A Guide to NYC Street Food
We like to think of the street as our extended dining room. We love the adventure of exploring a new neighborhood or stumbling upon a corner stand which offers a quick, delicious, inexpensive meal. If you're lucky the vendors will tell you a story or two as you wolf down your falafel or shish kebob. And there's nothing better than an excuse to make a mess.
Usually without a name or exact address, part of the fun of street food dining is following a friend's directions to track down a very specific cart selling that smooth cool gelato. Of course, nameless dining joints can be as dangerous as they are delicious. We may not have written the book on street food, but we'll read any book or column are put before us on the matter. So, when we found that Tara Kyle of the Conde Nast Traveler blog, The Perrin Post, has compiled a list of deliciously cheap and tasty food around NYC, we had to refer our readers.
For those who just can't stay out of midtown, Kyle interviewed Sanjay Surana, Traveler's resident street food expert. His favorite stops are:
Muslim Trinidadians at the Southeast corner of 43rd Street and 6th Avenue for the area's best Halal Food. Sanjay loves the curried vegetables (potatoes, chick peas, cabbage) over yellow or white rice, and while he's a vegetarian, he reports that the chicken dishes also do a "brisk trade." At the Egyptian-run falafel stand at the Northeast corner of 40th and Broadway, in front of Citibank, for just $3, you'll get "coriander in the falafel balls, slightly smoky fried eggplant, and lip-smacking hot sauce." Although not technically street food as it operates out of a storefront, the 24-hour pizza shop on the Northwest Corner of 36th Street and 8th Avenue gives you the true eat and run experience: There are no tables and little floor space, so you'll have to join the bike messengers, fashion district delivery men, and office workers who down their $1 slices standing on the pavement out front. Sanjay raves about the tomato sauce's "perfect combination of sweetness and tartness."
And wIth July here, it's time to buy your tickets and send in nominations for the Best Street Food Vendy Awards. Sponsored by the Urban Justice Center, the Vendy Awards will take place in September and is "an Iron Chef-style cookoff & awards ceremony to honor the city's best street food vendors while also recognizing the contributions that all street vendors make to NYC's rich cultural (and culinary) life."
Kyle recommends using the 2006 Vendy Award nominees as street food guide tour to the outer borroughs of New York City. To download the guide, click here , then click on the 2006 Vendy Awards program.
