Founder and Chief Storyteller, food. curated., www.foodcurated.com

What are the secrets behind the top street food vendors in New York City? Come find out!

From tasty homemade white sauces, to spicy meat marinades, to handpicked oregano straight from the hillsides of Greece, food. curated. takes you through a tour of each vendor’s personal stories to find out what makes them one of the best food trucks in the city.

Look out for the “Torta Puma”, a 10+layered torta sandwich that only few have managed to finish alone. Or the $1 Xin Jiang spiced lamb kebabs grilled to perfection under the busy Manhattan Bridge in Chinatown. These are the street food elite, the 2012 NYC Vendy Awards Finalists: six food vendors cooking up special plates unlike any other in the 5 boroughs.

1. The Cinnamon Snail Vegan Organic Food Truck
Schedule: Always on the move, for latest Manhattan coordinates, visit: @VeganLunchTruck

2. Piaztlan Authentic Mexican Food Truck
Schedule: Saturday & Sunday, 10am – 8pm, May-October at the Red Hook Ballfields, Brooklyn @PiaztlanBK

3. Uncle Gussy’s Traditional Greek Cuisine
Schedule: Monday-Friday, 11am -3pm at 51st St and Park Ave, Midtown, Manhattan @UncleGussys

4. Tortas Neza
Schedule: Daily from 1pm-1am at 111th Street and Roosevelt, a few blocks away from Citifield, Queens

5. Hamza & Madina Halal Food
Schedule: Everyday, 10am – 4am at 254-05 Hillside Ave, Glen Oaks, NY

6. Xin Jiang Prosperity Kebabs
Schedule: Monday-Sunday 10:30am-8:30pm at the corner of Forsyth St & Division St, Chinatown

Thanks for watching food. curated.! Congrats to all the finalists! I would love to hear all your comments and thoughts on the videos. Be sure to get your tickets to the big NYC Vendy Awards Event on September 15th.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/liza-de-guia/meet-the-2012-vendy-award_b_1854025.html

Elham Mogales's hot dog cart set up for operation on West 60th Street and Broadway.

The new system of grading city restaurants has been such a success Mayor Bloomberg said Monday that he wants to expand it to the city’s roving fleet of food carts.

“Personally, I would love to see before I buy from a cart a sign up there telling whether or not the guy washed his hands before he reaches in and pulls out the hot dog, Bloomberg said at an event trumpeting the benefits of letter grades for city eateries.

“I love to eat from the street vendors too,” he said.

But any idea hizzoner may have for a new campaign against what city residents can enjoy was immediately tamped down by Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley.

“It is more complicated because \[the carts\] are not always out there,” Farley said.

Bloomberg crowed that since the city instituted the letter-grading system a year ago, Big Apple restaurant have been spared $3 million in fines by earning A-grades.

While overall fines shot up from $32 million to $42 million, Bloomberg said the bite would have been worse if restaurants making fast improvements hadn’t had their fines waived.

“I promised in my State of the City that restaurants that earned A-grades over the last six months would be relieved of fines,” he said. “I am proud to say that system is working for customers and restaurants.”

In all, 90% of city restaurants have been inspected under the new system, with 69% earning an A, 15% a B, and just 4% getting a C.

The new program allows eateries that do not get an A on the first go-round to be reinspected within about a month to allow them to fix things.

In the interim they are allowed to post a “grade pending” notice.

Three generations of the Cruz family make chimis in Inwood. Here are three Manuel Cruzs, from left, grandson, grandfather and father.

INWOOD — When Manuel Cruz opened his chimi, or Dominican-style hamburger, truck in 1987, he never expected to still be slinging the neighborhood favorite late into his 70s.

But the 78-year-old said he has no plans to retire any time soon and has now introduced many of his relatives to the business, even putting three generations of “Mannys’— him, his son and grandson— to work his truck called Chimichury El Malecon over the weekend.

“It’s a family business,” said Cruz, whose daughter Monica also mans the truck.

“People ask me when I am going to retire and go back to the D.R. I tell them, I retired when I came here.”

Chimichury El Malecon sold its first "chimi" in 1987.

Cruz, who moved to New York on New Year’s Eve in 1957, said he came to flee the Trujillo dictatorship that ruled the country, and built a family in the Bronx before moving to Inwood.

He said the neighborhood was different then, with fewer Latino people in northern Manhattan.

By the ’80s, more people from the Dominican Republic began moving in and he came up with the idea of selling them food from their homeland.

Cruz said he never wanted to open a food truck and actually set out to create a food kiosk, akin to a magazine stand.

But he quickly learned a food truck was the only way he could begin selling his authentic chimis, made of 100 percent ground beef with shredded cabbage, tomato, onions and a mayonnaise and ketchup sauce on a toasted roll.

Cruz claims that he was the first person to open a chimi truck in the city, which is hard to prove and hard to imagine with the amount that now dot the streets of Northern Manhattan.

But judging from the steady stream of customers, few debate Cruz’s claim to be the best, which is emblazoned on the back of the truck, boasting “El Primero y El Mejor” ( The First and the Best) on 207^th Street and Sherman Avenue.

Washington Heights resident Maria DelValle said, “There is nothing like this chimi.

“The meat and everything is fresh and juicy, these guys don’t play around.”

DelValle is not alone. The truck is celebrated on several culinary websites and a recent Yelp.com review lauds its hamburgers.

“Their chimi kicks the butts of those from all the other trucks,” writes Paul W about the $4 regular chimi or $6 double chimi.

Although the business was closed for a year while the family built a new truck from scratch — Cruz took the first and old truck to a junkyard last week — El Malecon is still as popular as ever after reopening last month.

And with a new truck has come new marketing. El Malecon joins the ranks of the other food trucks downtown that have taken to social media to spread the word about their chow.

Chimichury El Malecon is now online as well with an active Facebook and Twitter account, hoping a foray into social media might bring chimi fans from all over the city. The crew has also set its sights on winning an award for their historic business at the Vendys, the popular annual food truck contest where another Inwood favorite truck vendor, Patacon Pisao, competed last year.

“We know everybody loves the chimi,” Cruz said. “We plan to be here for a long time.”