A Day at the Ball Fields

NEW YORK, N.Y. — In Red Hook, Brooklyn, where crumbling warehouses butt up against a shiny new Ikea, summer weekends mean huaraches and hipsters. Every Saturday and Sunday, a band of pan-Latin food carts flank the edges of the neighborhood soccer fields, serving dishes like the Mexican cornmeal huarache, and bringing with them a crowd eager for gustatory experience.

Carts have come to the fields for decades, providing refreshments for the amateur athletes, but it wasn’t until the last few years that the mix of cornmeal and ground meat became destination dining. Food blogs hail the carts as some of the city’s best and the name “Red Hook Ball Fields” is now synonymous with street food delicacy. The carts have taken their place among New York’s ethnic cuisine elite—when the city threatened not to renew the vendors’ permit in 2007, dedicated eaters, including Senator Chuck Schumer, rallied for their survival.

I arrived at the fields last Saturday at noon and lines were already forming for a cart selling pupusas, a flat Salvadorian bread made with maize and stuffed with cheese, pork, or beans. Each pupusa comes with a serving of pickled cabbage. The sharpness of the vinegar cuts the grease of the bread—or so thought the man in front of me. As patron after patron received their plastic dish, he would point and nod at his girlfriend. “A pupusa—A Salvadorian pupusa.”

On the fields, men in red and green jerseys played soccer. Families watched and cheered from the picnic tables. A few steps over, a group of 20-somethings stood in a clump, arms crossed. “This is great,” said one. “Yeah, this is pretty great.” Behind them, a sign draped over a fence. “Welcome to Red Hook. Bienvenidos a Red Hook.”


Madeleine M. Schwartz ’12 is a Crimson arts writer in Kirkland House.