A note on street festivals

Street festivals are awesome.  On nice days in NYC they tend to pop up everywhere.  While a lot of them serve the same food and products, they’re still great to walk through with your fellow New Yorkers. 

There are many throughout the year that tend to be geared towards holidays, such as the one tomorrow celebrating Cinco de Mayo (on may…6^th??). There are also many well-known ones such as the San Gennaro festival which hits Little Italy in September, or the Indian Day Parade which hits Madison Avenue in August.  You can find a list of them here: 

 http://www.nycstreetfairs.com/sched.html

However, there are plenty of smaller ones that tend to pop up every now and then also.  Walking through a street festival you can hardly contain the kid inside of you.  Where else can you find cotton candy, funnel cake, corn on the cob, kettle corn, sausages, chicken parmesan, gyros, and shish kabobs in NYC on one block?  Well, I am sure you can if you look hard enough, since this city is so diverse.  But you understand what I am getting at. 

Walking around the city you’ll always be able to pick out where they are, since you can smell the grill smoke from two blocks away.   If you get lucky enough, sometimes you’ll bump into a 3-star seafood restaurant serving fresh Maine lobster rolls on the street.  Now who can beat that??

Meet the crew of Oceana in midtown, and why they’re promoting Shake Shack I have no idea.  Executive Chef Ben Pollinger decided to bring his take on the lobster roll to 65^th Street and Lexington Avenue last Saturday.  They offered three different types, from the all-American classic lobster roll with mayonnaise and celery, the Connecticut lobster roll smothered in butter (yes, that’s right, butter), and the Bahn Mi, Chef Pollinger’s take on the lobster roll in the style of the classic Vietnamese sandwich. 

I went for the Bahn Mi, and oh my god was it so freakin good.  At $15, it was almost 3x the amount of other items being sold at the festival, but worth every penny.  The Oceana crew poached the lobster meat to order, toasted a hot dog bun, and mixed everything together with sweet chili sauce, carrot, daikon, cucumber, and cilantro.  Excuse the fact that in the picture it’s already half-eaten, but I couldn’t wait to take a bite…or two. 

If a $15 lobster roll isn’t your fancy, there are plenty of other options along the multi-block festival.  Now you could get a $1 hot dog that has been sitting in dirty lukewarm water for hours from someone like this:

Or you could get fresh corn-on-the-cob for $4, grilled fresh in front of you from a stall like this:

Or if that’s still too much to pay, well, Thai food for $1 anyone? 

Or at least I think it was a dollar, they obviously didn't do a great job of promoting the price...

You’ll be surprised about what you’ll find if you decide to take a walk through.  Ever have a fried oreo?  Well, neither have I, but nonetheless, you can also find those here too.