Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD)

Can you imagine New York City without street food? For centuries, immigrant street food entrepreneurs have shaped the city’s flavor and culture, one hot dog and halal plate at a time.
Street Food City celebrates the city’s smallest food businesses, revealing the hidden world behind the iconic NYC food cart, recognizing the ways in which street food vendors and the foods they sold have shaped the city’s foodways, and tracing the challenges faced by street food entrepreneurs of the past to today’s fight for vendor rights.
$18 General admission$10 General Admission Youth (Ages 5-13)&nbsp;

$12 Discounted General Admission**Discounted rate eligibility includes: (IDNYC, Senior, Military, Low-Income, Disability, Student)Open Thursdays-Sundays 12-6pm

Local Event: Street Food City

Kings County

Brooklyn

New York

Street Food City

Can you imagine New York City without street food? For centuries, immigrant street food entrepreneurs have shaped the city’s...

Join MOFAD for an enlightening and lively conversation with acclaimed food writers Anna Ansari and Polina Chesnakova as they explore the ways in which diasporic identity, memory, and migration shape modern cooking and kitchens.&nbsp; Drawing on shared dishes like dumplings, kebab, chicken tabaka, scrambled eggs with tomato, kompot, and Salad Olivier, Polina and Anna will discuss how their culinary traditions have overlapped, diverged, and reinvented themselves across time and geography.&nbsp; From immigrant kitchens brimming with both inherited recipes and distinctly American foods—think Capri Suns, hot dogs, Hamburger Helper and Shirley Temples—to questions of authenticity and nostalgia, the conversation will explore what these blended tables reveal about modern American food culture and writing. Together, Ansari and Chesnakova reflect on why these stories are especially compelling now, not just for them as food writers, but in the context of the cultural currents shaping the present moment.
Program Hosts

Anna Ansari is an Iranian-American food writer and former international trade attorney whose writing explores the intersections of food, history, migration, and the everyday act of cooking. Her acclaimed debut cookbook, Silk Roads: A Flavor Odyssey from Baku to Beijing, blends recipes with travel, family stories, and cultural history, exploring how ingredients move, settle, and transform across borders. With academic training in Asian and Middle Eastern studies, Anna lives in London, England with her husband and son, and believes deeply in the power of the home kitchen to tell global as well as personal stories.

Polina Chesnakova was born in Ukraine to Russian and Armenian parents from the country of Georgia. She was raised in a tight-knit Rhode Island community of refugees from all over the former Soviet Union, and has cooked and baked in a handful of professional kitchens. She’s had her blog (now newsletter) Chesnok since 2015, and her work has been published in Saveur, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, and more. She has written two cookbooks—Hot Cheese and Everyday Cake— in addition to her latest, Chesnok: Cooking from My Corner of the Diaspora: Recipes from Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. She lives in Providence with her husband, Lee, and two children.General admission $25&nbsp;General admission + Silk Roads Book Bundle $53

General admission + Chesnok Book Bundle $53
General admission + Silk Roads + Chesnok Book Bundle $81

Local Event: Convergent Cuisines: Commonalities Across Diasporic Traditions

Convergent Cuisines: Commonalities Across...

Join MOFAD for an enlightening and lively conversation with acclaimed food writers Anna Ansari and Polina Chesnakova as they...

Convergent Cuisines: Commonalities Across Diasporic Traditions

Brittany Gerckens

Miranda Levingston

New York City Metropolitan Area

Matt Troutman

Carroll Gardens-Cobble Hill

Brooklyn Heights-DUMBO

Fort Greene-Clinton Hill

Gowanus-Red Hook

New York County

Lower East Side-Chinatown

Park Slope

David Luces

Prospect Heights-Crown Heights

Tribeca-FiDi

SoHo-Little Italy

East Village

Date and time Jan 20 from 5pm to 6:30pm EST 

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Buying Into Brooklyn | January 2026

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Posting Activity

Street Food City

JAN

15

12:00 PM

Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD), 55 Water St, NY

Convergent Cuisines: Commonalities Across Diasporic Traditions

JAN

29

7:00 PM

Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD), 55 Water St, NY

Buying Into Brooklyn | January 2026