Four-Star Fast Food

Even without their celebrity-chef provenance, these things would likely go like hotcakes: crêpelike Swedish pancakes, griddled to order and slathered with lingonberry cream. “The best street food is rooted in tradition,” says Samuelsson, who didn’t have to struggle to come up with the idea for Marcus’s House of Pancakes. “In Sweden, where I grew up, yellow-split-pea soup followed by pancakes and sweet punch is the traditional Thursday supper. As a child, you don’t like the soup; you’re doing it for the pancakes.”

Wylie Dufresne, WD-50
Grilled salmon and “tartar tots”
Cost: $2.25 Sell for: $3.75

This very Dufresnian take on fish and chips served straight up in a newspaper cone may rankle more than a few Englishmen, not to mention the Tater Tot contingent, “but I’m not very good at playing to the purists,” he says. The salmon is simply grilled and cut into little cubes, but the tartar tots—deep-fried, panko-crusted little nuggets of hot tartar sauce—pull double duty, serving as both the crispy “chip” element of the dish and the condiment. “It took us four times to get it right,” says Dufresne. “I like it when things are hard.”