bottledworder

Please click on the images to read text on the carts!

I remember a cold, fall day about six years ago. I was at a new job in the city. It was about half past eight in the morning. I was in line at a food cart just outside one of my building’s entrances for coffee. It is a long commute getting into the city and the weak tea I had before leaving hadn’t cut it. 

The line was a mix of people: construction workers who were getting breakfast, students buying coffee before class, teachers like me and quite random passers-by. I discovered a warm, comforting item called “two eggs on a roll” that day on which I got hooked. As time passed I grew more confident ordering on tip-toe peering through the opening of the cart to get a glimpse of the man behind. He would take the order and then turn to press bread and sausages or turn over eggs on the hot griddle. He would add hot sauce, jalapenos, cheese, ketchup and other little condiments gratis if you wished.

When he poured coffee you would have to tell him “one” or “two” sugars and exactly time it right because it was so busy. Sometimes people would strike up a conversation with me or a student in queue. When it was relatively empty, such as when I was late to breakfast at ten or eleven the vendor would lean out to chat. This vendor was South Asian and always remembered me and whether I took one sugar with my coffee or none at all as I kept vacillating through many months. Sometimes a construction worker would join our conversation.

One day, when it was very cold and windy, as only the wind tunnels in the streets of New York can be, a few of my dollar bills flew away towards the road as I opened my wallet. I remember how everyone, including workers in line and the vendor himself (who was out of the cart to rearrange the soda bottles) ran helter-skelter to pick up the flying bills before they reached the road. 

My bond with these men and the cart was something special, even when egg prices went through the roof earlier this year. 

At a different entrance to my building is another cart that sells chicken over rice, lamb over rice, falafel over rice or gyros. The gentleman is of Middle Eastern descent but speaks good English. “Spicy rice or plain rice” is what he will always ask me. “White sauce or hot sauce,” is his next question, always. Once I wanted to be brave and asked for extra hot sauce confident that I could handle any level of heat considering the number of Indian green chilies I cooked at home with on a daily basis. I learnt my lesson that day and learned to revere the spice levels of NYC food carts. When they pour and pause and look at you discouragingly, you ought to take notice and show respect.

This gentleman too always remembers me. However, I suppose because he sees that I am Indian, he always remembers me as vegetarian. “Falafel?” he will always ask and I’ll say “yes” sometimes and sometimes I’ll say “chicken over spicy rice, please.” At this cart it is always more students, especially during lunch.

On cold days, there is a manhole next to the cart which gives off steam in a typical NY way from the subterranean steam system of the city that gives the cart a mythical appearance. On foggy mornings with lots of people crossing the street and ambulances with flashing lights and sirens rushing to a nearby hospital the cart stands in the foreground as if part of a cityscape on a stage in a Broadway show.

On hot summer days, people throng about the cart with an air of familiarity. Some people know the seller well enough to just slide back the glass panels in front to pick up a soda can or a bottle of water that always sits on beds of ice. Always, people are courteous and will slide the panel back so the cans remain cool. 

Lately, I have started visiting a bigger, more grand cart a block away, at the entrance to the hospital. This cart takes credit cards and is manned by at least three men and presents its fare in glossy plastic bags with the food presented with a lot more focus on aesthetics inside their disposable containers. The men don’t speak English very clearly but were very happy when they understood that I was taking their pictures for a blog. We always manage to communicate very well about food despite our language barrier. 

Food cart vendors lead far from a charmed existence in the city. I know that food cart vendors were already struggling in so many ways even before the pandemic hit with the scarcity of licenses and permits. Most vendors I have encountered are immigrants. With recent changes in the political climate, it has been very hard for some vendors. As a person who saw the crowds around these carts in pre-pandemic days, these changes have been hard to watch. There are fewer commuters to the city now than before since people don’t need to work from their offices everyday any more. Prices have skyrocketed and so the difference in what the carts can charge for a meal isn’t that different any more from mid-level restaurants and more people are avoiding eating out at all due to the expense. 

I don’t see as many food carts any more. When I walk down the same roads these days, I see fewer baked goods on display. Gone are the variety of inexpensive croissants, muffins, marble cakes and cinnamon rolls. The fare is reduced to a bare bones one or two items in many carts. The stoves are often cold and a solitary looking figure mans the cart ever too often. Sometimes I see the cart itself change adding to the feel of a general despondence. I hear that sometimes when a vendor can’t afford the lease on the old cart they have to change to a different one. It is hard to watch.

In the old days, come rain, wind, snow or freezing temperatures, you could bank on these men always being there waiting to cook you a meal. Sometimes, they would recognize you even after weeks. I remember a cart around 45th and 6th. The vendor spotted my rather short self from a distance. This was difficult considering it was lunch time and very tall, very formally well dressed men were thronging about his cart. They had come out from the surrounding office buildings. The man had exclaimed, “Didi, Biryani?” a bit too loudly and sure enough a box of biryani reached me seemingly instantly across the crowd. He didn’t know that he had put me right at home in a city that can be very intimidating sometimes. We both spoke Bengali in different dialects. We came from different countries but his biryani had established a kinship that he hadn’t forgotten.

Most days I move between the Herald Square area to Columbus Circle in Manhattan where I notice all the food carts on the way. The pictures above are from the Columbus Circle area fairly close to Central Park closer to the South West corner of the park.

Sometimes though, when I go far from this area I find food carts that look different. One such area is South Seaport in lower Manhattan. I haven’t been there recently. The food carts that used to be there in the “before times” prior to the pandemic were very glossy, higher priced and often represented some of the expensive restaurants in town. I liked looking at them.

Because of my personality, I am more intrigued by the food carts in Flushing and Jackson Heights, the former more focused on East Asian cuisines and the latter on South Asian foods, a place with a high concentration of Bangladeshi immigrants in the city. 

I happened to be in Jackson Heights yesterday. I took photos of carts selling various street foods such as Momo, originally a Tibetan dumpling which is ubiquitous as a street food in Kolkata now (and I am guessing in Bangladeshi towns too). There were other carts selling Chapli Kabab burgers and various fusion foods around the square.  There were so many cuisines here that it would be an injustice if I said I could name them all.

I love the ambiance that food carts create in the city through their presence, the crowds they draw and the music they play, often in languages that represent the cultures of the foods they sell or that of the seller when the cuisine is just the universal New York Chicken/ lamb/ falafel and rice or hot dogs or roasted nuts. The aromas that waft out and the genial banter creates the culture of the city streets.

People travel and so does food with them. I have seen “chicken rice” and “Biryani” sold in various parts of the world that look and taste completely different.

Such is the case with “phuchka,” little shells of thin dough filled with a spiced potato filling dipped in spiced water. It is a street food from South Asia represented in the cart below which sells phuchka from Dhaka. I have known phuchka only in its Kolkata version or in some of its North Indian versions variously as “Panipuri” or “Golguppa.” It’s a shell of fried dough stuffed with mashed potatoes and spices, chopped green chillies and dipped in cumin and tamarind water served in cones of dried sal leaves, at least in Kolkata. It has a special way of being consumed when people gather around the vendor in a circle, each person specifying exactly how much chopped chillies to add in the potatoes. Each phuchka has to be put into the mouth as a whole with all its filling and the spiced water. Eating phuchka is a ritual, not an exercise in nutrition. You cannot take that experience out of the streets of Kolkata, Dhaka or Mumbai (from what I hear–I wish I had lived in all cities of the world that sell phuchka).

I would say that New York streets have created a close approximation of that experience in Jackson Heights. That is where the charm of this city lies for me: Not only is it made of immigrants but immigrants make the city their own in the way that their experiences feel real, not fake, even if, inevitably, a little bit different.

New York City carts need to get their people back. When the carts lose their people, the city loses its charm and character. We have experienced too much of the still, sad music of humanity here in the city since the pandemic. We all need to come back now!

As I wrote this post, I remembered a post on Kolkata street food I did in October 2014. I have pictures of the Kolkata phuchka there!