Life a la Rice Cart
Sharif uses the slow hours after dinnertime to restock the condiments and vegetables (stored in the van) and cook the chicken that will last him all night. In fact, because the cooking chicken takes up every square inch of the grill’s surface, this is pretty much the only time that the cart can’t take orders. Despite the monotony, Sharif appreciates the long shifts because he’s paid by the hour, getting not much more than the New York State minimum wage of $7.15.
All in all, it’s remarkable the variety of food the Halal cart can cook. Its menu includes chicken-on-rice, chicken-on-pita, falafel-on-rice, falafel-on-pita, vegetables-on-rice, Philly cheese steak, hamburger, Italian sausage, fish fillet, and rolls, and the prices range from four to six bucks. According to Sharif, the most popular dish is chicken-on-rice. His pet peeve is when customers order chicken-on-pita and then – after he has already drenched a pouch of pita with white sauce and tossed it on the grill – change their mind to chicken-on-rice. His hates it when a customer orders Italian sausage, because that takes almost 10 minutes to cook. “This is rice-cart, no sausage-cart. Sausage cart down there,” he said, waving his tongs in the direction of South Street Seaport. “I tell them it slow, but they still want sausage.”
Despite its considerable size, inside the halal cart space is very limited. When not serving customers, Sharif sits sideways in a plastic folding chair that only just fits between the skillet and a miniature sink behind him, and the stainless steel buffet-style compartments of rice, iceberg lettuce and diced tomatoes in front of him. Moving around inside the cart is a lot like walking down an airplane aisle, with the same kinds of background noise: the generator putters under the floor, the refrigerator hums, the skillet sizzles and clicks, and the traffic roars by only feet away, causing the cart to shake with every passing car. On weekend nights, drunken hoots and hollers from a nearby bar sometimes join the mix.
As for view, beyond the interior of the cart, one can’t see much. The windows on either end are boarded over by photographs of the dishes for sale, and the only opening to the outside, a narrow window above the countertop, faces the gray facade of an office building. On a recent night, two cabbies got into a shouting match on a nearby corner and Sharif had to sit on the counter, hold onto the awning and pull his torso out the front window, just to look.
“The Same But Coffee”
On weekdays, Sharif does “the same but coffee,” as he puts it, on the corner of 1st Avenue and 18th Street. The hours for his second job are no better: 4 a.m. to noon. Before the customers begin to arrive around 5 a.m., Sharif brews coffee and butters bagels with squirt-bottles while his partner Abdulla loads the tiny cart’s shelves with muffins, donuts, croissants, danishes, apple turnovers and plain bagels purchased wholesale from a bakery in Queens that morning and transported in Abdulla’s red Dodge minivan. By 5 a.m., they’re stacked so high you can’t see through the cart’s Plexiglas walls.
As their first customers trickle in, they assume their work stations on opposite sides of the cart: Sharif in front of the two coffee machines, paper cups at the ready, and Abdulla on the other side, within arms’ reach of the myriad baked goods. The space is so small that neither of them can sit down, so they work back to back and on their feet. If they both turned around at the same time, their noses would be touching. For much of the next seven hours, Sharif fills paper cups with coffee, cream, milk and sugar and Abdulla wraps pastries with silver foil and brown-paper-bags them. Rush hour hits between seven and eight when there’s on average five or six people in line. The prices are unbelievably cheap: $1.50 for a small coffee and a buttered bagel. As the economy worsens, they get more business. “Now that economy going down, coffee-cart busy but rice-cart the same,” remarked Sharif. Apparently the struggling bankers on Wall Street haven’t had to resort to five dollar lunches quite yet.
