The Most Magical Place on Earth

It's not where you think.  There are no life-sized cartoon mice or princesses with castles.  Nope.  It's in a truck with a secret password.

When I went to New York City this weekend, I had one mission in mind:  Find a Wafel and Dinge truck. I'd read about this food truck, saw endless odes to its amazingness on Yelp and in magazine articles, and I just knew that if there was anything I was going to get on a Chinatown bus and travel 4 hours for, it was going to be this truck.

So what about that secret password?  You go to their twitter feed for a daily ticket to a free dinge.  Sadly, Saturday's secret password was not so much a password as an exercise in torturing other customers. Opera is not our thing, even in the name of free dinges.  My friend and I decided we could handle forking over the extra $1 to double-dinge our order and not burst eardrums.



Now everything anyone has ever said about these wafels doesn't hold a candle to what your first bite is like.  There were fireworks exploding, which I couldn't see at first because I went temporarily blind in my ecstasy.  I'm pretty sure there was also a Baptist choir belting out hallelujah, several rainbows appeared simultaneously through the cloudy gloom, and there were puppies.  Really cute puppies.

At the Wafel & Dinge cart just off Central Park

Okay, maybe only that last part was true. About the puppies.  Beside us on the park bench a couple shared small bites of the wafel with their puffy-jacketed pug who spent the entire time perched upright against their knees with an intent stare fixed on the wafel.  I would act similarly if someone was withholding wafel from me.

I actually have no idea what amazing recipe these folks have to make the wafels so addictive, but they come out chewy and slightly caramelized on the corners.  And then the dinges, or the toppings, there are so many choices but the one you can't forego is the speculoos spread.  It's like peanut butter, but better. I know, I know.  What could be better than peanut butter?  Well, this is it.  It's made from ground up ginger cookies. It's like making gingerbread in smooth spreadable form.  And then (it can get better), if you drizzle warm Belgian fudge over the speculoos-laden caramelized wafel, it's like a superior nutella.  That's right, it got even better.

Wafel with speculoos and Belgian chocolate

I mean, I've been fantasizing about these wafels since before I even finished my last bite.  My friend and I, sitting in the bitter cold at the edge of Central Park, looked at each other shyly and from powdered sugar-dusted lips tentatively voices what was going through both our minds, "What if we went back for more wafel?"

"At this cart?  Maybe we should go find another truck."

"Oh, you're right. I suppose we can't go back for seconds here.  Do you think there's one parked in Soho?"

"Probably. What if we went to every truck?  And got a wafel at each one?"

"That is the best idea ever."

 
 P.S. There were nuts purchased also.