September 22, 2004

Street Corner Cooks Have Names, Too

By DANA BOWEN

HER name is Maria Piedad Cano, but friends call her Piedad.

"There are so many Marias where I'm from," she said, chuckling, as she slathered margarine over Colombian corncakes sizzling on a propane-powered griddle.

It was 10:45 p.m., and the Friday night bar crowd on Roosevelt Avenue hovered hungrily around her sidewalk kitchen. An hour earlier she had dragged her batterie de cuisine — condiment bottles, coolers, cast-iron grills and all — out of a Jackson Heights garage and set up shop under the elevated 7 train on the corner of 79th Street in Queens. Drivers pulled up, waving money and shouting orders, then circled the block until their arepas were ready.

Throughout New York immigrant cooks without the wherewithal to open a restaurant serve quick, cheap and delicious tastes of home from makeshift stands at the curbside.

Some are so good that they have developed wider reputations, particularly among a segment of the culinary cognoscenti for whom the difficulty in finding a meal only adds to its appeal. The vendors' specialties, and often elusive locations, are posted on Internet message boards and confidentially circulated among friends by e-mail.

Unlike the celebrated chefs in New York's more fashionable neighborhoods, whose every career moves and garnish choices are subjects of discussion, these men and women labor without publicists, with little English and often without the documents needed to live in this country or sell food in this city. Yet they have become known in a corner of the food world for dishes they've distinguished: souse stew from the Caribbean, Oaxacan tamales, Brazilian rissole turnovers and other traditional recipes.

Ms. Cano is known to many as the Arepa Lady, which amuses her deeply. She didn't prepare these traditional snacks until 1986, two years after she fled her home in Medellín. She was a judge, she said, and the drug wars made her beautiful town, and her job, too dangerous.

She reminisced, through a translator, about her former good life, before turning to the subject of her culinary accolades. She cited articles on the Internet about her and scoffed at a cookbook author who claimed to have published her recipe. "She didn't have the right proportions," Ms. Cano said.

No matter how she makes them here, it's hard to match the flavor of the arepas in Colombia. The corn here is of a different variety, she said, and not as sweet. Still, the demand is high for her arepas, including the inch-high pancake of cornmeal, mozzarella, milk and sugar that she makes at home.

"Restaurant food is very industrialized," Ms. Cano said. "It loses much of the flavor that's made at home."

And there lies the conundrum of homemade street food. "You cannot prepare food at home and sell it on the street," said Elliott Marcus, assistant commissioner for the city's Bureau of Food Safety and Community Sanitation, an office of the Department of Heath and Mental Hygiene. "You need to have a cart."

Vendors need a license, and to get one they need a green card and must pass a new mobile vending food protection course that is currently offered only in English, Mr. Marcus said. They also need permits for their carts, which among other requirements must have running water and be stored in an approved area if they are used to cook food. Only 3,100 year-round permits are issued, with 1,000 more in the summer, so there's a waiting list.

For many vendors the system is difficult to navigate. "It took me two years to get it straight," said Sean Basinski, director of the Street Vendor Project, which offers classes and legal counsel to its 200 members.

Ms. Cano has a green card and a license but no permit; her equipment has been confiscated three or four times, she said.

Some vendors caught in Ms. Cano's situation rent permits. "The going rate is $6,000," Mr. Basinski said. "There's sort of a black market in it."

Many vendors take the risk of selling home-cooked meals from makeshift carts, coolers or insulated sports bags.

Melania Chavarria and Carlos Villanueva do a brisk weekend breakfast business outside a coin laundry in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

"In the morning everyone wakes up early to eat tamales," said Mr. Villanueva, who moved to New York from Puebla, Mexico, in 1988. The couple started vending two years ago, after Ms. Chavarria lost her job in a plastics factory, and Mr. Villanueva's construction work slackened.

"It's a recipe from my family," he said of the tamales steamed in corn husks, which his grandmother sold in markets. The chicken version comes slathered in a superb chili sauce; the pork, with cooked jalapeño and fresh tomatoes.

On cooler mornings their intensely rich atole — porridge made with milk and rice, sometimes corn, always cinnamon — sells out quickly. Ms. Chavarria, who is Nicaraguan, pours steaming ladlefuls into plastic foam cups. "Too much water, it's no good," Mr. Villanueva advised. "And you don't cook the milk too long."

Vendors like Ms. Chavarria and Mr. Villanueva are part of a long tradition in New York, one that has helped preserve the city's polyglot food cultures, said Suzanne Wasserman, the associate director of the Gotham Center for New York City History. The pushcart politics among vendors, store owners and city officials are also timeless, she said. "It's a major turf war that touches on taxing, health issues, food safety and even issues of street crowding and congestion," she said.

In 1938 Mayor Fiorello La Guardia outlawed street vendors to consolidate sales in new markets like La Marqueta and Essex Street. But the law could not put an end to sidewalk sales.

Flor Bermudez, a lawyer who is the executive director of Esperanza del Barrio, a street vendor organization in East Harlem, said vending and community go hand in hand. "In Mexico," she said, "the best thing you can eat is always on the street corner."

In East Harlem nearly every corner beckons with regional specialties. The vendor organization, founded a year ago by Lidia Calleja, who sells shaved ice with fresh tamarind and other juices on 115th Street, has more than 100 members. Financed by a grant from the Open Society Institute, part of the Soros Foundation Network, the group is lobbying the city to grant vending licenses to undocumented immigrants.

The group also represents vendors in court: in the past year, it has challenged 170 arrests. Though fines are lower than those issued to licensed vendors (which quadrupled to a maximum of $1,000 last summer), these vendors face jail time and community service. Those who are undocumented immigrants fear deportation.

The group doles out emotional and educational support, as well. Vendors study English together. Members have started a catering company. They take road trips upstate and brag about one another's cooking.

Ms. Bermudez said Hilda Jaimes sells great, oversized Oaxacan tamales out of a cooler in front of Taco Bell on 116th Street.

"Even Mexicans sometimes are like, `I've never tasted these before,' " said Ms. Jaimes's 17-year-old daughter and kitchen assistant, Janis. The family arrived from Guerrero, Mexico, in 1996, and soon after started selling Ms. Jaimes's grandmother's recipe. The masa — cornmeal dough tinted with chilies and infused with an artichokelike flavor from deep green banana leaves — conceals a stewy center of guajillos, chicken and aromatic spice.

In their apartment, Ms. Jaimes and Janis work in a tiny kitchen under a candlelit shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Pots hang on screws over a small gas stove, and a large television sits atop the refrigerator. A blender whirls above Ms. Jaimes's stack of red coolers.

Mexican and South American vendors seem to dominate the sidewalks of New York. More populous groups, like Dominicans and Chinese, sell less home cooking on the street for several reasons, including traditions, employment trends and regulatory enforcement in their neighborhoods.

"They're really harsh right now," said a middle-aged woman selling from a shopping cart in front of Sara D. Roosevelt Park in Chinatown. "I have been fined many times."

The woman, who said through a translator that she did not want to be identified or photographed, rents work space inside a Chinese restaurant, where she reheats food made in her Brooklyn home. She used to rent a cart, but the owner lost his permit.

From the shopping cart she sells homemade sweet potato pastries, crackled eggs hard-boiled in hot, spiced tea, and zongzi, sticky rice pyramids wrapped in bamboo leaves and tied with string. The knot dictates the filling: middle bows means mung beans and pork; top ties are peanuts.

"They make it differently in different provinces," said her 15-year-old daughter, who has learned perfect English since moving here six years ago from Enping, in southeast China. "I know the long ones, that when I was young I used to call them sheep horns, and we'd hang them around our neck."

When zongzi aren't street food, they're feast food, and women cook them communally, stuffing raw rice into intricately folded leaves. "It's really hard to make," the vendor said, adding that she sells 20 daily at $1 each and fries leftovers for dinner.

An elderly Cantonese customer wanted to know why they don't use lotus leaves, which opened a discussion about the recipe's history. Zongzi commemorates the suicide drowning of an ancient political poet: legend has it that his followers threw rice-stuffed bamboo into the river, so fish would spare his body.

To avoid conflicts with restaurant owners, street vendors, like the zongzi sellers, often work far from their view. Subway exits are popular. So are industrial zones during lunch. But nowhere is as prime as a public park, where vending is managed by the Parks Department.

In light of the long waiting lists for street vending permits, many vendors turn to Park Department permits instead. Ron Lieberman, the department's director of revenue and concessions, said vendors bid on locations and are required to obtain proper Health Department licenses and pass the food sanitation class. He said his division oversaw some 700 vendors and took in about $63 million this year, about triple what was bid in 1995.

In McCarren Park in Brooklyn, Zoila and Luis Orellana, from Cuenca, Ecuador, cook taco fillings on a sheet pan stained brown with fat. Mrs. Orellana zooms past soccer fields in her green gingham housecoat, selling bags of puffy pinwheel chicharrones and torta sandwiches she makes at home. They paid $4,000 for the permit this year.

Other vendors, who can't afford such rent, sell just outside the park. Susana Sanchez, 25, griddles pupusas — Salvadoran cornmeal patties stuffed with cheese, beans and meat — on a green Coleman camping stove across from the parade grounds on Caton Avenue. Her mother patted masa between her palms on a recent day, while her grandmother sat in the shade, recalling the markets of San Miguel and caring for Ms. Sanchez's 3-year-old son.

Outside Lincoln Terrace Park on Buffalo Avenue in East New York, Brooklyn, a party erupts during Tuesday and Thursday night cricket matches. There's Caribbean music, occasional wafts of marijuana and Adelle's famous souse, a West Indian specialty rarely served in restaurants.

"They make the chicken-foot souse, the pig-foot souse, and you have this thing from the sea — conch souse," said Adelle, a tall St. Vincentian, ladling up tepid cow-foot souse from a metal stockpot, topping it with fresh cucumbers.

With its gelatinous meat and marrow-filled bones, this beloved West Indian stew looks disconcerting to the uninitiated. But a sip of its spicy pepper broth, with flecks of celery leaf and ample lime, encourages sampling the more adventurous bits.

Customers from Guyana, Trinidad and St. Vincent dive in fingers first for the bones and sip Irish moss, a creamy drink of thickened seaweed, wheat germ, peanut butter and milk. It's rumored to be sexually fortifying; she always sells out.

Adelle, who asked to be referred to by only her first name, has been selling here for 12 years. During the days, she has shoveled cement and baby-sat, and currently cares for an elderly woman. "No matter what other job I have, I'm still cooking," she said.

Mobile food vendors say money is a main motivation. Autonomy is another. Only the romantic few and serious cooks wax philosophical about preserving food traditions.

Neuza, a 61-year-old Brazilian woman with beaming eyes and oven burns on her arms, is one of these. Her salgadinhos — fried snacks — are buzzed about in Little Brazil in Manhattan. She also sells them out of an insulated bag in Newark to the Portuguese-speaking population.

Her homemade crescents — which she calls rissole, and which she used to sell on the street in São Paulo — are crusted in bread crumbs. Underneath, a thick layer of dough envelops a burst of creamy shrimp, capers and corn.

As she flips them in a bubbling pot of oil with two wooden spoons, she talks about the traditional foods she served at her restaurant in Paraná, in southern Brazil, until she closed it in 1998 and moved here. "I would love to open a restaurant here," she said through a translator.

For many vendors a little restaurant or take-out shop is the ultimate goal. It was for Jaime Bermudez, 49 (no relation to Flor Bermudez), who has whizzed around Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens for 16 years selling his Colombian empanadas from a bicycle equipped with a cooler. Over the years he started thinking like a restaurant owner. "Instead of buying little packages," Mr. Bermudez said, "I'd buy 50 pounds, so this way the corn is cheaper."

Now that he has a cheery little storefront nearby, with green-stained benches and coolers full of homemade ice cream pops, he's still selling his empanadas by bike.

"I love the park," he said with a shrug. "It's so different, it's like a personal touch with the people.`

Other vendors would call it quits. "It's hard to work the whole year with rain and snow and the cold," said Ms. Cano, who has dreamed about a little place of her own. Nothing fancy: just a few tables and a comfortable kitchen. What would she call it?

"The Arepas Lady," she said. "Or maybe Palacio de las Arepas.`


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