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New York City

Chicken over Rice

Chicken over rice in NYC means chopped grilled chicken with onions and Mediterranean spices (usually including oregano, sumac, and lemon juice), served over rice seasoned with turmeric and cumin, topped with chopped lettuce and tomato, and two sauces, a yogurt and mayo-based garlic white sauce and a harissa-based red sauce. When I was there, an order was US$6, and was enough food for two meals for the average person, or one if you're seriously hungry.

The recipe was originally developed by The Halal Guys, Mohamed Bayoumi, Abdelbaset Elsayed, and Ahmed Elsaka, for their street carts. Like the Chicago Dog, the dish was created to meet a need in the community, in this case for good, cheap food that tasted like home.

And all of New York City discovered an alternative to pizza and hot dogs.

Since 1990, when the Halal Guys, who were still all over the city last I checked, first defined NYC chicken over rice, it's become an institution. Halal carts and food trucks serving it are everywhere. Delis don't count as street meat, according to New Yorkers, but you can get the same chicken over rice at a lot of delis that you get from the halal carts. With some delis being 24 hour, you can get a chicken over rice pretty much any time of the day or night.

If you're traveling on the MTA, it's really easy to hop off the train pretty much anywhere, exit the station, grab a chicken over rice from the halal cart out front, and be back in the station in time for the next train. Of course, then you get side-eye for being the one bringing the chicken over rice on the train, and now the whole car smells like it and everybody else wants one. If it happens to be, say, one thirty in the morning, you can count on several folks, the ones most obviously drunk or ripped, hopping off at the next stop.

(For the record, I was in fact on my way back to the flat from a bar in Brooklyn, but had been there for a Satanist political meeting, and had restricted myself to one beer. I was just hungry.)

Mayor Mamdani made a joke about it just recently. New Yorkers are already eating halal food, he said. There's a chicken over rice cart on every corner.

I ate a lot of chicken over rice, from a lot of sources. I never had a bad one.

Halal carts also normally have falafel rolls, which at the time I was there were US$3. This meant I could count on being able to find either a cheap sandwich or a full meal, that I could eat, pretty much anywhere I went. I didn't have much trouble finding food, though, even with my dietary restrictions, which was amazingly cool, let me tell you.