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“Money doesn’t really matter to me,” says former taxi driver Samiul Haque Noor of Sammy’s Halal. “I love to serve.” What he serves is mainly marinated dark-meat chicken, chopped up on the griddle and plopped down over a pile of fragrant Afghan-style long-grain rice with a side salad, for $4.99. Order it with the works, in this case a trio of sauces—one hot (red), one mild (white), and one somewhere deliciously in between (green). The red and white are toothsome, but some say that Sammy’s isn’t Sammy’s without the green sauce. If you persist, Sammy will tell you the green sauce is a mixture of garlic, cilantro, lemon, a little jalapeño, some yogurt, and, of course, various secret spices. That Sammy yields to no one in the spice-procurement department is a point of pride: “I go far, far away to get my spices; if it’s not right, I go farther; even if I have to go to Jersey, I go to Jersey,” he says.
— Rob Patronite and Robin Raisfeld

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