Family Still Slings Dominican 'Chimis' in Inwood
July 18, 2011 7:15am | By Carla Zanoni, DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
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 and son David also man 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.”
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.
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