New York’s viral ‘Chaat Dog’ blends South Asian chaat with the classic American hot dog, offering a bold, flavour-packed take on immigrant identity and culinary assimilation, led by chef Pervaiz Shallwani.
“First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin,” Leonard Cohen wrote in 1987. Soon, the song became a staple in the Canadian singer-songwriter’s concerts and a major source of discussion among those trying to decipher his spiritual-political poetry. In a backstage interview in 1988, Cohen said the song was about “terrorism”, paraphrasing a poem by Irving Layton: “our terrorists, Jesus, Freud, Marx, Einstein.”
The song has since become an anthem for resistance and reclamation. If New York’s latest street food obsession is anything to go by, it might as well be an anthem for NYC’s immigrant communities. I am, of course, talking about the sinful communion of Indo-German street food staples: the abominable ‘Chaat Dog’ that New Yorkers seem to have been seduced by.
The ‘Chaat Dog’ is a New York-area pop-up food concept created by Pervaiz Shallwani, a journalist and chef of Pakistani descent who grew up in the Chicago suburbs. The premise is exactly what it sounds like, and more. Shallwani’s claim to fame is the eponymous ‘Chaat Dog’ — an all-beef hot dog on a ghee-toasted bun, topped with chaat and finished with cilantro chutney, tamarind-plum chutney, fried onions, sev and boondi crunch, fresh cilantro, and house-made pickled hot wax peppers. Shallwani describes it as a mashup of his Chicago-area upbringing — eating a lot of hot dogs growing up — and his Pakistani heritage.
In a 2022 interview with Epicenter NYC, Shallwani said that the idea first came to him at a hot dog cook-off in 2017 at a friend’s birthday party, where he and his wife entered with a bhel puri hot dog — potato, bhel puri mix, tamarind chutney, and green chutney — and won.
The word ‘chaat’ comes from Hindi and Urdu, meaning ‘to lick’ or ‘to taste’ and refers to a popular street snack found across Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh — known for combining sweet, crunchy, tangy, and spicy flavours, typically built on a starchy base and layered with chickpeas, yoghurt, spices, and chutneys. Placing all of that on top of New York’s, and arguably America’s, most democratic street food — the hot dog — is a very pointed act of cultural synthesis. In the same Epicenter NYC interview, Shallwani himself framed it in terms of assimilation: “Hopefully, this is the beginning of a larger part of exploring not just mine but other people’s assimilation into American cooking... taking stuff from back home and from here and making it their own. That’s American cuisine.”
Shallwani recently collaborated with Top Chef Season 22 winner Tristen Epps-Long for a pop-up at Time Out Market Dumbo in Brooklyn, where Afro-Caribbean and Desi American street food influences met on a hot dog bun — and drew crowds from across the city.
If you enjoyed reading this, here’s more from Homegrown:
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How A Women’s Chai House In New York Is Subverting Patriarchal Cultural Traditions
Spilling the Tea: Meet Two Brothers Giving New York City Authentic Indian Chai