Street food, fast, cheap and out of control, is the current darling of the food lover's world, but the culinary glories of the San Gennaro street fair in New York's Little Italy are faded at best. Deep-fried Oreos offer 10 seconds of pleasure and an evening of regret; once-promising sausages get burned to charcoal before being stuffed into cold rolls with peppers steamed limp. It's not for tasty things that I jostle my way through the perpetually mobbed festival, but to get a taste of a different sort of local flavor, mainly by overhearing things like this: "My pop got into a motorcycle accident and was in the hospital for weeks. My grandpa came over and started cookin' all this Italian food. It was the best thing that ever happened to me!"


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