Queens’ Street Food: Sustenance, Not Swank

By Alexandra Torrealba

As Jackson Heights’ restaurants and bodegas close their doors for the day, another kind of food business hits the streets. When it’s past most of our bedtimes, Roosevelt Avenue’s mobile food vendors are just getting started.

Along this broad avenue, which runs under the 7 subway from Woodside to Sunnyside, food cart vendors open for business at the same spots every night, preparing to serve Mexican, Ecuadorian, Dominican and other ethnic foods under the street lights. Handing customers small, cheap dishes of everything from tacos to sweet rice pudding, as many as five vendors line the sidewalks, creating a mobile food court that only comes alive after dark.

Aurelio Reyes, a 26-year-old Mexican immigrant who has been living in Queens for six years, wakes up every day at 6 a.m. and drives to 92^nd and Roosevelt, where his food cart El Coyote Dormilon closed for business an hour earlier. He tows the cart – which has wheels at the bottom and fits two employees – to a designated garage three blocks away. “Mornings are for maintenance,” Reyes said. “I clean the food trays, spray water on the tires, and get it ready for the evening.”

Meanwhile, Reyes’s wife is at home cooking. She makes vats of ground beef and pork, unpacks the tortillas and cleans all the tomatoes, lettuce and onions that the Reyes get from wholesale providers every week.

At mid-morning, Reyes tows the cart back to 92^nd and Roosevelt, picks up the food his wife has prepared, brings it to the cart and sets it up on warming trays. At 1 p.m., Reyes’ two employees begin the lunch shift, serving customers from all walks of life: families, businessmen, employees on break, students after school and tourists. Reyes sells traditional Mexican dishes including tacos, quesadillas and burritos for three dollars apiece, and the typical “café de olla,” a watery, cinnamon-infused hot coffee drink for one dollar.

The business remains open until 5 a.m. “My peak selling time is 3 a.m.,” Reyes said, standing under a street lamp as he chewed on a Mexican gordita – a fried corn flatbread stuffed with heaps of ground beef, avocado and Oaxaca cheese. “From Thursday to Sunday, people around here leave bars at that time, drunk and hungry. Some people are also leaving work after midnight, so they come here for a hot meal before heading home.”

The late-night bars, Mexican karaoke joints, and the smell of fresh tamales and roasted pig at midnight are very characteristic of this neighborhood, which many Hispanic and South Asian immigrants call home.

The Ecuadorian salchipapa cart parked in front of a school playground on Roosevelt Avenue. Photo: Alexandra Torrealba.

The street food trend isn’t new: mobile food vendors have been wheeling through New York since the late 1600s, when they first became regulated by the city. Most recently, especially following the economic recession, New Yorkers have enthusiastically embraced the concept of food on wheels, a business model based on convenience, speed, affordability and innovation that satisfies busy schedules.

“Street food is a showcase,” said Jeff Orlick, a Queens resident whose side job is giving food tours in the neighborhood. “If everything was behind doors, you couldn’t smell it or see it. Street food puts it all on display and makes it accessible.” He also believes the low prices are an incentive for consumers, as restaurants get more expensive and “the high cost of a sit-down dining experience drives people away.”

The business model is particularly successful in Queens, where the largely immigrant, hard-working community sustains it. “Most of the vendors sell to their own neighbors,” Orlick said. “The dynamic is different from gourmet food trucks, where the food vending is anonymous.”

No two food carts on Roosevelt Avenue are the same. Even the three Ecuadorian carts on the corner of Warren Street, which sell essentially the same plates of roasted pig and potato tortillas, are quite dissimilar in their seasoning. “My food’s flavors are from Cuenca, the highlands of Ecuador,” said Maria Victoria Nevares, who started her business as a pushcart vendor and now owns a truck, Pique y Pase Pepin, and a restaurant in Corona called Vicky’s. “The other girls around here sell the same food, but their seasoning is from the Ecuadorian coast,” she said. While dishes from the Ecuadorian highland are characterized by no seasoning, maintaining the natural flavors of the slow-roasted pig, the people of the Ecuadorian coast tend to marinate the pork in chili powder and garlic, and serve it with hot sauce.

In 2006, the Street Vendor Project, a membership-based advocacy organization, published a report that stated there were approximately 3,000 licensed food vendors in the city. The city requires all mobile food vendors to have both a food-vending license for every employee and a legal permit for their vehicle. “The easiest way to think of it is that a permit is for the cart, like license plates, while the vending license is for the person, like a driver’s license,” said Sean Basinski, founder and director of the Street Vendor Project, in an e-mail.

A significant number of street food vendors are unlicensed, though, which means that the total is even higher. While food-vending licenses are quite simple to obtain, permits, which come in the form of stickers that are placed on the vehicle, are not. The application process is long, and only 3,100 year-round permits and an additional 1,000 seasonal permits are granted every year. The number of food vendors significantly surpasses the supply of permits; in 2011, there were over 2,000 names on the waitlist.

If and when a vendor gets off the waitlist, the price of the legal two-year permit is $200. There is a flourishing black market, where a permit holder illegally rents out it out to a licensed vendor for as much as $20,000. In 2011, “The Wall Street Journal” reported that more than 60% of vendors rent their permits, and that even the city’s Health Department admits the difficulty in avoiding – or proving – the illegal transfer.

In 2008, Nevares won her permit at a lottery the city holds every few years, was removed from the waitlist, and had enough money to make the investment. She said she renews the permit every two years. But vendors like Reyes had to opt for the alternative.

Maria Victoria Nevares hands a takeaway box of Ecuadorian roasted pig and potato tortillas to a late-night customer on Warren Street, Jackson Heights. Photo: Alexandra Torrealba.

“The permit has been impossible to get by myself, so I rent it from someone else,” Reyes explains. “The person who owns the permit got my cart through the inspection process for me. When the police comes to check my cart, all they want to know is whether or not the cart itself is operating legally and has been inspected, and that all employees have vendor licenses. That’s all.”

Reyes paid $14,000 for his rented two-year permit, but at least avoided the waitlist. The person he rents the permit from renews it every year.

Location is also another challenge for many vendors, who often face complaints when they park close to a storefront. A popular Ecuadorian cart, famous for its made-to-order ‘salchipapa’ (a mix of sliced frankfurters and French fries), avoids complaints by parking in front of a school playground on Roosevelt Avenue. Some vendors will often cluster around or near the busy subway entrances, taking advantage of the constant flow of potential hungry commuters.

Vendors like Florencia Aca, 37, and Lucila Sarmiento, 33, face the location dilemma every day. Originally from Puebla, Mexico, they’ve sold homemade tamales, beef skewers and corn on the cob out of retail grocery shopping carts along 82^nd Street for almost 15 years. Their carts lack permits, and they find it more difficult to align with stringent Health Department regulations; they work with a makeshift grill over burning carbon chunks, where the ready-made items are placed for slow reheating.

Aca and Sarmiento sell their items for two dollars apiece and make approximately $80 a day, but their costs include $15 for a daily bag of charcoal, $20 for the day’s ingredients, another $20 for a daily babysitter to pick up their children from school, and most importantly, “four mouths to feed at home” every night, Sarmiento said.

All vendors, large and small, have to align with the Department of Health regulations or face costly fines. While a ticket from local police for obstructing a sidewalk can cost $50, a health violation can lead to a $1,000 to $2,000 fine.

“How am I supposed to pay a $1,000 ticket when I make $20 in earnings every day?” said Aca, digging into her small bag and displaying a handful of pink slips, each one for fines from $25 to $200. “I’m just out here trying to make ends meet, but I have accumulated a debt of over $8,000 in tickets that I still haven’t been able to pay.” Her latest fine from the Department of Health was for inadequate storage of her ingredients – she keeps everything inside a cardboard box under her cart.

“I once got a $630 fine from a health inspector who found an egg on the counter that wasn’t kept refrigerated,” said Reyes, whose daily net profits on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, his busiest days, are approximately $800. “They cracked open the egg, stuck a thermometer inside, and determined the temperature wasn’t right.”

“Fines are a huge problem for me,” said Nevares, who not only has to cover food truck expenses, but also pays electric and water bills at her restaurant, where the kitchen is essential for the preparation of her truck food. “The last ticket I got was for $1,200 in January, and it was because the salad tongs were resting on the lettuce and not on the side of the tray.”

The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene did not respond to a request for comment.

Like Reyes’ operation, which is popular for its 3 a.m. tacos, other Roosevelt Avenue’s food carts are most profitable in the wee hours of the morning. In the case of the more mobile “tamale ladies,” as they are informally known, strategic selling hours are key. “I start at 8 p.m. and leave at 1 a.m.,” said Mari Martinez, 35, who has been selling her warm, wrapped tamales and sweet rice pudding by the 103^rd Corona Plaza subway entrance, off National Street, for almost two years. “Tamales are a very versatile food, they can be eaten at any time of day,” she said. “All of my 200 tamales are sold in less than five hours.” Every afternoon, she makes the chicken tamales, which are served with a choice of green or red sauce, the way her family eats them back in her hometown of Puebla, Mexico.

“I buy from her daily,” said Weiner Arreaga, 25, who at 11 p.m. had just left his shift at a nearby restaurant and came by for his usual order: three tamales with green sauce, each for $1.25. “They taste homemade and the price is convenient. It’s a good option for me; I’m very tired after work and I don’t cook at home.”

Arreaga, like many street diners in the area, knows Martinez personally because they share the neighborhood. Unlike the gourmet food trucks that drive through Manhattan and announce their daily locations on Twitter, most of Queens’ food carts are offline and tend to stay put at a single location. Social media is an alien concept to the majority of the vendors, who rely solely on word of mouth. “You come, you eat, you like it, and you tell your friends,” Reyes said. “That’s how I get my customers.”

Mobile food vending is a complicated business. Orlick, the Queens resident and food tour guide, suggests that educating storefront owners is a good starting point. “The city could encourage storefronts to rent out the space that the carts usually occupy in front of their business,” Orlick said. “This is usually around $1,000, but I know many would pay for it if it means getting less tickets from the police.”

Until then, enduring the tough economics of the food cart business will continue to be a struggle for most of the vendors. “Everything about this is hard,” Nevares said, as she handed a plate of steaming pork to a late-night customer. “But we need it and we are used to it, so we keep going.”

Alexandra Torrealba