New York Street Food

(credit: NYSF)

We recently received a copy of the Eat St. Recipe Book, which we will be posting a review of tomorrow. The book features recipes from 126 of the food trucks featured on the Eat St. program over the past 4 seasons, and we have 1 copy to give away to a lucky NYSF reader too!

As you would expect, a number of the  recipes in the book are from NYC food trucks. What we didn’t expect was to find a recipe for a dish from a NYC truck that we haven’t tried yet. But there it was – pork chops and lemon-roasted potatoes from Uncle Gussy’s – right on page 233.

Luckily, Uncle Gussy’s featured it as their Daily Special recently for $10. Since it was a cold, windy day, so we also got a cup of Mom’s avgolemono soup.

(credit: NYSF)

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(credit: NYSF)

We all know Uncle Gussy’s, a food cart on the corner of Park Ave & 51st St since 1971 (and upgraded to a truck last year) has delicious homemade Greek food. While their regular menu is enjoyable, we are always on the lookout for their Daily Specials. They usually cost a couple of bucks more than regular menu items, but we feel it’s worth it.

A recent special was shrimp souvlaki with pineapple habanero salsa for $11. In addition to shrimp and rice, you get a large Greek salad.

(credit: NYSF)

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(credit: Pago)

Uncle Gussy’s, one of the most popular and authentic Greek street vendors in NYC, is launching a new cart today called Pägσ, with Greek frozen yogurt and gelato served from a self-sustainable cart (whatever that is).

Nick told us the Greek frozen yogurt will be a constant, but the gelato will be rotated and include flavors such as dark Athenian chocolate, frappe (coffee flavor), coconut, and a lemon mint sorbet.

As they progress, they will start to add toppings as well.  BTW, pago means “ice” in Greek.

The cart will be located by their deep blue truck on the corner of 51st St & Park Ave, where their Uncle Gussy launched his first food cart back in 1971!

Follow Pago on twitter here or our Mobile Munchies twitter feed.  Good luck guys. We’ll stop by to try it very soon.

(credit: NYSF)

Sometimes we talk about the new breed of food trucks and sometimes we talk about the old school street vendors.  Uncle Gussy’s is actually a hybrid of both.

Uncle Gussy’s is on the corner of 51st St & Park Ave, as it has been for over 40 years.  Nick and Frankie are the brothers who run Uncle Gussy’s, which was actually a Greek food cart started by their Uncle Gussy back in 1971.  The brothers upgraded from a cart to a truck in June 2010, which gives them more space to cook and more options for the menu.

Not too long after they bought the truck, Uncle Gussy’s started featuring Daily Specials made by their Mom and Aunt Georgia.  This is real, authentic Greek home cooking.

I had keftedes, which are Greek-style meatballs.  This lunch special cost $10, and included 4 oval-shaped meatballs served over yellow rice with tomato sauce.  A Greek salad was included as well.

Each oval meatball was the size of 2 round meatballs, so it was a good amount of meat.  With the sauce and rice, this was a very hearty dish, perfect for cold winter days.  The meatballs tasted really good too, with some herbs mixed into the meat.

After the meatballs and rice, a Greek salad was a nice way to finish the meal.  Most street food salads are pretty lame, but Uncle Gussy’s Greek salad is one of the best around.  Large chunks of feta cheese, olives, red onions, lettuce, tomato, oregano and an oil and vinegar dressing.

When I say the salad “finished the meal”, that didn’t include dessert.  I’ve heard about Aunt Georgia’s baklava, but haven’t tried it until today.

Baklava is often too sweet and syrupy for me.  While this baklava was sweet, it wasn’t overly so, and there wasn’t any syrup on it at all.  It was nutty and sweet, but I could easily detect cinnamon and cloves as well.  Nothing like homemade baklava to finish a Greek meal.

You can find Uncle Gussy’s on 51st St & Park Ave every weekday.  One of the ways they are part of the new breed of food trucks is their embrace of twitter.  Even though they don’t move around every day, they communicate with their followers and send out tweets here every day with their daily specials.  They are also in our Mobile Munchies twitter feed with lots of other vendors.

If you see keftedes (meatballs), konikisto (braised beef) or our favorite, pastitsio (kind of like Greek lasagna), get to Uncle Gussy’s early, because the daily specials go quickly.  If you get there too late for the daily specials, they also have excellent souvlaki with real tzaziki (yogurt) sauce – but you knew that already!

In the slow street food season of winter, I’ve been revisiting some of the better food carts around town.  One of the best is Tony Dragonas’ cart on the SW corner of 62nd St & Madison Ave.

Tony was actually a Vendy Award Finalist in the very first competition back in 2005.  Even in 30 degree weather with 3 people working at the cart, there was still a line of about 10 people, although I didn’t wait more than 5-10 minutes.

Most of the people on line seemed to get chicken over rice or a combo platter of chicken and rib-eye steak over rice.  Another excellent dish is the steak and portobello hero I had there about a year and a half ago, which you can get with grilled chicken too.

In order to try something new, Today’s Lunch is a chicken gyro ($6).

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