Street Food: How to Think About It
If anyone knows about street food it’s Robyn Eckhardt of Eating Asia (link below).
I am a big fan of street food for a number of reasons, but I’m as particular about my street food as I am about other food. I don’t like — and I won’t tout — a mediocre dish prepared with sub-par ingredients by a cook who doesn’t care, whether it costs $100 and is served in a 5-star setting, or whether it costs 50 cents and requires my sitting on tiny stool on sidewalk to eat it. For me the by-products of eating street food — mingling with locals, being part of a lively dining scene, seeing facets of unfamiliar cultures you’d never otherwise see and, in some cases, having the opportunity to try a dish that just isn’t available elsewhere, off the street — should be the bonus of a great street snack or meal, not its raison d’etre.
via EatingAsia: On Street Food and Those Who Love (and Deride) It, and Where to Eat it in Siem Reap.
I couldn’t agree more. I grew so weary of being told that street food was the best food in Mexico or the real food of Mexico. Sometimes it was great, sometimes it wasn’t and my stomach churned at old cooking fat or cringed at tortas made of inferior rolls (hard to get good bread now in Mexico City). And as to real, well, there are lot’s of real foods: home food, restaurant food, street food. No one has the monopoly.
So I’m totally with Robyn. Great street food (and see her definition of this) is specialist, best in its class, and a glimpse into the society. Bad street food, well, just forget it.
- Off the Milking Stool: On Leaving Mexico
- Eggs up, chicken up, beans up: trouble looms for food politics in Mexico
Thanks Rachel. Well put! (and typos, which always seem to escape me no matter how many times I re-read before publishing, have been corrected).
I’m glad someone else can’t escape typos. My eyes just pass over them. My husband’s do not!
THX4 the link to that delicious site!
I couldn’t agree more about good bread in MX. Good bolillos especially have become very scarce. Most of what are now sold in that name are just airy tasteless football shaped wonderbread made with inferior flour.
But where does street food stops and a restaurant takes over? Is there a definition of street food?
Clearly there’s no sharp line of demarcation, Nick. Robyn defines street food as something prepared (or finished) on ordering, close to the daily life of the place, and specialized, not as necessarily being actually on the street. How much of it is there in Brussels. The weather when I was there did not allow me to judge.