Purpose: There is a strong prerequisite for organizations to analyze customer review behavior to evaluate the competitive business environment. The purpose of this study is to analyze and predict customer reviews of halal restaurants using machine learning (ML) approaches. Design/methodology/approach: The authors collected customer review data from the Yelp website. The authors filtered the reviews of only halal restaurants from the original data set. Following cleaning, the filtered review texts were classified as positive, neutral or negative sentiments, and those sentiments were scored using the AFINN and VADER sentiment algorithms. Also, the current study applies four machine learning methods to classify each review toward halal restaurants into its sentiment class. Findings: The experiment showed that most of the customer reviews toward halal restaurants were positive. The authors also discovered that all of the methods (decision tree, linear support vector machine, logistic regression and random forest classifier) can correctly classify the review text into sentiment class, but logistic regression outperforms the others in terms of accuracy. Practical implications: The results facilitate halal restaurateurs in identifying customer review behavior. Social implications: Sentiment and emotions, according to appraisal theory, form the basis for all interactions, facilitating cognitive functions and supporting prospective customers in making sense of experiences. Emotion theory also describes human affective states that determine motives and actions. The study looks at how potential customers might react to a halal restaurant’s consensus on social media based on reviewers’ opinions of halal restaurants because emotions can be conveyed through reviews. Originality/value: This study applies machine learning approaches to analyze and predict customer sentiment based on the review texts toward halal restaurants.