The tables inside Bawabat Istanbul, a busy Syrian restaurant with one side open to the street, fill up the moment the previous guests pack up and leave. The food arrives fast as well: carefully decorated plates with grilled meat or falafel, hummus and fries, tomatoes and salad, all sprinkled with paprika and cumin. If it weren’t for the baguettes served along with the pita, one would guess that this was in Syria. But it is not. The street outside, lined with shops and small cafés, is the main thoroughfare in Bir Khadem, a suburb in southern Algiers. In one sense, Bawabat Istanbul is unique. It is the only place of its kind in Bir Khadem, otherwise dominated by Algerian favourites like loubiahand deep-fried sardines.

To organize for your right to vend is not glamorous; it involves community and trust-building, meetings, disagreements, unification around a campaign, administrative quagmires and persistence. This is what a small group of Latino vendors in Corona, Queens decided to take on. “I get too many tickets because of the ’20 feet rule’ or the ‘10 feet rule’ for vending too close to a business or crosswalk,” said a Latina street vendor. “The rules are unfair and confusing,” she added in Spanish. She was new to the monthly street vendor meetings in Corona. The more seasoned members, like Rosario, explained her vending rights. Rosario sells a few types of Ecuadorian ceviche with her partner, Jorge, on 111th Street.

If you walk the length of Roosevelt Avenue from 69th Street to 111th Street in the early morning, you may encounter up to two dozen tamale ladies, usually at the major intersections that correspond to the 7 train’s stops. Few have licensed carts; most vend from grocery carts. Many of these women are up at 3 a.m. cooking and packing their steaming goods and are on the street by 4 or 5 a.m. Licensed or not, their business is brisk, efficient and professional. The ladies feed their own and charge prices that day laborers can pay. It is 5 a.m. on the corner of 69th Street and Roosevelt Avenue in Woodside, Queens. I am here to meet Christina Fox and her favorite tamale ladies.

Évelia, who sells tamales at the intersection of Junction Boulevard and Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, began with a grocery cart and no permit. Her story is a typical one. She arrived from Mexico in 2000. “When they arrested me [for operating without a permit], I really felt horrible,” she says. “I cried. But I had this courage inside. I decided to sell the next day.” After harassment from police, more arrests, obtaining black-market permits and contending with angry restaurant owners, she can finally sell her tamales legally. The video below tells her story, in her own words.

“The people with permits, they are not working. We vendors on the streets, we need more permits,” yelled Mehdi, a New York street vendor of Bengali origin, at a recent protest for more permits. Street vending in the city – in particular food vending – is largely the domain of immigrants like Mehdi, seemingly an easy way to start earning an income. But selling food from a street cart is no easy ride. Sean Basinski, Director of the Street Vendor Project, which advocates on behalf of street-based sellers, says food vendor licenses are relatively easy and inexpensive to acquire. There is no cap on the number of food licenses issued. There’s a catch, though.

Queens these days is New York’s street cart central. According to the Street Vendor Project, which advocates for vendor rights in the five boroughs, the largest concentration of street vendors with licenses lives in that borough. This concentration of streetside sellers is easy enough to see on six-mile-long Roosevelt Avenue, which runs through six of Queens’ most ethnically diverse neighborhoods with a dizzying assortment of vendors catering to almost every taste and nationality, depending on the time of day. It’s not always easy work. At a recent monthly meeting of street vendors in Corona, Queens, the air was thick with grievances about the conditions they have to work under.

"Me siento latinoamericano de cualquier país, pero sin renunciar nunca a la nostalgia de mi tierra: Aracataca…” “I feel Latin American from any country, but without renouncing the nostalgia for my land: Aracataca…” ~Gabriel Garcia Marquez Most are animated, some waver and occasionally one stumbles. Every few feet, a door swings open and a bolero, salsa or merengue tune blares from within. It’s Saturday night in Jackson Heights, and up and down Roosevelt Avenue families flow, children beg their parents for sweets, young women gossip and others hop from bar to bar. In the midst of the hustle and bustle works Luis Alfonso Marin, a Colombian immigrant who sells butter-laden, mozzarella-stuffed arepas topped with grated white cheese from his cart at the corner of Roosevelt Avenue and 80th Street.

Rego Park and Forest Hills are home to much of Queens’ Central Asian Jewish diaspora. The neighborhoods comprise two main thoroughfares, 63rd Avenue (which changes to 63rd Street) and 108th Street. Both roads have a range of markets, restaurants and bakeries catering to local tastes. Here are a few notable addresses. Queens Gourmet Bazaar Food Brothers Yusuf and Juda Saz run this long, narrow market that is filled with Persian staples. Mini barrels of nuts, seeds, dried fruits, several Samarkand raisin varieties as well as fruit molasses, barberries, and other provisions in cans and glass jars cover the floor and walls. The brothers make some of the ready-made food in-house.

Rubi wanted two things for his 13th birthday: a bicycle, and to see his dad, Ahmed, again. It was the end of November, and it had been three months since his family was whole, since Ahmed left for Germany with Rashed and other colleagues from Salloura. Rubi’s days in Istanbul were a steady grind, all blending together in a dim purgatory: wake up at 6 in the morning, get to work at the shirt factory two bus rides away by 7, iron, sew, take the boss’s orders, go home 12 hours later, eat, sleep, repeat. Before Ahmed left, he had been working at the Salloura factory, learning his father’s trade.

“It is betrayal,” As’ad Salloura declared from behind his giant wooden desk at the Salloura factory, tucked away on the outskirts of Istanbul. From here, he runs the transplanted 150-year-old sweets empire that is his family’s namesake. It had been three months since he’d last seen Ahmed, his most cherished employee, Rashed, another integral part of the staff, and two others. “No one told me they were leaving…I found out by chance maybe four or five hours before they left [for Europe],” he said, his thick dimpled fingers thumping the table as he spoke between sips of cigarettes and mate, an herbal caffeinated tea popular in Syria.

It was a hot, humid June in Istanbul. A deadline hovered over Ahmed. He gave himself three months to make the biggest decision of his life: Would he stay? Or would he go? The reasons to leave Istanbul far outnumbered the ones to stay. He was working day and night for a salary that barely made ends meet. The long hours weren’t new – his life in Aleppo was work, 15 hours a day, seven days a week. But unlike in Turkey, Ahmed made more than enough in Syria: he bought a brand new house for his family just before the war; his wife, Laila, was a respected housewife, pushing her kids to study; his two older kids, Rubi and Ruseel – little Rivana wasn’t even born yet – went to good schools. Rubi even had a private English tutor.

The 20th century saw millions of African-Americans leave the South for cities in the North in what is called the Great Migration. And with them, they brought their food traditions, and they opened eateries and groceries and other businesses to serve these rapidly expanding communities. In Queens, African-Americans settled in Flushing, Corona and Jamaica. Today, even with the influx of many new immigrants in recent years, Jamaica continues to be home to many African-Americans. Byron Lewis, an African-American pioneer in multicultural advertising and founder of UniWorld Group, grew up in Queens. His parents’ families both traveled from the South during the Great Migration, ultimately settling in South Jamaica, where Byron, the oldest of six, his parents and grandmother lived on Pinegrove Street from the 1930s on.

Rashed wandered aimlessly in the dark, autumn leaves and twigs crunching under him with each step. Apart from the light from his Samsung, the scene around him was pitch black. “I just need to get signal so they can send me a recording of Lulu’s voice,” he said, hopeful but frustrated. Lulu is his beloved two-year old niece – the one who almost convinced him to stay in Istanbul when he squeezed her goodbye. It was the last time they touched before he left his family behind to embark on the harrowing three-week journey to Germany.

Enslaved Africans first stepped onto North American soil in 1619, unloaded by the Dutch West Indian Company in Jamestown, Virginia. Colonists first auctioned enslaved Africans in New Amsterdam (now New York City), New York, in 1626. According to the New York Historical Society, during the colonial period, 41 percent of the city's households had enslaved peoples, compared to 6 percent in Philadelphia and 2 percent in Boston. Only Charleston, South Carolina, rivaled New York in the degree to which slavery entered everyday life. By 1756, enslaved Africans made up about 25 percent of the populations of Kings, Queens, Richmond, New York and Westchester counties, says historian Douglas Harper.

In order to fully appreciate Tokyo and its deep food scene it’s necessary to not only peek behind the curtain of yesterday, but also join the constant flow of people eating their way through the city of today and even tomorrow. Our Tokyo walk will allow us to do just that, taking us on a journey that serves as an edible survey of the city’s culinary past, present and future.