new york glimpses: on the move

Chalk this one up as a victory for Portland: our food cart scene puts New York to shame. True, it's a city of 12 million people and probably 1 million food carts, but most vendors don't venture much beyond the hot nuts/soft pretzels/hot dogs triumvirate. Meanwhile, in our Portland neighborhood alone, there is a waffle taco cart, an ice cream and pancake cart, a grilled cheese bus, and a retro trailer slinging baked goods and juices. In every neighborhood, food carts circle their wagons on overgrown lots and in empty parking spaces, creating an impromptu culture of makeshift cafes. Now, that's not to say that New York doesn't have any good cart food - they do have their own awards ceremony, after all - just that they're a lot more mobile than their Portland brethren, making them harder to track down.

On our first day in town, we went with our friend Hannah down to the weekly vintage bazaar called the Brooklyn Flea. Yes, we did want to check out the mid-century baubles and funky thrift-store clothes, but we knew we wouldn't be lugging home a suitcase full of Fiestaware; we came for the food. After we returned from last year's adventure to Red Hook, we heard tell of some amazing Central American cooks grilling up food for the neighborhood's weekend ballgames. While we didn't venture to Red Hook again, the Red Hook Ball Field Vendors made the trip up to Fort Greene for the Flea. We zeroed in on their stand and ordered a bean-and-cheese pupusa, along with a sweet corn tamale. The pupusa was crisply grilled on the outside and was filled with a savory melted cheese that tasted delicious with the pickled cabbage and hot sauce mounded on top. The tamale was unlike any other we'd ever tried: it had no filling inside the soft, steamed masa, but tasted exactly like a meltingly sweet ear of mid-summer corn.


Keeping with the stuffed-and-filled theme, we queued up for two other flea market street vendors. First up was Elsa's Empanadas, where we quickly downed an order of spinach, cheese and raisin handpies. They were nice and flaky and the filling had the right balance of tangy and sweet. Tantalizingly, the Empanada stand was right next to Asia Dog, but A steered me away from a kimchi-garnished hot dog and over to dessert.

Salvatore Bklyn does handmade ricotta with hipster street cred. What caught our notice were their hand-stuffed cannoli. I have a real weakness for cannoli - we've even made them ourselves once, which entailed no small amount of deep-frying and pastry bags. Best to leave it to the experts. And these were certainly expert, with the right amount of outside crunch and a lightly sweetened, curd-y filling. The more I consider it, the more that I realize that stuffed foods are pretty much made for street carts. Well, those and foods-on-sticks. But as far as portable edibles go, it's hard to beat a cannolo.


From then on, our mobile eating stayed on a decidedly sweet note. Walking down Bedford Ave. in Williamsburg, A nearly shrieked when she saw a buttermilk-colored truck passing our dishes of small-batch ice cream. Van Leeuwen ice cream uses simple ingredients to craft simple flavors. With our friend Hannah, we ordered a peppermint-chocolate chip scoop and a dish of red currant and cream. Both flavors had a fresh creaminess, despite being custard-based, but the currant ice cream was particularly memorable for its balance between tangy fruit and sweet milk.


The next evening, after making dinner with our friends Catherine and Quincy, we were struck by two realizations: we hadn't bought dessert, and we were just a few blocks from Dessert Truck's late-night parking grounds. You might recall our nighttime sugar-fix from last-year's visit, but if not, I should fill you in: Dessert Truck sells haute cuisine desserts in paper cups for six bucks. It's a brilliant business plan. On this visit, A ordered a goat cheese cake, while I opted for the pavlova. Individually, the components of the pavlova (crisp meringue, red fruit gelee, creme fraiche) were spot-on, but for some reason, they just didn't quite jive. I'm sure some of it had to do with the difficulty of breaking a meringue with a plastic spoon. That said, A's cheesecake choice more than made up for mine: a few blackberries and a drizzle of rosemary-scented caramel were a great accompaniment to the rich cake. This is one we might have to work on re-creating at home.


After a few days of going without a mobile-food-fix, Hannah informed us of a weekly fixture just around the corner from her midtown workplace: the Treats Truck. Late one afternoon, we strolled up Lexington to where it was parked, only to be generously barraged by samples. Normally, I take a free taste (and I think most people are like me on this matter) and walk away thinking, "Sucker...you didn't trick me into buying anything!" But hell, the Treats Truck proprietess more than tricked us; she up-sold us two brownies, when we'd only meant to get a double-peanut-butter sandwich cookie. I have to hand it to her, though - she knows her product. The PB cookie was really good, but imagine downing an entire box of Girl Scout Tagalongs, and you'll begin to get a sense of its mouth-parching stickiness. We also enjoyed our Mexican chocolate brownie, which tasted more of Ibarra hot chocolate than the overly-infused chile concoctions everyone else seems to love. Of everything we ordered, though, the pecan butterscotch bar ranks among the most addictive desserts I've ever had; it was decadently sweet and sticky in that slightly under-baked way. With sweets this good, I suppose I could be okay with having to follow a moving target.