Become Your Dream
Weather is a major factor for the Street Food Vendor. Bright sunny days are always good for business.
A parking lot of food trucks in DUMBO becomes an outdoor food court and helps the vendors to avoid incurring parking tickets on the street.
NYC foodies love their street food vendors. They search for them and stand in line for their fare.
Many tourists feel their Big Apple experience incomplete without an iconic soft pretzel from a corner cart.
Without a car or van to tow the morning coffee cart, the vendor must use elbow grease (and a few muscles) to maneuver and push his cart back to the garage after the morning coffee shift. Once in the garage, the cart is cleaned, recharged and restocked for tomorrow's service.
Normally thought of as a daytime enterprise, many Street Food Vendors work well into the night, serving the appetites of those that do not follow the 9 to 5 routine - or just want a midnight snack.
A good commissary or garage is very important to every street food vendor. This is where food can be bought or prepped, where carts and trucks are loaded in early morning, and where, at the end of the day, they are emptied, cleaned and stored.
NYC has capped the total number of required unrestricted, year-round, citywide mobile food vending unit (MFV) permits at just 2,000. Not surprisingly, permit holders rarely give them up. The arbitrarily low number fuels a booming black-market as a black-market permit is the only option for the vast majority of NYC street food vendors wanting to operate their businesses. MFV permits, which cost just $200 to renew every two years, currently fetch $25,000 on the black-market.
Working the window: street vending creates jobs not only for vendors but often also for full- and part-time employees.
Food carts and food trucks are all about the aspirations of the people who invent them, outfit them, and work them. This highly diverse group of bootstrap-entrepreneurs all believe their businesses will allow them to achieve their dreams, no matter the hard work and frustrations.
Magdy came from Egypt to the US as a law student. As he tells it, "First, I fell in love with this country, then I fell in love with my wife - and everything changed." Wanting to spend more time with his family, Magdy has operated his food cart for the past 25 years on the same Midtown corner, his wife and best friends working by his side.
Most Street Food Vendors perform all their prep work in a commissary and then cook the final product on either their cart or truck for that day's business.
A good dish is all about the detail of finishing touches.
Mobile vending carts are required by the NYC Health Department to be no larger than 5 feet by 10 feet, including all cart attachments and overhangs. As every inch of space on a cart is precious, the discipline of "a place for everything and everything in its place" is a way of life for food cart vendors.
