New York Street Food

Abby and I spent Sunday morning at the 9th Avenue Street Fair. The last few times I have been to New York, it seems like I find a street fair somewhere in Manhattan that, goes on for blocks and blocks and features the same repetition of stands selling smoothies, arrepas, kabobs, and grilled corn. The 9th Avenue fair had a little more variety that the others that I had been to. That probably has a lot to do with the location. I guess 9th Avenue is known as a restaurant row of sorts, so a number of the establishments had their own booths set up to add some variety to the usual booths that you might see at a street fair.

The first stand we saw when we got to 9th avenue had several tables full of clams and oysters on ice, and we grabbed a half dozen oysters on the half shell. We worked our way up, trying out several little dishes. Our favorite was probably the crawfish boil that a cajun restaurant was offering. This stuff is messy, but fun to eat. Right next to the Cajun stand, some guy was selling key lime tarts out of the back of his truck. This was also very good.
One of the more interesting things that we saw was at a Colombian place where they were cooking steaks using a big cage like contraption (pictured below). I know that it is common to cook steaks over an open flame like this in South America, but I had never seen this particular piece of equipment.