This $10 Street Food Lunch Is Worth Seeking Out

Every day, a group of Ecuadorian women fans out across Chelsea, the West Village, and Greenwich Village just before lunchtime. They push flat carts carrying ice chests filled with iced beverages, and backpacks of condiments and utensils. They set up shop on corners, usually with the help of an assistant, and begin to sell set meals for $10 to workers in hardhats on big-ticket townhouse renovation projects (and there seem to be two or three per block in these neighborhoods). By around 1 p.m., the ice chests are empty and they pack up and depart.

The locations are fluid, but the women easy to spot. I’ve seen them along Sixth Avenue and on West 11th Street, among other places. If I see one, my practice is to buy a meal immediately, because the women are excellent cooks. Typically, two or three meals are available per day. These do not include the more arcane dishes sold by Ecuadorian trucks in Jackson Heights, where I’ve enjoyed things like blood sausage soup and ceviche, but rib-sticking, belt-busting, intentionally caloric meals that anyone could love.

The other day, one of the vendors offered three options for the main course, deposited in a round aluminum container with steamed vegetables, red beans, a fried egg, and rice: beef stew, breaded chicken cutlets, and a quarter-pound garlic sausage, slashed to facilitate cooking. I picked the sausage, and it was spectacular as sausages go.

But that wasn’t all: A soup came on the side consisting of bowtie pasta in a thick peanut broth laced with turmeric. It took me a while to realize it was probably intended as a vegetarian substitute for the Ecuadorian tripe stew guatita. The meal came with two sauces, one tasting of cilantro, like the green sauce in a Peruvian chicken joint; the other made with the South American aji chile, which is tolerably hot. The food was plain but delicious, and, with a Pepsi included, certainly one of the best $10 meal deals in town.

New York is one of many U.S. cities in the midst of a crisis due to the influx of migrants, with over 175,000 people having arrived here from the country’s southern border since 2022. Mayor Eric Adams declared a state of emergency, and said the city could spend $12 billion to mitigate the crisis. For new arrivals, selling food on the street can be a means of survival, one that the city has not been particularly willing to accommodate, with people selling without permits targeted by the police or the Department of Sanitation.