New York Street Food

cheesesteak pizza

The cheesesteak melt we had from Gorilla Cheese NYC for Today’s Lunch got us looking around the web for stuff about cheesesteaks.  What we found was pretty interesting.

The people behind Endless Simmer put together an article about some of the ways you can enjoy cheesesteaks in non-cheesesteak forms.

Besides the not-much-of-a-stretch cheesesteak pizza, there are cheesesteak egg rolls, cheesesteak fries, cheesesteak empanadas and cheesesteak pretzels – but the piece de resistance is the Philly Taco aka South Street Sushi.

Click through to find out how to create this Frankenstein’s Monster of cheesesteak, pizza and cheese fries.  There’s even an instructional video.

cheesesteak egg rolls

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The 1st Annual Philadelphia Vendy Awards were held over the weekend at the Piazza at Schmidt’s.

Gigi and Big R

The 1st Philadelphia Vendy Cup Winner was Gigi and Big R’s Caribbean/American Soul Food. The 10-year-old business operates on the Drexel University campus and run by Elukene Rene (“Big R”), originally from Haiti, and Thomas Bacon (“Gigi”) from Philadelphia.  After winning, Bacon held up the Vendy Cup and joked about using it for a cold beer “after standing over a deep fryer, frying chicken, cooking cabbage and greens and serving customers.”

The Best Dessert Winner was Sweet Box Cupcakes, and the Peoples Taste Award went to Cucina Zapata for their chicken satay tacos and other Thai-Mexican fusion dishes.

Cucina Zapata

Congratulations to the winners and everyone who was nominated for the 1st Annual Philadelphia Vendy Awards.  We might have to take a trip down to Philly next summer for this.

We haven’t confirmed it yet with the Vendy Awards, but uwishunu is reporting that 3 Philly street food vendors have been invited to participate in this year’s Vendy Awards.  With all the nominations already announced, we assume this will be for show and on a non-voting basis.  According to uwishunu, Philly Homegrown arranged this with the Street Vendor Project.

The 3 vendors are Honest Tom’s Taco Shop, Denise’s Soul Food Restaurant and the Chester County-based Birch Run on a Roll.

And Midtown Lunch is reporting there will be a “Winner’s Circle”, where past Vendy Award winners such as Treats Truck and the NY Dosa Cart will be serving the public who do not have tickets to get into the Vendy Awards.  We expect that section of Governor’s Island will be a zoo.

Below are videos for Honest Tom’s and Denise’s, produced by Liza de Guia of Food Curated.  She also did the videos for this year’s Vendy Award Finalists in the Main Category.

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A good way to start a fight in Philly (which is not hard to do) is to talk about who has the best cheesesteak in town.  Pat’s and Geno’s are the most popular, but there are many others serving delicious cheesesteaks as well.

In New York, Steak Truck and Magdy’s are both good, and Tony Dragonas has a huge steak and portobello hero with mozzarella cheese under the meat.

It’s pretty easy to make a good cheesesteak yourself – just make sure you use decent steak.  Other than that, you only need onions, peppers, salt & pepper, cheese and bread.

Some people (including the video below) like to use melted Cheez Whiz, but if we want to ingest chemicals, it will be for our mind, not our body.

Our cheese preference is for provolone.  It’s similar to mozzarella, but with a little more bite.  In our opinion, mozzarella is too mild to stand up to the onions and peppers.

Thanks to Denver Food Guy for the link.

Drew Lazor of the Philadelphia City Paper filed the following report about the sudden increase in cupcake trucks there.

“Last summer, Kate Carrara debuted her Buttercream cupcake truck and was instantly embraced by sweet-teeth citywide. One year passes, and suddenly there are two brand-new four-wheeled cupcake-slangin’ operations hitting Philly. What is the logical next step here? Will each truck roll out tank-caliber fortifications and invest in armaments on some Twisted Metal-type stuff (artistic rendering above)?  Will the streets run red-velvet with senselessly spilled cream cheese frosting? Will someone develop a projectile IED slathered in chocolate ganache? WHO SHALL PREVAIL?!”

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