Beneath a blue canopy on the corner of 26th Street and Drake Avenue, in Little Village, Geaby Figueroa shaves ice off a sweating block, packs it into a cup, and flavors it with strawberry syrup. An immigrant from Mexico, Figueroa has been operating her food cart on this corner since 2019. It might look like an ordinary scene of a street vendor trying to make a few bucks, but even though she is licensed, Figueroa is technically breaking the law: Chicago prohibits street vendors from preparing food at their carts or stands. They can only serve it.
“Everything we have to prepare is illegal,” says Geaby’s daughter Estrella (Geaby doesn’t speak English). The problem is that the shaved ice, chicharrones, and elotes don’t lend themselves to being made in advance. “How are we going to sell elotes if people can’t watch her prepare them?” The only item the family serves that is within the letter of the law is the unsliced cactus.
With those kinds of restrictions, it’s no wonder New York and Los Angeles, the cities Chicago loves to measure itself against, are eating our lunch when it comes to food carts. New York has 6,880 licensed street food vendors (a number that includes food trucks) and is adding 11,000 more licenses over the next five years. By contrast, Chicago has an estimated 3,000 food cart vendors, and only 12 are licensed. (The city also has about 140 licensed food trucks.) In Manhattan, there’s a hot dog vendor on nearly every corner. Here, that would be against the law: Placing a frank in a bun is considered on-street prep. In Los Angeles, hurried diners can enjoy a bacon-wrapped hot dog served from a cart — also illegal in Chicago, because the city prohibits vendors from using propane or gasoline generators.
For immigrants, who account for an estimated 80 percent of food cart vendors here, these regulations can block a familiar path to making a living. “When you are unemployed, when you are looking for a job, you say, ‘Let me invest two or three hundred dollars,’ ” says Baltazar Enriquez, president of the Little Village Community Council. “You sell tamales, you sell elotes. It’s a tradition of being vendors since the Maya, Aztecs, Incas. This is how we do it in Mexico.”
It’s a strange thing that such a food-loving, immigrant-driven place as Chicago could be so hostile to the humble food cart. And yet the city, which didn’t legalize these carts until 2015, seems intent on making it near impossible to actually operate one. Among the rules and regulations? The food must be prepped in a licensed retail food establishment. That means you’ll have to fork out a few hundred bucks — $330 for two years — for a shared kitchen license. That’s on top of the $100 for the two-year vendor license. The food must also be prepackaged and sealed before being sold. Want to operate out of a desirable area like the Mag Mile? Forget it. Carts are prohibited there. You aren’t even allowed to stay in one location for too long. Violate any of these rules and you risk being ticketed, arrested, and sent to court and seeing your inventory and equipment confiscated.
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Our dearth of street food vendors is hardly the biggest problem facing Chicago, yet it feels emblematic of the city’s inability to get out of its own way with overburdensome regulations. “We’ve had a merchant culture in the past, like Maxwell Street,” says Austin Berg of the free-market think tank Illinois Policy Institute. “The current status quo is a de facto ban. We have a political culture that emphasizes who you know, and food cart vendors are at the bottom of the economic ladder.”
“The current status quo is a de facto ban. We have a political culture that emphasizes who you know, and food cart vendors are at the bottom of the economic ladder.” — Austin Berg of the Illinois Policy Institute
Food carts had long been effectively banned over concerns about food safety, not to mention the restaurant industry’s lobbying against curbside competition. The 2015 ordinance that legalized them, sponsored by former 26th Ward Alderperson Roberto Maldonado, was an attempt to bring Chicago to parity with other major cities. But it didn’t open the doors as wide as Maldonado had hoped. He wanted operators to be able to prepare food at their carts, but the Chicago Department of Public Health pushed back on that, saying it didn’t have enough workers to carry out inspections. Maldonado says he relented on the issue, worried it might have “killed the bill.”
Rigorous safety regulations aren’t unusual for vendors elsewhere either; in 2017, New York City expanded its restaurant letter grading to cover food carts and trucks. The difference here is manpower and funding. New York City began issuing licenses to street food vendors as early as the late 1890s; it has had more than a century to fine-tune regulations and build an army of inspectors. Chicago doesn’t have that same food cart culture — and perhaps never will. Nor does it have the money to keep pace on regulating the carts. CDPH’s budget saw significant cuts last year, and the city is operating with a $85 million shortfall.
It hasn’t helped the food cart cause that these vendors have historically lacked political clout. But the recent push to protect immigrants in Chicago might end up spurring some change. Alderperson Andre Vasquez, chair of the City Council’s Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights, favors passing new ordinances allowing vendors to operate more freely. For starters, Vasquez wants food cart tickets to be kept out of court. After two vendors appeared before a judge this year for violations, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested them, and they were issued deportation orders.
Vasquez also wants to increase the number of shared kitchens in this city, expand the areas where vendors can operate, and allow them to prepare food at their carts. All of that would likely mean new regulations. For example, New York City requires mobile food vendors to keep their carts and trucks overnight at an approved, permitted Department of Health commissary, where their equipment can be cleaned, tanks refilled,
and food stored.
“We talk a lot about where food carts can’t be instead of where they can be,” Vasquez told Chicago. “They add more texture to the city, more flavor.”
The pro-immigrant sentiment that has swept Chicago in the wake of ICE raids offers an opportunity for the city to reembrace its roots. After all, as Berg of the Illinois Policy Institute points out, Vienna Beef, which he calls “the foundation of the Chicago-style hot dog,” began as a hot dog stand at the 1893 world’s fair, operated by Austro-Hungarian immigrants Emil Reichel and Samuel Ladany. Today, such an operation would be illegal.
Edward Robert McClelland is a freelance writer for Chicago magazine.