[music]Alison Stewart: This is All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. A new exhibition celebrates the entrepreneurs who shaped New York City's local culinary moments from across the world. It's called Street Food City, and it opens tomorrow at Brooklyn's Dumbo neighborhood. Throughout history, New York street food vendors have often been immigrants. The exhibit traces the history of street vending from New Amsterdam in 1624 to present day, highlighting hot dogs, pretzels, roasted nuts, ice cream, halal plates, and many other foods that have helped define New York as an international food capital.

It also looks behind the food itself and asks, who are the people behind these carts? Where do they come from? What challenges do they face? How have they shaped cities, sights, sounds and flavors of a city for centuries? The exhibition opens tomorrow, Saturday, December 6th, at the Museum of Food and Drink, located at 55 Water street in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Joining us now is the museum's president, Nazli--

Nazli Parvizi: Oh, you got it. No, no, no, you got it.

Alison Stewart: I got it. Nazli Parvizi.

Nazli Parvizi: Perfect.

Alison Stewart: Nazli, nice to speak to you. Also Catherine Piccoli.

Catherine Piccoli: Piccoli. It's because you were practicing too much and you had it right the first time.

Alison Stewart: I was practicing.

Nazli Parvizi: You had it the first time. Perfect.

Alison Stewart: The museum's curator/director. Thank you so much for being with us. Let's get to our call in. Listeners, we'd like to hear from you. Do you have a favorite street food vendor you can't live without? Are you a vendor yourself? Shout out to your favorite business. Tell us what inspired you to start a food venture in the first place? Give us a call. 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC. You can hit us up on social at allofitwnyc. Nazli, what first inspired you to make an exhibition all about street food?

Nazli Parvizi: I think it was a few things. I think one of the things that we realized two years ago, this was always on the list, but food is a really wonderful way about talking about issues that we care about. It's such an approachable way about learning about ourselves, about the societies around us, and in our Republic of New York that we love and cherish.

When we had a migrant crisis, we noticed the language around migrants being really vitriolic in a way that, as a New Yorker, I'm not used to hearing us talk about immigrants that way. Street food is an immigrant phenomenon. When you get to the museum, you'll realize it didn't start that way maybe in the 1600s, 1700s. For the last 200 years onwards, 250 years onwards, it is an immigrant phenomenon.

I think that it's so iconic. There's so much joy in street food. You're going to get so many calls. It's such a great question to ask, and everybody has an answer to it. I think, for us, we just wanted to use this sort of joyful topic to talk about immigration and to sort of humanize this topic and these people that we really care about. This is the lowest rung on the economic ladder for new Americans, and it deserves a deeper dive and a deeper look.

Alison Stewart: Catherine, did you want to add anything?

Catherine Piccoli: I agree. We all eat street food, and these entrepreneurs are part of the cultural and culinary landscape of the city. I think so many times, as New Yorkers, we're rushing around and maybe we're not paying attention to them. They're here and they work really hard and they make delicious food that we do eat. To be able to give them their flowers honestly feels really lovely.

Alison Stewart: How did you decide which stories from the past and the present to focus on?

Catherine Piccoli: This is a bit of a survey exhibition. We are looking at all 400-plus-ish years of New York City history and all of the people who have sold food on the streets of the city. Each of our sections, in our historical sections and even in our contemporary section, we're answering the questions, who were the people that were selling food on the street? What kind of foods were they selling? How did that whole ecosystem work, and who were they selling to?

You can really see how street food vending changes over time historically, but also how so much of it stays the same. There's really this cyclical pattern of boom immigration time that brings lots of people into the city. People start vending, and then there's regulation that sort of caps or limits that, and it maybe gets smaller, and then the cycle repeats itself.

Alison Stewart: Nazli, was there something that you discovered about food vending that you didn't expect?

Nazli Parvizi: Ooh, that's a great question. I think what's really interesting to me is in the early days with the first immigration waves in the 1830s to 1850s, is how much street vending answered the sort of problem that we still have today, which is last mile delivery of fresh food to neighborhoods that can't access fresh food. We really keep coming up with that. We've heard Mayor Mamdani talk about bringing supermarkets.

The food that was sold by vendors in places like the Lower East Side was often fresher than anything they can get in the markets because they were going directly to the farms in Brooklyn and getting the food themselves and bringing it to their own communities. There's a lot to be learned there. Frankly, it's still a tool.

I ran Brooklyn recovery during hurricane Sandy. Because I've always been a fan of street vendor and I always had a relationship with street vendors., we used food trucks at a point where so many restaurants and businesses were shut down in Coney Island to bring food and meals to people who just couldn't leave their neighborhoods or access anything. They are part of the city fabric. They are a crucial part of the city fabric, but they're also were and should be considered a major part of our food delivery system.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call. Nick is calling in from Astoria. Hi, Nick. Thank you so much for taking the time to call All of It. You're on the air.

Nick: Oh, thanks so much. I'm calling from Astoria. Queens is really the absolute mecca of food. You got the best food everywhere, but the absolute best of the best is my halal cart on 30th Avenue run by Ahmed. He named the cart Eat It. This is the pinnacle of halal food. His falafel is the absolute perfect. It's so crispy on the outside. It's so soft and fluffy on the inside. The flavors just explode.

I think the secret is he makes them in cubes. I asked him once, like, "How do you make the perfect falafel like this?" He's like, "Look here." He showed me an instrument. He says, "You make a cube like this, and it keeps the flavors intact. It keeps the structure of the falafel perfect. The crispy outer, soft inside." This is the kind of place when I just need a snack. I just go there just to get one falafel. I don't even need sauce. It's just the perfect snack. On top of that, I just go daily for my platters. He's got a following. He knows everyone in the neighborhood. He's the friendliest guy. It's an institution of Queens.

Alison Stewart: Thanks so much for calling. Hey, do you have a favorite street vendor you can't live without, or are you a vendor yourself? Call in. Shout out that business. Our number is 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC. A new Museum of Food and Drink exhibition celebrates generations of New York's mostly-immigrant street food entrepreneurs.

Museum president Nazli Parvizi and curator/director Catherine Piccoli join us to discuss Street Food City at the Museum of Food and Drink. It's in Dumbo in Brooklyn. In the exhibition, you have advisors for the show, including representatives from the Street Vendor Project, the Smithsonian National History Museum. What are these scholars and historians you consulted with help you understand about street food culture?

Catherine Piccoli: For each exhibition that we put together, the first thing we do as we're starting our research is to find the experts in the field who can really help us, guide us, help shape the stories that we're telling, and help ensure that we are telling stories respectfully always. This group of people, they are really phenomenal.

The folks at Street Vendor Project helped connect us with so many vendors and people working within the street food vending ecosystem, like commissary kitchen owners and food cart manufacturers. There are many people with historical backgrounds who have been studying street food not only in New York City, but in other places like New Orleans, like Singapore, who help give us some more depth and stories and help us to think about how the vending system in New York may or may not be different from the vending system in other places in the country and the world. They're an incredible, incredible group. I'll just say that.

Alison Stewart: There's a special exhibition, Nazli, from the World Food Photography Awards. How did this partnership come about?

Nazli Parvizi: You segued so perfectly because I was going to mention this. We're telling a very distinctly New York story. I think one thing I should mention is we're a bite-sized museum. We love our food puns. I don't think there'll ever be enough space, no matter how large we are, to tell the full story we want to tell. What we want to do is spark people's curiosity and get them out there. We think New York City is a museum of food and drink. Our point is to educate you, give you some kernels of knowledge and guide you into the city to go explore it for yourself armed with this knowledge.

Knowing that this was a New York City story, we were put in touch. They found us with a wonderful organization based out of the UK called the International Food Photography Awards. What a wonderful partnership. When we got in touch, we were trying to figure out how we could partner. I'm a lover of art, but especially photography. I said, "Well, we're doing this thing on street food. Do you happen to have--" and the founder, Caroline, said, "Oh, that's an entire category for us."

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Nazli Parvizi: She gave us a whole bunch of photographs and we curated our favorites and picked about 30 or so and had them printed. We're on the second floor of the Empire Stores building. This is on the first floor. What I love about it is it gives you an international gallery of street vending from around the world. The pictures are so gorgeous.

There's a theme throughout of it, which is that this is something that people do for a living and have to do for a living oftentimes. The culture of the food itself is fascinating and incredible. It's just an incredible way of completing the entire exhibition and giving a look at the international story. We'll touch upon more of the New York story versus the international story in our programming, but it's really nice to get a look of both the New York story and the international story in the building.

Alison Stewart: We got a great text here that says, "When the migrant crisis started, my main response, other than worrying about the safety of our new neighbors, was being so thankful for the street vendors. As a former Angeleno, it's pleasant to be able to buy from a fruit cart on Broadway or grabbing a churro on the subway." Let's talk to Joy, who's calling in from Huntington. Hey, Joy, thanks for calling All of It. You're on the air.

Joy: Hi. Thank you so much for taking my call. My name is Joy Moy. My husband is John Moy. First of all, I married him just to have a rhyming name. Let's put that out there. I seriously married my husband, jokingly, not jokingly, because he's that good of a cook. He started his side hustle making dumplings. I'm like, "John, you got to go with this."

He purchased a trailer two years ago. He's been catering ever since. He didn't know what to name it. I said, "Listen, I'm happy when I eat your dumplings because they're that good and they're authentic." He makes customized dumplings. He's like, "What am I going to call it?" I said, "Listen, I'm happy and I have a fat rear end because of your dumpling. Let's just call it--" I hope I can say it's on the air. His company is called Happy Fat Ass Dumplings.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: So good. Thanks for calling, Joy. Let's talk to Maxine, who's calling in from Manhattan. Hi, Maxine. Thank you for making the time to call All of It. You're on the air.

Maxine: Thank you. I'd like to tell you about Taboonia, which is an Israeli Druze restaurant that's at the Grand Bazaar every Sunday. It's more of a restaurant than a stand. The way the food is prepared, it's fantastic. Specialties of the Druze community, including Lebanon and Chica Lebanon. Whatever your taste buds want, from grape leaves to the most extraordinary exotic pizzas, it's at Taboonia.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling. Let's talk to Harold, who's calling from Midtown.

Harold: Hi, guys.

Alison Stewart: Hi.

Harold: Great segment. I live and work in Midtown. We're so excited every year with the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, but it wouldn't be as exciting without the layers of smells of the chestnut vendors, the hot pretzels. The smells are so important to add to the excitement of the holiday season in New York. It's Gershwin, it's Woody Allen. It's everything we love about New York. Thanks.

Alison Stewart: You sound like a commercial, a great commercial.

Nazli Parvizi: We love you. It's funny. This is not a city known for good smells. We're not Southern France. You say nuts for nuts, and everybody's just like, "Ah." You say chestnuts and pretzels, and you're like, "Thank God." They're scenting our city in the best way possible.

Alison Stewart: I want to ask you a little bit about history that we can learn in the show. You highlight the Hot Corn Girls. Will you please explain to us who the Hot Corn Girls were?

Catherine Piccoli: Sure. First of all, corn has been sold on the streets of New York City since the earliest days. Originally, roasted corn was sold by African American women. As you get into the mid to late 1800s and you have many more European immigrants coming into the city, you have a lot of women and children actually selling food on the street.

The Hot Corn Girls sold hot corn. I think it was boiled with a touch of salt in the-- I don't know what it's called, in the husk. They were known for their beauty. They were known for their calls. They sung late into the night as people spoke about them. Their calls are really compelling. My favorite one is, it's short and sweet, but it's something like, "You have money, I have none. Buy my corn so I can go home."

Alison Stewart: Short and sweet.

Catherine Piccoli: Right to the point.

Nazli Parvizi: Right to the point.

Alison Stewart: As you said, a lot of the vendors have had jingles and songs they would sing. This is a street call by Clyde "Kingfish" Smith. It's called A-Tisket, A-Tasket. It was interpreted and recreated by a local actor, Jared Kemp, for the museum show. Let's listen.

[MUSIC - Jared Kemp: A-Tisket, A-Tasket]

A-tisket, a-tasket

I sell fish by the basket

If you folks don't buy some fish

I'm going to put you in a casket

Going to carry you down avenue

And there's not a single thing you'll do

I'm going to dig, dig, dig all around

A-tisket, a-tasket

I sell fish by the basket

Alison Stewart: How did early vendors, how did they advertise their business, Nazli?

Nazli Parvizi: New York was a much louder city. I know people think that New York is loud now, but it was a much louder city. It's funny. I'm Iranian, and this is what Tehran sounds like today. Street corn is my favorite street food, because that's our street food over there. It's interesting. Parts of the world still sound super loud, and there's still people going through the streets selling salt and fish and whatever on the back of their trucks and whatnot.

It was a loud city, and you didn't have TikTok or phones or anything. To Catherine's point, nothing's changed. If you are more attractive, if you had the best song, if you sung it well, you're going to get the attention. Then I hope that people actually looked at the quality of the food and then judged it by that. We heard a lot. I think you had mentioned this, Catherine, your research, the loudness of the Lower East Side. We have some bells for the Good Humor Truck that we have at the museum. People will get their bells personally tuned-

Alison Stewart: Oh, really?

Nazli Parvizi: -so that you could recognize whose truck it was.

Catherine Piccoli: It really speaks to that creativity and ingenuity of these street food entrepreneurs like Clyde "Kingfish" Smith. He took popular songs of the day, like A-Tisket, A-Tasket, like Stormy Weather, like Minnie the Moocher, and remixed them. They're funny, and they're joyful. He tailored songs and sang different songs in different neighborhoods. He's really thinking about, "Where am I going? How am I selling the most that I can wherever I am?"

Alison Stewart: In the exhibit, how do you handle the challenges that food vendors have had to experience?

Nazli Parvizi: It's a big part of the exhibit. There's always been challenges, and that's part of what we wanted to show. Whether it was LaGuardia wanting to just rid the street vendors and push them inside, history repeats itself. That's why we have museums, so you can see that over and over. You have two forces right now facing street vendors. One, you have the sort of regulatory morass of 400 years of a patchwork of laws that make no sense, waiting lists of 20 years. No one has a fair shot of getting a fair vending license right now in New York City.

Truly, no one has a fair shot of getting it, which is why the caller, who with the lovely dumplings or fat ass dumplings, you might have noticed, she said, "My husband does a lot of catering." You can't vend in New York City right now, if you want to start today, legally, you could never get a permit right now. You could cater, you could vend it on private property.

Then the other part, which again, is not unfamiliar, is the fear of ICE and immigration. 97% of our vendors are immigrants. Half of them are women. That's another surprising fact most people don't think about. People were so generous with sharing their stories, but one of the things I think we would both like to note is how many of them said, "Please don't share my photo or my name." We love to credit people as a museum. We want people to know who's telling the stories. We want them to see who's in the pictures. That's where we're at today.

To have that sort of double pressure for people who are literally just trying to feed their families. There's a particularly heartbreaking sign in Spanish in our exhibit, we have a bunch of protest signs that just says, "Feeding our families is not a crime." That's what vendors are trying to do by feeding New Yorkers, which is so generous and wonderful. We all love to eat. What they're trying to do is just feed their own families, and there's a lot pressured against them.

Again, Mayor Mamdani sort of went around talking about how expensive halal's gotten, and what you'll see through our exhibition is why it's so expensive now, why vendors have to charge so much, and how little of it they're actually taking home, despite the $11 halal.

Alison Stewart: Catherine, is there any one part of the exhibit you'd like people to spend a little extra time looking at?

Catherine Piccoli: Oh, goodness. I just want people to be in there the way that I've been in this space for the past year. I want to shout out a couple of the audio visual elements. We worked with an amazing videographer and interviewed many, many street food entrepreneurs, people with carts and trucks and vendors at Smorgasburg, and Ernie Wong, who owns Shanghai MKS, which is a food cart maker. We have lots of great interviews. I love giving people the mic and letting them tell their own story, but also we created some virtual reality experiences so you can put on that headset and be in a cart, in a truck. I think so many New Yorkers have not ever been able to experience this, and this is a cool way to do that.

Alison Stewart: The name of the exhibition is Street Food City at the Museum of Food and Drink. It's in Dumbo in Manhattan. My guests have been the museum president, Nazil--

Nazli Parvizi: I'm Nazli Parvizi. This is Catherine Piccoli.

Alison Stewart: Thank you to be with you so much for being with us. It's Friday, y'all. Thank you very much.

Catherine Piccoli: Thank you. Really appreciate it.

Alison Stewart: Actor and singer Ana Gasteyer is back with a holiday spectacular. The show is called Sugar & Booze. She'll be at the town hall. Coming up, Ana joins us to tell us more. Thank you for being with us.