Meet the Man Whose Dosa Cart Has Been a New York Icon for 20 Years

Vegan cafés, bakeries, and restaurants are a vital part of New York dining. Yet these establishments don’t always get the coverage they merit. This series of stories this week by Mayukh Sen highlights immigrant-owned, plant-based eateries across the city and the people behind them.

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Thiru Kumar isn’t exactly wanting for attention. No matter the season, throngs of admirers tend to line up at his cart in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park, where NY Dosas has sold this iconic South Indian dish for two-plus decades. Clippings of articles from newspapers in France, Japan, and the United Kingdom, along with screen grabs from his numerous video appearances on channels like Vice’s now-defunct Munchies, wallpaper Kumar’s cart.

“A lot of people said, ‘It’s not going to work out,’ you know?” he says of the early days when he first began this project in 2001. “So I didn’t give up. I tried my best.”

Born in the Sri Lankan city of Jaffna, Kandaswamy Thirukumar — known to regulars as Thiru Kumar, or the Dosa Man — has bright eyes and a distinct mustache, and, on the day I visit him, wears a shamrock-hued apron and chunky beads around his neck.

As he works, he pools lavas of dosa batter onto his griddle while conversing with a customer in Tamil. Some might ask for the Pondicherry special, dosas stuffed with a clump of crisp salad greens; others might spring for his vegan drumsticks, poles of soy protein on sugarcane twigs. Cups of sharp sambar, a soup rich with lentils, and creamsicle-orange coconut chutney usually arrive as accompaniments. He offers his food on a spice gradient; one patron implores him to serve her order “as spicy as you can make it.”

Kumar grew up in Sri Lanka, cooking with his grandmother. In that past life, he taught diving and swimming. In those days, there were few restaurants dotting the beaches where he worked; cooking was a necessity. “We go out to the ocean from the city, so we had to bring our own food and stuff,” he says.

By 1995, Sri Lanka’s ongoing civil war prompted him, his wife, and daughter to come to the U.S. by the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, also known as the Green Card Lottery. Settling in Queens, he worked a job in construction. Then, he pumped gas. He toiled away in an iron factory. But it was a gig helping a friend out at Dosa Hutt, a restaurant in Flushing, that made him want to start his own food cart. “I wanted to do something different, like no one is doing,” he says.

Around this same time, he decided to transition to veganism, which he’s devoted himself to for over twenty years now. Some of his friends were vegan, he says, and the vapors of their influence rubbed off on him. “I tried it, I liked it, I stick with it,” he says.

He opened NY Dosas in December of 2001, in the shadow of 9/11, which had traumatized the city. There were ample reasons why an endeavor like his shouldn’t have worked: Washington Square Park wasn’t the safest place back then, and, at least from where he was standing, there were few vegan spots, period, let alone ones that championed a regionally specific style of cooking like his cart did.

Most of his early patrons, whether yogis or nearby New York University students who were just hanging around in the area, didn’t know what dosas even were. CREPE MADE OUT OF RICE & LENTIL, the signage on the front of the cart still blares.

Attention came quickly. The sheen of novelty — along with the promise of good health that his food carried — lured patrons in the first place, he says. It helps that his menu items are under $10, too. Many of his early customers were cash-strapped; they were international students, too, and his cart became a point of attraction for that global audience who now found themselves in Manhattan by circumstance.

Kumar won a Vendy, one of the highest forms of recognition for street food in New York, in 2007; his status as a finalist twice before his eventual win got him the reputation of the Susan Lucci of the awards. He’s held steady all these years later, and the luster hasn’t worn with age. His refusal to futz with a tried formula, he says, is what’s kept the cart alive.

His is a mostly solo enterprise, he states, though he occasionally enlists the help of friends, family members, even NYU students who want to pitch in and help run the business. Being his own boss affords him some welcome flexibility (and so he’s not always stationed in the park). He went to India and Sri Lanka a few winters ago. A photo of one site he visited, the Ramanathaswamy Temple on the island of Rameswaram in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, is affixed to his cart. The challenges of keeping his business afloat are surmountable, he says, though rainy days are the hardest.

Despite those occasional minefields, he doesn’t see the tenor of his work changing at any point soon. He has entertained — and declined —entreaties to take his talents to a restaurant. He prefers to keep things simple with a cart; he says his current contract with the city runs until 2029, which is a ways away.

“I do it for — not money,” he says of his cart, “but kind of love.”

Mayukh Sen is the author of Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America. He has won a James Beard Award for his food writing, and his work has been anthologized in three editions of The Best American Food Writing.