{"id":2557,"date":"2007-07-30T09:53:43","date_gmt":"2007-07-30T17:53:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2007\/07\/halal_is_the_new_hot_dog.html"},"modified":"2007-07-30T09:53:43","modified_gmt":"2007-07-30T17:53:43","slug":"halal_is_the_ne","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/archives\/2007\/07\/halal_is_the_ne.html","title":{"rendered":"Halal Is The New Hot Dog"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/07\/29\/nyregion\/thecity\/29hala.html?ex=1343361600&#038;en=33e981c386872742&#038;ei=5090&#038;partner=rssuserland&#038;emc=rss\">Hot dogs have finally gone the way of the egg cream<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>Although the city doesn&#8217;t collect statistics that distinguish between different types of street food, halal vendors generally agree that their ranks have swelled in the last five to eight years, prompting the obvious question: How did the halal platter become the city&#8217;s new hot dog?<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The hot dog now is for tourists,&#8221; said a rueful Chafik el-Mokhtar, office manager at 2M Friend Corporation, a hot-dog cart garage and supply store on West 47th Street near 11th Avenue.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The people usually go for chicken and rice because it&#8217;s good for hunger,&#8221; he added wistfully.<\/p>\n<p>Mohamed Abouelenein, an Egyptian who used to sell hot dogs, said, &#8220;Hot dog is not a meal.&#8221; That&#8217;s one reason he switched to gyro and chicken in 1992, becoming, he claims, the first peddler in New York to sell halal meat from a cart.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We figured out that most of the cabdrivers are Egyptian, Pakistani,&#8221; he said. &#8220;They suffered too much from no halal.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>On some corners of Manhattan, halal carts outnumber hot-dog vendors by as much as three to one. Mr. Abouelenein&#8217;s cart, named 53rd and 6th, after the Midtown corner on which it sits, stays open from 7 p.m. to 4 a.m., feeding throngs of clubbers, foodies and cabbies. Its success has been such that Mr. Abouelenein recently opened a new cart across the street, supplanting &#8212; yes &#8212; a hot-dog stand.<\/p>\n<p>The term halal may be applied to any food prepared in accordance with the laws of the Koran, although in New York the term has taken on special connotations: oily chunks of chicken or gyro meat, yellowish rice, some scraps of lettuce, hot sauce and, of course, the mysterious substance known as white sauce.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hot dogs have finally gone the way of the egg cream: Although the city doesn&#8217;t collect statistics that distinguish between different types of street food, halal vendors generally agree that their ranks have swelled in the last five to eight years, prompting the obvious question: How did the halal platter become the city&#8217;s new hot [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feed"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2557\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}