Life a la Rice Cart

One Saturday night at around eleven o’clock, Sharif entertained a visitor at the rice cart: a 55-year-old vendor named Osama. They met for the first time a few months earlier when Osama randomly walked up to the cart’s window and began speaking Arabic. Excited at the prospect of talking in his mother tongue while at work, Sharif extended him a standing invitation to stop by the cart for a free chicken-and-rice dinner. Since then, Osama has more than capitalized on Sharif’s generosity by showing up more and more often. It turns out that Osama had been recently evicted from his apartment in Staten Island, and was now living in the loading dock of a FedEx near the cart.

Sharif undergoes a very noticeable change when he is speaking Arabic. He gesticulates a lot and his intense, somewhat bewildered expression is nowhere to be seen. He doesn’t need to choose between comprehending and reacting, which seems to be the case when he’s speaking in English. Even though Sharif is not nearly as talkative as Osama, together the two can go on for hours. On this night, I interrupted their conversation occasionally to ask Sharif what they were talking about. In just 45 minutes, they discussed Kabbalah, numerology, little-known translations of the Bible, sketch comedy, the PLO, President Obama, suicide bombers and Playboy.

Every time I see Osama he, like Sharif, is wearing the same outfit: a dirty but otherwise nice black down jacket, dirty jeans and a baseball cap with the Pentagon logo partially obscured by a Barack Obama pin. His crinkled and twisted smile makes his face look like an ancient Greek comedy mask. Before Osama left the cart, I asked him what the Arabic writing on the menu meant. “‘Halal,’ look, you can write it with your hand,” he said, holding his right hand up in a high five and joining his thumb and pointer finger, making the same shape as the Arabic script on the menu.

It’s no coincidence that as immigration from the Middle East has increased at a record pace since the 1990s, so have halal carts. Unlike the predominantly Christian Middle Eastern immigrants of the 1970s and 1980s, since 2000 73 percent of immigrants from the Middle East have been Muslim, most of them devout. As the demand for halal food increased, halal butchers, markets and supermarkets have been popping up all over the city. In fact, in some neighborhoods halal carts have begun to outnumber the ubiquitous New York hotdog vendors. While many of the cart’s customers probably couldn’t care less whether their meat is up to Koranic dietary standards, most of Sharif’s late-night customers are Muslim cabdrivers, who come to his cart for that very reason.

At around three that morning, an overdressed thirty-something man got out of an SUV and stumbled over to the cart. He reeked of alcohol.

“Three Italian sausages and a chicken-and-pita, my man,” he ordered.

Sharif took a deep breath and got three large sausages from the refrigerator, placing them in the center of the grill. Then he got started on the chicken-on-pita, smothering a slab of pita in the mysterious white sauce and putting it to heat on the grill. Next, he dipped his tongs into the heated container of pre-cooked chicken, placed some on the grill and cut up the bigger chunks with a sharp spatula. He then pressed the chicken with two metal paddles wrapped in silver foil (Sharif calls these “irons”) to help it heat up quicker.

After about a minute, Sharif transferred the heated pita onto a sheet of silver foil and filled it with the sizzling chicken, folding it in half like a taco.” “More white sauce?” he asked, holding up the pita in one hand and the enormous white squirt bottle in the other. “Yeah, lots of it,” said the man. “What’s in that stuff, anyway?” “If I tell you, I kill you,” Sharif responded, without smiling but with perfect comedic timing.

Then he wrapped the pita in another sheet of silver foil and placed it on the counter right under the customer’s nose, as if to say, “You’d have your food right now if you didn’t order those goddamn sausages.”

Several minutes later, the sausages were finished and also wrapped in silver foil.

“Sixteen,” Sharif said.

The man nodded impatiently while rummaging through his wallet and slapped three twenties on the counter. He grabbed his food and hurriedly got back in the car. Sharif stared at the counter, confused by the 44-dollar tip. Then it hit him. “My English that bad?” he asked me, grinning as he peeled the twenties off the counter. “Sixteen, sixty, sixteen, sixty,” he practiced under his breath.

Feeling rich and generous, Sharif offered me a free chicken-on-pita “on the cart.” I accepted, then waited until he drenched another pita and put it on the grill.

“Actually, I’d like chicken-on-rice,” I joked. Wide-eyed, Sharif turned around and shook his tongs at me in feigned frustration.