10 Best Street Food in New York City (Costs & Tips, 2026)

Every chicken-and-rice halal cart in America traces back to this exact corner, where a trio of Egyptian immigrants started selling platters to cab drivers in 1990. A combo platter — chicken, gyro, rice, white sauce, hot sauce if you're brave — runs $10-12, and the line still wraps the block after 2am on weekends.

Smithfield Foods paid $450 million for this company in early 2026 — for a hot dog stand that opened in 1916 and still costs about $6 for the original. Skip the sit-down restaurant next door and eat at the original walk-up window on the boardwalk; the July 4th eating contest happens on this exact sidewalk.

The spicy cumin lamb hand-ripped noodles here started a whole genre of NYC food writing back when this place was nothing more than a folding table and a hot plate in the old Golden Shopping Mall basement — that original stall's current status is unconfirmed, so head for the bigger, well-documented Flushing flagship inside Tangram instead. Around $13 for a bowl that will genuinely make your eyes water — order it medium spicy the first time, not mild.

Three tacos and change gets you lunch here, and the adobada — marinated pork shaved off a vertical spit, same technique as al pastor — is the one worth queuing for. It's inside Chelsea Market, so it doesn't feel like street food, but the counter-only, no-frills setup is exactly that in spirit.

Maria Piedad Cano started selling arepas from a shopping cart on Roosevelt Avenue in the 1980s after emigrating from Colombia — she's since expanded to a real storefront, but the arepa de choclo (sweet corn, cheese) still tastes like it did on the street corner. Around $6 each, cash preferred.

A single fold-and-eat slice here costs under $4 and has for longer than most of the restaurants around it have existed — 1975 to now, same recipe, same walk-up counter. It's the plain cheese slice people mean when they say "New York pizza," not a specialty topping worth the detour.

You'll hear the jingle before you see the truck — that's on purpose, and it's been the same tune since the fleet started in 1956. A vanilla-chocolate swirl cone runs about $4; there's no single flagship truck, just chase the music to whichever corner it's parked on that day.

These started as a single cart outside the Oculus before growing into a small chain, and the baked (not fried) beef empanada is still the one to get — closer to a hand pie than the deep-fried version most people picture. About $6 each, and two is a real lunch.

The combo here is deliberately strange and has worked since 1932 anyway: a grilled hot dog paired with a tropical papaya drink, no logical connection between the two beyond both being cheap. A hot dog and a juice runs around $13 combined — order both, the pairing is the actual point.

"Dinges" is just Flemish for toppings, and there are enough of them here — speculoos spread, whipped cream, fruit, ice cream — that the actual Liège waffle underneath almost becomes the delivery vehicle. Around $8 loaded, from a truck that started this whole Belgian-waffle-truck trend in New York back in 2007.