On the way to dinner.....

We were heading to the China Grill for dinner. A simple walk along 53rd over 6th Avenue and then we'd be at our destination.
We (Sue Margaret and I) came across a long queue that seemingly stretched back from the corner of 6th Avenue for about 100 yards. As we got closer to 6th Avenue we realized people were lined up to get food from the food cart. The serving of food is fast but they couldn't be all that fast.
We had a discussion over dinner about whether we had had food from one of the sidewalk vendors. The others hadn't very much but I had fairly regularly from one of the vendors on the Lower Eastside. The cart we passed on our way to dinner was
I checked it out via the NY Times list and it is 17th on the list. The NY Times said:
These days, there may be more halal carts than hot-dog stands, but you will recognize this one by its never-ending line. You will also know it by its signature bright-yellow plastic bags and employees’ T-shirts, which proclaim, in no uncertain terms, we are DIFFERENT. TASTY. DELICIOUS. This opinion is echoed on a fan-based Website (53rdand6th.com), in a Young Muslims of North America chat room, and especially by the polyglot mixture of cabbies and bridge-and-tunnel pleasure seekers who crowd the corner every night, turning it into an impromptu alfresco cookout. The stand has even made it onto Wikipedia, under the name “Chicken and Rice,” and gained a more tragic form of notoriety last fall, when one customer stabbed another to death after a line-cutting scuffle. While no $6 lamb-and-chicken-combo platter is worth dying for, this one benefits from the constant turnover and the harmonic convergence of a hot red-chile sauce and a mysterious white one, the contents of which the Halal Chicken and Gyro crew cannot be sweet talked into revealing. An even bigger secret than the white-sauce recipe is the fact that HC and G operates a second cart across Sixth Avenue, on the southeast corner of 53rd Street, and even though it’s parked there until 2 a.m., it’s never cultivated the same devout following—proof, perhaps, of the herd mentality: The longer the line, the better it must be.

It may well be fantastic food but why people don't queue up at the other van from the same food vendor that is on the opposite side of 6th Avenue. It is literally across the street and the same food. Compare the length of the queues- well nothing to compare really.

Perhaps one day I'll try the food there myself but we went on to the China Grill and had a banquet of a meal and waddled home afterward.