-certified,” is now in a world of woe and likely to be closed. First, as of last December, it opened a tiny dining room “for girls and women only.” But according to French law, such an act of sex discrimination is unlawful.

More on this restaurant, and its closure by the French authorities that may not be temporary, can be found here: “Halal restaurant in France slammed for dedicated women’s area shut down over dozens of health violations,” Remix News, May 2, 2026:

The Seven Times restaurant in Vaulx-en-Velin has been shut down by the local prefecture, pending the fulfillment of no less than 39 corrective measures for serious breaches of local hygiene rules. But this isn’t the first controversy for Lyon’s “largest halal-certified food court.”

Last December, Seven Times launched an all-girls room, which was finally ended over outcries of discrimination. The restaurant insisted that the “100% girls” area had zero link to Islam. But locals weren’t buying it.

Of course, this “all-girls room” has everything to do with Islam. All over the Muslim Middle East, one sees men and women separated by sex. They pray in different areas of the mosques. They are segregated by sex in their schools. Women cannot use public swimming schools at the same time as men use them. Such segregation is not the same everywhere. It is most pronounced in such places as Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Iran, less so in Morocco, Tunisia, and the UAE.

Here is the X announcement in French about the offending restaurant in Vaulx-en-Velin:

The restaurant bills itself as “a halal fast-food restaurant, with a room for girls and women only, a prayer room, and a ban on alcohol.”

National Rally (RN) deputy Jérôme Buisson at the time denounced the move as “unacceptable and illegal separatism” in a post sharing a TikTok video from the restaurant’s channel that clearly indicates only women may go to the girls-only room (seemingly in the back and completely shut away), while the rest of the restaurant, out in the open, is reserved for men. The man in the video is clearly pleased with the space provided for men, seemingly referencing some sort of cultural norm that this is appropriate.

Here is an English translation:

The Lyonnais restaurant Seven Times in Vaux-en-Velin practices an impermissible and illegal segregation in placing women in a room apart [from the main hall]. Clients are thus being sorted by sex. Do you, the Prefect of Rhone, find this normal? In France, this is unacceptable discrimination.

French law also stipulates that any establishment open to the public, such as a restaurant, cannot deny service or restrict access to specific areas based on sex.

For its part, the owner of Seven Times told Le Figaro, “It’s 20 square meters out of 400 where women can gather to celebrate birthdays or graduations. We’re very far from communalism; everyone comes as they are and sits wherever they want.” At the time, the owner also considered filing a complaint against Buisson.

The restaurant’s owner is flat out lying. It is not true that everyone who comes to the restaurant sits “wherever they want.” Girls and women have since last December been limited to sit in a very tiny space, one-twentieth of the restaurant’s total area, at the back of the facility.

…During a visit by agents from the Departmental Directorate for Population Protection (DDPP) on Monday, April 20, 2026, several deficiencies were noted at the restaurant, reported Le Progrés. Violations included the presence of dead flying pests, the risk of unsanitary conditions due to chemical contamination, inadequate maintenance and cleaning of the premises, and poor storage and preservation conditions for raw materials….

That’s not just a handful of inadequately cleaned tables that the investigators found, but a laundry list of unsanitary conditions. It may be that there were simply too many violations for the authorities to allow the management to try to correct all of them; when restaurants reach this level of uncleanliness it often makes more sense to shut them down altogether. And these unsanitary conditions were not new to at least one of the managers at the Seven Times restaurant. He owned another restaurant — the Naan Factory — that had the same problems: it was a menace to the public’s health, and had been closed.

The case isn’t over, but I think rather than giving the owners of Seven Times the chance to literally clean up their act, given the great number of serious infractions of the code, it will be shut down. I’m guessing the owners will not give up, but move far from Lyons, open another health hazardous restaurant for halal-only clients in, say, Marseille, with its huge Muslim population, and do just fine, until another set of health inspectors from the Mairie comes a-calling, and shuts down that restaurant too.

I am reminded of an incident that took place in Cambridge, England, when I was living there years ago. Health authorities raided a local Pakistani-run Indian restaurant. In the back, they discovered 600 cans of cat food. When they asked the owner to explain their presence, he responded “We keep a cat.”

Comments

  1. The number seven must have come from the seven “planets” or “stars” that are visible by naked eyes (the Sun, the Moon, Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Mars and Saturn) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_planet
    It shows how ignorant allah is that it doesn’t know that the sun and the planets are different type of objects and there more than seven planets. Based on this fact, allah and Islam must have been invented by human..

  2. Given every other way Paris is bending over backwards to accommodate mohammedans, they might as well scrap that law making sex discrimination illegal, rather than making life miserable for that restaurant while tolerating shariah zones all over their country

    Otherwise, just deport every last muslim by making an agreement w/ Algeria: send all of them to Algeria, and let Algiers figure out where to forward them

  3. I once had lunch with an imam. He ordered about $100 of food for himself and about $20 for his wife and kids together who say in a separate booth. My family had a bill for about $40. He stuck us with the bill. That’s when I realized that Islamic evangelism was nothing like how a Christian would do it.

    • If you are non-Moslem how could you trust someone who owns, runs ,and serves mostly Moslems with the cooking and serving your food. The halal food carts in Manhattan and now the other boughs I refuse to patronize .I avoid Moslem doctors ,I avoid using Moslem run businesses .To my feeling it would be like patronizing or trusting an open Nazi not to hurt me or at least steal from me.

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