Editor’s Note: We know mobile gourmet food like artisanal ice cream and fancy burritos helped renew interest in meals-on-wheels. But our latest $10 A Day challenger, Jeannie Rose Field, explores some oldies but goodies that made the Big Apple the street food epicenter of America way before the trucks rolled in. Which street food vendors would you hit up if you only had $10 today? Let me know at amy@vendr.tv.

via NYC.andre on Flickr

I first fell in love with street food while living in Thailand. In Bangkok, street food was ubiquitous. The vendors were able to throw an endless array of dishes together in minutes and you could have it all for less than $3 a day. For breakfast, I’d have steamed rice with bananas before moving on to noodles for lunch. At night, I picked up bags of curries, stir fries, and chili sauces from street vendors to go with the rice I’d make at home. I was fearless and would pick dishes I didn’t recognize while chatting with vendors in my imperfect Thai.

In contrast, dining out in New York is a rare treat for me. These days, most of my meals are made at home. So it wasn’t until recently that I realized New York is dotted with carts selling foods as diverse as its population.

Could New York City street food become part of my daily routine, like it was in Thailand? When VendrTV challenged me to spend $10 on just street food in one day, I jumped at the chance to find out.

Every morning, Manhattan is flooded with breakfast carts stocked with donuts, bagels, muffins, and hot coffee. I was immune to the charms of these carts until one fateful morning when I was running late and filled with a hunger no bagel could quell. The sign appeared to me like manna from heaven: egg and cheese on a roll. I’m hard-pressed to imagine a more satisfying way to start the day. Maybe egg & cheese on a roll…with Ruth Reichl?

I stop at the first cart in front of NYU’s Stern School of Business, right off Washington Square South. Like in Thailand, business people, students, and construction workers all join the line for a hot breakfast. There is another cart down the way, but it only offers pastries, which won’t do as I have my heart set on egg and cheese on a roll. This cart, like most carts, offers it for $1.50. I could add coffee for 75 cents, but decide to save for lunch.

Stereotypes aside, the prototypical New York street food lunch is no longer just hot dogs and pretzels. That snack—still ubiquitous in Central Park and near museums—has been dethroned by halal chicken and rice stands, scattered all over the city.

Sammay’s Halal, on 6th Avenue just north of the West 4th Street subway stop, has been in the area nearly four years. I buy a big tray of chicken and rice with iceberg lettuce doused in both red and white sauce for $5. I watch the chef expertly dice onions with one hand while drizzling sauce on piles of juicy meat with his other. The tray is filling and I can’t finish it. With extra pita, it can easily feed two.

Later in the day, I make my way to Brooklyn where street vendors line the enormous Atlantic Terminal building on several sides. That’s where the word papas catches my eye. As I move closer, I see that the cart offers empanadas and tacos as well as fries (papas is Spanish for potatoes). Sounds good to me!

Two minutes and $2.50 later, I’m munching on a satisfying taco stuffed with plump pieces of chicken with a savory and mildly spicy sauce. I was surprised to see that the man serving this delicious street taco was Chinese – or so I assumed. When I dug a little deeper, I learned that Cesar the “Chinese” taco-maker is from Peru.

Cesar usually runs an ice cream truck in Brooklyn during the summer. Last summer, however, it rained about nine days out of ten. He didn’t make enough money to retire the truck and hibernate for the winter as he usually does (after working, he assured me, very hard for six months). The entrepreneurial Cesar decided to take after his family, who runs a series of restaurants in Peru, and started serving food. He’s been in the neighborhood for only six months and I hope he stays. I’m looking forward to trying his $2 empanada to add just another delicious bit of street food in my daily routine.

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