Each weekday, Isabel, a 30-year-old asylum seeker from Ecuador, finds a spot among the tourists, shoppers and licensed food vendors in SoHo. Without a permit, she sells $10 packaged lunches from coolers to construction workers, offering hot soups and a beverage with generous platters of Ecuadorian staples like roast chicken with rice and beans and chaulafan, a fried rice served with plantains.
It’s likely that her customers, mostly Latin American immigrant workers, assume that Isabel — whose last name is being withheld out of concern about her immigration status — makes the food at home, a common practice among vendors at construction sites.
Instead, they are a product of a more sophisticated business quietly emerging from restaurants and make-shift commercial kitchens in many of the city’s Latin American communities. It has become an early example of how new migrants, scrambling to find any kind of work, are helping to expand the city’s economy in unexpected ways.
The lunches Isabel sells are prepared in bulk in a Queens pizza shop. She is one of more than 30 vendors dispatched to job sites from SoHo to Midtown by the restaurant owner, an Ecuadorian woman who was identified by several people who work with her, but who refused to be interviewed. Each one is supplied with ice chests holding 25 to 40 lunches. The food, produced before the pizzeria opens for its regular business, is dispatched to Manhattan in three vans where migrant women wait to pick it up.
Interviews with more than a dozen vendors and lunch business entrepreneurs outside kitchens and at worksites, fill out a picture of a spurt of apartments, backyards and restaurants in The Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn where crews cook overnight for vending operations that have become a new part of the city’s food chain. They employ scores of migrant women largely living in shelters, and they feed hundreds of construction workers every weekday.
The enterprises operate in a gray zone, without vending licenses or food cart permits. The sellers are susceptible to summonses from the police and the city’s Departments of Health and Sanitation. Health code violations carry fines starting at $200. Summonses for not having a permit or a license are $1,000, which the businesses usually cover, but some of the vendors have faced arrest and spent hours in station houses unsure whether they would be jailed overnight.
Most of the vendors are Ecuadorian mothers who arrived in the last year. Without work permits and no childcare, Isabel and others say, this is the only way to make a living during school hours or with their kids in tow. They hear about the opportunity in city shelters or through friends or family. Some are recruited on TikTok and Facebook.
The work usually does not last more than two or three hours. Some of the vendors are grateful for the money, pointing out that at $20 an hour, a typical rate, they earn more than the minimum wage. But a vendor who might sell 40 meals on a shift, generally takes home $40 or $50, and with no other work, they struggle to scrape by, much less leave a shelter.
Some are disheartened by their circumstances, which include the fear that any court record stemming from an arrest could jeopardize their asylum applications.
“For what they earn, they pay you very little,” said Epifanía, a 30-year-old vendor from Lima, Peru, who was hired as a vendor in Manhattan earlier this year. “They squeeze you dry.”
Others, like Isabel, feel otherwise. She said that she met Alexandra, a relative’s friend who became her future employer in New York, through a local Facebook group she belonged to while working as a pineapple picker in Ecuador’s Manabi province last year. As the country descended into violence, the mother of two said, she faced gang extortion and decided to get out. “In my country,” she said, “I have death threats.”
Alexandra promised her help if she made it to the United States, she said. Isabel took out a high interest loan in Ecuador to pay guides for the treacherous journey north, and, in January, she crossed the US-Mexican border with her 13-year-old son.
After they were detained by border patrol officers, she said, she called Alexandra. True to her word, Alexandra paid for plane tickets from Texas, put the mother and son up in a room in Corona, and gave her her job. “She’s a good person,” Isabel said in June. “She helped me.”
The $40 to $60 she earns per three-hour shift has allowed her to pay Alexandra back, but she struggles to cover rent for the small room she shares with her son and to pay off her debt of $8,000 in Ecuador. She thought vending would be temporary, but other than sporadic cleaning gigs, months later she hasn’t found additional work. “I wasn’t expecting to be doing this here,” she said.
‘He Grew and Grew’
The informal lunch economy has long existed as a kitchen counter pursuit. But newer migrants living in shelters or renting subdivided rooms don’t have their own kitchens. Instead, they sell for others whose ambitions have risen with their arrival.
Home cooks turned entrepreneurs can fill a minivan with a couple hundred lunches for five or six vendors. One midtown seller described cooking with five others in her aunt’s Queens kitchen that was expanded into the backyard under a tarp. But driving the vendor boomlet even more are neighborhood restaurants that churn out enough lunches to fill several larger vans and employ dozens of migrants.
At a demolition site near Fifth Avenue in midtown, a cook in an apron selling chicken adobo and quesadillas for a South Bronx taqueria said her boss does a brisk street-corner business there and at an Upper East Side building site. Nearby, María, a 45-year-old woman from Cuenca, Ecuador, explained how she rents out a Brooklyn restaurant from 3 a.m. to 10 a.m. on weekdays. The Ecuadorian lunches she and her crew prepare in the tiny Dominican restaurant are sold at construction sites from Wall Street to Central Park.
Other sellers describe a Queens and Manhattan guerilla vending operation run from the kitchen of, a well-regarded Ecuadorian restaurant in Long Island City whose manager said in an interview that his family rents its kitchen to a separate business after hours but had no information on how or to whom it sells its lunches.
The number of operations, as well as vendors, has multiplied in the past year, changing the city streetscape, especially in Manhattan. Unlicensed vendors work in the shadow of the new JP Morgan tower that topped out on Park Avenue, across from a supertall condo tower being finished on Fifth, and on scores of street corners near smaller construction sites.
Restaurants pivoted to street sales during the pandemic, when they struggled to stay afloat without indoor dining. At the time, the city wasn’t strictly enforcing vending laws and outdoor construction sites had quickly reopened. Since then, jumps in Manhattan takeout and dining prices have helped drive demand, while the influx of migrants has supplied a pool of workers.
“We started in basically a small minivan,” Jonathan, a 16-year-old Queens high school student recalled. He described how his cousin, an Ecuadorian restaurant owner in Sunnyside, began to sell lunches in the summer of 2020, adding, “Then he grew and grew.”
Now, the restaurant uses two cargo vans and hires around 30 vendors, he said as he hawked from an Igloo cooler of 40 platters across from a midtown skyscraper construction site on his summer break. Almost all the hires are recently arrived Ecuadorian immigrant women who, he said, come to the restaurant looking for work.
“My cousin is just trying to help them,” he added, echoing a comment from others who employ migrants.
An Ecuadorian Surge
As of June, Ecuadorians make up 19% of migrants in New York City shelters. According to Soledad Álvarez Velasco, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois Chicago who studies Ecuadorian immigration, undocumented men easily find work as laborers. “For women it has been much more complicated and challenging,” said Álvarez Velasco. With few opportunities as nannies, house cleaners, or in restaurants, street vending beckons.
“They don’t have any other possibility of surviving in the US,” she said. The women share information about opportunities and rely on informal support networks in the Ecuadorian community. “There’s exploitation, but also there’s a dimension of solidarity.”
María, who manages a fleet of vendors, said she hires Ecuadorian migrants because she feels they are hard workers, and that hiring mothers gives the impression that the meals are homemade, which adds to their attraction. Like Jonathan’s cousin, the mother of four said she empathized with her employees’ situation: “They live in the shelter and have children. They need the work.”
María said she herself emigrated from Cuenca, Ecuador, 22 years ago and started selling lunches in 2012 after losing her job at a nail salon damaged during Superstorm Sandy. “I sold tamales and morocho in Flushing,” she said in Spanish, referring to the Ecuadorian corn drink popular for breakfast. Soon after, she switched to selling homemade lunches at construction sites.
Back then, she said she constantly worried about the police and city inspectors. It’s not just that vendors work without food cart permits, but selling hot meals from coolers violates various mobile food vending regulations. Pre-prepared hot dishes with fish or chicken must be sold from carts equipped with thermometers and mechanisms like warmers that maintain the food at temperature.
María is under 5 feet tall, wiry, and wears an apron outside the restaurant kitchen she rents in Bushwick. She constantly smiles, revealing a small diamond embedded in her front tooth. It’s in the last couple of years she began selling in what she called “large quantities.”
Like most vendors, she sticks to simple homestyle dishes in order to appeal to a wide customer base beyond Ecuadorians. Her menu often includes hornado, an Ecuadorian roasted pork dish with crispy skin, and baked fish over beds of rice, with beans and a side, which may be a vegetable but is often potato or pasta.
The carb-heavy platters are squeezed into foil containers with crimped edges and a plastic top. The soups and platters are stacked into large ice chests to keep them warm, while smaller coolers with ice hold fresh-made hot sauce, raw chili peppers, and free beverage choices.
‘La Bestia’ Hits the Road
Around 10 a.m. one recent morning, María oversaw a game of Tetris outside the Bushwick restaurant, fitting all the coolers and hand trucks into five vans. Soon after the vehicles arrived at Manhattan drop-off spots. María directed the unloading of her largest cargo van, nicknamed “La Bestia,” or “the beast,” which was stacked to the roof with coolers.
Some of her street sellers fanned out to assigned street corners. Others like Kely, an Ecuadorian migrant, walked a route covering five or six sites, pushing a handcart with two coolers around midtown between Park and 7th Avenue over the course of about two hours. Her heavy loads were difficult to maneuver through crowds and over curbs, and the coolers had to be carefully balanced to not topple over.
Kely lives with her 10-year-old twin daughters in a Bushwick shelter near the restaurant María rents. But the vans have no space for passengers, so, like the other vendors, she takes the subway into Manhattan.
Kely works while her daughters are in school or a city summer program. Other women wheel the coolers while pushing a stroller or with a baby wrapped on their back. They call out “lonch, amigo, lonch” focusing on construction sites, but also selling outside migrant shelters.
As the loncheras have become more visible, more New Yorkers are catching on to the meals, which are cheaper than a Big Mac combo. But they also attract attention from local businesses, licensed food carts, and the police.
Jahaner Hossain, a 55-year-old Halal cart vendor in SoHo for 18 years, said the loncheras only started appearing in the past year. “First, it was on that corner,” he said pointing to Prince and Broadway while preparing chicken over rice, “now, there are ten, maybe 15 vendors nearby.”
A Bangladeshi immigrant, he said the competition cut into his sales and has an unfair edge. Unlike him, the unlicensed vendors don’t pay for permits, contribute taxes, or have regular health inspections.
“Sometimes the police come, make arrests, and take everything away,” he said, but it changes little. “They stop for a week, then come back.”
A Police Sweep
In May, Gabriela, a mother of two from Ecuador who sells lunches for a Queens restaurant was caught up on a sweep on Prince Street. “It was my first day,” the lonchera recalled in Spanish, “I was arrested by the police, and given a (desk) appearance ticket.” At the time, her children were in school. “I was worried they’d keep me a day or two,” she said, but was released after a couple of hours.
Gabriela believes the nearby licensed vendors complained to the police. Hossain said local stores complained. The judge took pity on her and dismissed the ticket. If she had been fined, her employer made clear she would pay, Gabriela said.
Shari Logan, assistant press secretary for the Health Department, said that licenses, issued after vendors pass a food protection course, were designed to protect consumers from food-borne illnesses by ensuring that sanitary practices are followed.
But the waitlist for food cart permits tops 10,000, making it nearly impossible for recent migrants to sell legally.
“They’re serving a need,” said Matthew Shapiro, Legal Director of the non-profit Street Vendor Project at the Urban Justice Center, which advocates for vendors. “Unfortunately, because there’s no permits or general vending licenses available, they have to keep doing it in a precarious way.”
Gabriela is scared that vending arrests could jeopardize her chances of staying in the U.S.
Shapiro believes her concerns are valid. Having many violations or an arrest record could be held against a vendor during an immigration hearing, he said, although it is unclear whether this has occurred.
Yet, Gabriela feels she has no alternative to continue selling. The family lives in a shelter in Long Island City and her husband works in construction, but they owe lenders $3,500 from their journey out of Ecuador and their children need school supplies and other basics. “I’ve been here a year,” she said while working near Madison Square Park. “it’s the first job I’ve been able to find.”
Nearby, her children, who were on summer break, played on their phones.
Some migrant vendors try to set up shop for themselves. Epifanía, who said she worked in the administrative department of a Lima health clinic before emigrating from Peru eight months ago, started selling lunches for a competitor of María’s.
She was frustrated by the low pay, especially given the risk of getting fined, even if her employer paid the ticket. “It’s you who has to go to court. You get a record,“ Epifanía, who has applied for asylum and dreams of bringing her 11-year-old son from Lima, asserted in Spanish.
Unlike most vendors, Epifanía has a kitchen. She rents an apartment with other recent immigrants in the Mount Eden section of the Bronx. In the Spring, she and a roommate decided to sell lunches on their own. She felt she had an edge by selling Peruvian food, rather than Ecuadorian, Mexican or Venezuelan. “My lunches are unique,” she said, “Peruvian food is highly sought after.”
On weekends, they buy most of their ingredients at a Food Bazaar supermarket in Queens. Then during the week, they start cooking at 6 a.m, preparing 60 meals in total. Larger operations in commercial kitchens can make several lunch options each day. Epifanía offers two. Her roommate’s partner, an Uber driver, transports them to Manhattan and watches the roommate’s three-year-old son while they sell. If all goes well, each roommate takes home $150 in profit, but less if it rains and work construction sites shut down.
Recently, however, Epifanía said, multiple sellers have been pouring into spots that were hers alone, some pushing and jostling for position.
The competition has forced the roommates to stop vending and look for other work. “We get fewer customers because they flood the market,” she asserted.
The flood is building.
Each day, Washington Zurita, a 55-year-old Diamond District security guard, looks for construction site food vendors. He emigrated with his family from Ecuador when he was 7, and their food is a taste of home at a bargain price.
One day this summer, he brought along a coworker, describing the Latin American dishes. They inspected the selections of four vendors at a demolition site near Fifth Avenue, where back in April, one seller from a South Bronx taqueria said, they had been the only vendor.
Zurita and his friend finally decided on the fish stew and roasted chicken from Kely, one of María’s workers.
“It’s fresh food, man,” Zurita said. “It’s homemade.”
Soon after, Kely continued on her route, pulling her hand truck. At 1 p.m., as the early lunch rush came to an end, she and other vendors hustled over to meeting points where vans collect coolers and cash and supervisors often hand out unsold lunches to their sellers.
At scenes like these, María boasted, “I sometimes give away 60 meals.”
The migrant women and their children gobble up the leftovers.
