November 11, 2005
The Best and Wurst Street Food Posted by Claire Lui at 02:15 PM EST Last night I attended the first annual Vendy Awards, which recognized the best street food in New York. The event also served as a benefit for the Street Vendor Project, whose mission is to advance economic justice and civil rights for street vendors. (First, full disclosure. My boyfriend, Adam Kuban of Slice, a pizza blog, was one of the judges.) As someone who has always been a fearless street eater, ignoring the wimpy and fearful protests of my weaker-stomached friends, I loved tasting the chow of the four finalists: the Best Halal, Dosa Man, the Dragon, and Hallo Berlin, all cooking their goodies out of their carts in a long, narrow warehouse. And eating my chicken sausage (little mustard, no ketchup, $4 from Hallo Berlin) and drinking my guava juice ($1.25 from Dosa Man), I started thinking about how anonymous cart vendors are. Often we refer to them by their product rather than by name (“Oh, the kebab guy on the corner is good”), a symptom of the fast-food quality of our lives and meals. Though many of the cart vendors have an encyclopedic memory of their regular customer orders, I suspect that they too remember us, their customers, with mnemonics, such as: “Annoying brunette likes tea with milk, no sugar,” or “Ugly sweater guy likes his chili with no cheese.” I have a standing order at almost every cart where I eat with any regularity, and I wonder how much neighborhood knowledge and gossip is contained within the minds of the various cart vendors. Unsurprisingly, these observers of our daily eating habits are almost always immigrants and have been for centuries. Nancy Ralph, another one of the judges and director of the New York Food Museum pointed out that the first street vendors in New York were probably Germans who sold hot potatoes from carts beginning as early as the 1640s. Later, in the 1800s, oysters were sold raw and freshly picked off the shore, a delicacy today that was then considered nothing more than a pedestrian staple. Ralph mentioned that during the 1880s in New York, almost 800 million oysters were processed annually, making them the nineteenth-century equivalent of today’s pretzel or flabby hot dog. Today, New York is one of just a handful of American cities (Philadelphia’s lunch trucks with their hoagies and cheese steaks come to mind) where one can choose from a varied selection of street food. With our large pedestrian population, New York is probably the ideal American metropolis for selling the street foods so popular in other countries. (Even Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the impresario of fancy restaurants, embraces street food with Spice Market, his restaurant that serves upscale variations of Asian street foods. Appetizers there can cost a whopping $14, ideal for street-food lovers who wish to munch in a more genteel environment rather than loitering next to a fire hydrant.) Unsurprisingly, these men, like many street-food sellers of yore, struggle with heavy ticket fines for legal infractions and the pressure to keep selling enough food to turn a profit no matter what the weather. After the announcement of the winner (Hallo Berlin, aka the Wurst Street Cart, beat out the other three contestants by two points to claim the trophy), the event took on a distinctively union flavor, with instructions that we all hold hands and yell “Vendor Power!” and “Si se puede!” (“Yes, we can”), giving the thing a Norma Rae-esque vibe. All in all, an interesting event, and a reminder that street foods represent so much of American history in each bite. Someone said to me recently, “For each new immigrant group, the language is the first to go, and the food is the last.” Street vendors bring a taste of home to recent immigrants while introducing new foods to the American vernacular. Who knows? Just as yesterday’s oysters became today’s hot dogs, tomorrow’s dosas will give way to something still unknown to the American palate.
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