Street Food Icons

Dollar Hits is a Filipino street food staple in Los Angeles, specializing in meat skewers that cost $1. Customers can cook pork barbecue and chicken barbecue, along with pork ears, chicken feet, and more on charcoal grills outside the restaurant, located in a nondescript mini-mall in downtown LA's Historic Filipinotown. The three sisters who run Dollar Hits immigrated from Pampanga in the Philippines and have since become local street food legends. Other offerings at Dollar Hits include chicken liver, heart, and intestines, fish and lobster balls, and balut, a fertilized duck egg.

Mama Jo has been serving breakfast staples like bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches and omelets and traditional Greek pastries, such as spanakopita and baklava, from her food truck in Midtown Manhattan for over 35 years. She claims to be NYC’s oldest street food vendor and isn’t planning on retiring her legendary food cart any time soon. Mama Jo’s breakfast menu is longer than some dine-in restaurants’ menus, and it’s all done without sacrificing quality. She gets her ingredients fresh every morning in Astoria, Queens, serves food with a smile, and genuinely cares about her customers, really earning the name Mama Jo.

Evelia Coyotzi has been selling dollar tamales in Corona, Queens since 2001. Her team starts every day around 9 PM, cooking through the night, so that by 4 AM, they're outside the Junction Boulevard subway stop selling her tamales. Originally from Tlaxcala, Mexico, Evelia makes a large variety of tamales, like tamales con rajas, mole, pollo verde, Oaxacan tamales and more, which she sells for $1-2 apiece out of a pushcart.

Angel “Piraña” Jimenez has been serving his legendary Puerto Rican lechón, or roasted suckling pig, to the South Bronx for 20 years. He uses a traditional machete to cut his adobo-seasoned pork, before serving it with a roasted banana, pigeon pea rice, and garlic mojito sauce. Angel also makes Puerto Rican classics like beef pastelitos and shrimp mofongo. La Piraña Lechonera is only open on the weekends, as Angel works a day job fixing air conditioning units. Originally from Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, Angel immigrated to the United States as a teenager. Now, he’s a legend of his community.

Eli and Oren Halali, the two brothers who founded 2 Bros Pizza, sell slices for a buck. They're known for getting their patrons in and out of the store within ten seconds, and for selling hundreds of pies a day. And they're certainly not the only people in the dollar-slice game in New York City. Ever since the Great Recession in 2008, dollar-slice spots started popping up all over Manhattan because people were in desperate need of a quick and cheap food option. Now there are more than 80 dollar-slice spots on the streets of New York. People gravitate to dollar slice because it's quick, easy, cheap, filling—and the slices themselves are pretty damn good considering the price. But, according to pizza historian Scott Wiener, dollar slices may be on the way out...so get them while you can!

King of Falafel & Shawarma has been serving mouthwatering Middle Eastern cuisine on the streets of Astoria for the last 17 years. The falafel recipe, with its unique oval shape, is a guarded secret of owner Freddy Zeideia, who mastered it with techniques he learned while growing up in Palestine. After being dissatisfied with the falafel and shawarma offerings in New York, Freddy took matters into his own hands by starting King of Falafel & Shawarma in 2002. Since then, his enterprise has grown, with a truck in Astoria, a cart in Midtown, and a newly opened restaurant in Queens. They also serve chicken over rice, kebabs, meatballs, and other Palestinian specialties. As Freddy would say, "Yeah Baby!"