British Street Food Awards 2012

Catherine Kilgour is one half of Scottish caterers Wild Rover Food. But apart from travelling around in her trusty old (1961!) Series 2 Land Rover, and sourcing food directly from local farms and hedgerows, Catherine is a writer. And she wanted to let the BSFA know who she fancies for the Best Street Food Market in the 2012 Awards….

Public spaces, when they’re used well, can generate social cohesion and a sense of community spirit; when they’re not used well, however, they suffer from antisocial behaviour and environmental neglect. That was what was happening in Edinburgh’s Stockbridge town: it was what every budding Landscape Architect dreads – ‘dead space’.

That was until last September, when the heroic Beth Berry opened Stockbridge Market in Jubilee Gardens, and filled it full of traders. I say ‘heroic’ because it took Beth two years and the patience of a foodie (more…)

At the British Street Food Awards, we like to think that we know our business. Check out our knowledge of world street food here. But we don’t know everything. Alex Watts does. The travelling journalist, and sometime chef, writes the food blog Chef Sandwich – and we’re huge fans. So when he offered to write us an atmospheric piece about a side to world street food we hadn’t seen first hand, we jumped at the chance.

Walk down any road in Cambodia, and you’ll see street food – sometimes an ingenious bicycle-driven cart hooked up to a car battery, sometimes a stall with a few plastic chairs to perch on.

There are old women pushing barrows of freshwater clams that are slowly ‘cooked’ on a metal tray in the morning sun for an hour or two, baguette stalls (a hangover from French imperialists) (more…)

It’s called The Cock in Cider. Which is quite rude. But Jamie Oliver loves the army truck – complete with machine gun implacement – which he drove on his recent jaunt round the UK. “I don’t mind cooking in people’s homes – whatever they may look like or wherever they may be. In factories. On buses. Or in chefs’ kitchens. But it’s always nice to go back to your own little place and have some thoughts.” That little place, as it happens, was the Cock In Cider.

It’s basically a giant Land Rover – an ex-military 4 x 4. It only goes 55 mph, but will go climb up pretty much anything. It has, of course, been modified. “It’s got servos on it now” says Jamie. “I don’t know how the original boys did it — you would have had to be built like a brick shit house to handle it. It’s also got a wood-fired oven, and a barbecue that pulls out of the side. I had it for Feastival, and I was cooking pizzas in it for the Charlatans. It’s a beautiful thing.” And I want it at BSFA 2012…….

Tired of overworked foam-and-froth dining, Americans have helped create a food revolution – with the help of the humble burger van. Here, Jill Starley-Grainger, editor of  EcoLuxHotels, heads back to the country of her birth in search of the country’s finest street fare.

It’s become such a phenomenon that there’s even a TV game show about it, The Great Food Truck Race, in which seven trucks go head-to-head in a cross-country race to see whose food is the most popular and profitable. On your next trip Stateside, take to the streets to see how the once-humble food truck has taken pole position as the country’s trendiest eatery. Here are a few of our favourites.

Seabirds  — from Orange County, California — were finalists in 2011’s Great Food Truck Race, and bring a welcome dose (more…)

Some people love American football for what goes on in the stadium. Not me. I love what’s happening outside – in the parking lot. That’s where you find the buffet served from the tailgate of the cars and trucks of sports fans. It’s all about the foods that you eat with one hand (because the other hand always has a beer in it). As we approach Super Bowl weekend, I’ve got one thing to say. ‘Forget the game, people – raise your big sponge hands in the air for the tailgate’.

Legend has it that the inaugural tailgate happened in 1869, at the college football game between Rutgers and Princeton. Fans travelled to the game by carriage, and then cooked up a pre-game meal at the ‘tail-end’ of the horse. A Health and Safety nightmare. (more…)

The genesis of Pitt Cue Co. is a fireside story of foodie folklore. From a friend’s kitchen in Vauxhall, ferrying tranches of meat to the Southbank in a clapped-out car, to a T-bona fide restaurant in one of London’s coolest postcodes. Adam Layton of Noshable tells the tale, and Paul Winch-Furness takes the pictures.

Pitt Cue Co. chef and co-owner Tom Adams is a very modest man. But he doesn’t have much cause to be. He’s just opened his first restaurant, hot off the back of a victorious spell on the Southbank, where his own take on American-style barbecue classics (more…)