Taco and cupcake trucks now compete with hot dog sellers.


By JULIA MOSKIN

NEW YORK - It was a routine weekday for Grant Di Mille and Samira Mahboubian, the owners of the Street Sweets food truck, a mobile trove of croissants, cupcakes and cookies that got rolling in June.

The couple loaded the truck by 6 a.m., parked in front of the Museum of Modern Art at 7, traded hostilities with other vendors from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., and were surrounded by police officers by 2.

“The police told these guys that nobody owns the streets. But it sure doesn’t feel that way,” said Mr. Di Mille, who called the Midtown North precinct in Manhattan - not for the first time - when a jewelry vendor set up shop directly in front of his sales window.

In four weeks of business, the couple has been threatened at the depot where they park the truck; cursed by a gyro vendor who said that he would set their truck on fire; told to stay off every corner in Midtown by ice cream truck drivers; and approached by countless others with advice - both friendly and menacing - on how to get along on the streets.

“I want to be a good neighbor,” Mr. Di Mille said. “But I am nobody’s fool, and nobody’s pushover, and I should not have to carry a baseball bat on my truck in order to sell cupcakes.”

In the last two years, upscale food trucks have swarmed the streets, entrancing New Yorkers with everything from artisanal Earl Grey ice cream to vegan tacos. These highly visible trucks, their outspoken owners and their followers on Twitter, Facebook and food blogs, have broken the code of the streets that has long kept a peace among food vendors.

Turf wars are nothing new for carts selling kebabs and cheap coffee. But the makers of thumbprint cookies, chicken-Thai basil dumplings, and creme anglaise are not happy about the jostling that is part of the city’s sidewalk economy, or the murky bureaucracy that oversees the issuing of permits. (Six people were arrested recently on fraud charges related to food vending permits.)

These new culinary entrepreneurs say that they are on a mission to bring better street food to New Yorkers, and ready to bring dark corners of the business to light.

“Right now the system actually favors the black market over people who want to do things right,” said Nathalie Jordi, an owner of People’s Pops, who makes frozen treats with ingredients like locally grown rhubarb. “How can that be good for the city?”

Now, having been through the hassle of getting established on the street, these vendors are determined to find gold there. Like Mr. Di Mille, who has two children to support and a six-figure investment to recoup, they say they can’t afford to give in to the vendors who want them to move.

“If I only did business where these hot dog guys said I could do business,” said Lev Ekster, owner of the new CupcakeStop truck, “I would be vending in New Jersey.”

The established vendors, on the other hand, see newcomers as competitors with an unfair advantage in a desperate economy. “They think they can come in with their big fancy truck and push into a spot where I’ve been for 18 years,” said Norman Sweeney, the jewelry vendor who tried to block the Street Sweets truck. He said that the strain of holding down two jobs and sleeping in his truck had caused him to “snap.” “This spot is all I have left,” he said.

Since last fall, when the city’s economy turned especially rough, the trickle of new trucks has become a flood. “We used to get two or three calls a week from people wanting to become food vendors,” said Michael Wells, a director of the Street Vendor Project, a nonprofit group that advocates for vendors. “Now we get a dozen.”

More variety and better street food for the people of New York might seem like an uncontroversial proposition. But new food trucks have encountered resistance from shops; huge backlogs in the city’s licensing system; and harassment from established vendors, which, new vendors say, is increasing as the trucks attract more attention.

“Absolutely the situation has deteriorated since last fall,” said Kenny Lao, an owner of the Rickshaw Dumpling Truck.

“A new vendor used to mean someone’s cousin coming in from Egypt,” said Zach Brooks, whose blog Midtown Lunch chronicles the sidewalkfood scene. “Now it’s a major culture clash.”