British Street Food Awards 2010

I will always remember Marco Pierre White in the lobby of the Soho Grand, signing for breakfast. He put it on Room 320 – the only problem was that he was in Room 322. He was the worse for wear after a night on the sambuca – ‘the house cocktail’, as he called it. The aniseed spirit was lit, extinguished (with the palm of the hand) and shot – in one. Sure, it was against New York fire regulations, and everything that was good and decent. But it was very Marco Pierre White. And the burns from last night didn’t appear to be bothering him…

White was in Manhattan promoting The Devil In The Kitchen – the American edition of his autobiography. His publicists at Bloomsbury were selling him as the original rock-star chef. The one who made Gordon Ramsay cry – who would string up his kitchen juniors by their aprons before dumping them in the dustbin. He was off to do a live cooking demo on The Martha Stewart Show. If he could keep his breakfast down long enough.

Last night it went wrong. It went wrong when White suggested ‘the house cocktail’. The heat of the shot glass threw one member of the drinking party into a blind panic, and she smashed her hand down onto the table. There was flaming sambuca everywhere. White got burnt, and had to ram his hand into a bucket of ice water, and bandage it up in a table napkin, before somebody – nobody quite remembers who – rolled him into a cab.

But somehow he still managed to look handsome – despite a grey demeanour and a tangle of greasy hair. He hadn’t spent any time at the mirror, but it wouldn’t have hurt – The Martha Stewart Show is, after all, the American standard for gracious domestic living. White’s turbot with citrus and cilantro was due to sit alongside a leaf-covered candleholder how-to, and a tip on using old navigational charts as gift wrap. It was the start of one hell of an adventure……

Marco (alongside the equally brilliant and magnificent Mark Hix, Antony Worrall Thompson and Thomasina Miers) will be judging the British Street Food Awards. And by the look of this Marco Pierre White LIDO feature in the Sunday Times magazine, he’s quite excited about it……

Antony Worrall Thompson has just sent me this article. He wrote it for the Express, a few years ago, when he was — understandably — down on the whole idea of British street food. Now he’s coming to Ludlow to  judge the British Street Food Awards. And he’s not doing it ironically. How times have changed — thank goodness.

 “You’re on holiday, you’re feeling peckish, what do you do? You don’t really want the expense of a full blown meal, so you think to yourself ‘Do I trust the street vendors?’  The answer in many cases must be no. My general rule of thumb is, if you’re in a western country (USA, UK, Germany, Australia), don’t touch them with a bargepole — unless, of course, you are into greasy nondescript burgers with boiled onions or boiled frankfurters with tasteless cotton wool bread.   Let’s face it — we don’t do street food well. Except, of course, the great bacon buttie. As long as good quality bacon is used.

Take the sub-continent, the Far East or other Asian Countries and even North Africa and we’re talking a very different story, I love this sort of street food.   In the hawkers’ markets of Singapore I’ve experienced some of the most delicious stuffed flatbreads and piping hot bowls of steaming noodles with chicken and prawns, cooked to order in large woks.

Then in Indonesia you can’t afford to miss the different sate with a variety of sauces including the traditional peanut.   There are times when you yearn a steaming spicy vegetable stir-fry enriched with sambal oelek, soy sauce and honey or some fab seafood encased in a fritter with a spicy chilli sauce.

And in China you can’t go wrong with their vegetable or chicken spring rolls. So cheap to make, but so delicious to eat.  I’ve even eaten saffron ice cream from an Indian street vendor, how brave was that? But it was delicious, and I’m still here to tell the tale. Street food done well has to be one of the nicest forms of instant fodder, but be selective — go where the crowds go; it’s definitely the best endorsement.

I don’t know if it was the coffee beans (Tanzanian Peaberry and Sumatran Mandeling), the hand grinder, the personal cafetiere or the trioxane pocket stove in her handbag that give it away. But I knew early-on that my wife was particular about coffee. Now, to make matters worse, she has gone and struck up a relationship with our local coffee cart. “Try one of these” she says, handing me a coffee with a spoon dipped in white chocolate. “You want cinnamon with that?” She’s lost her coffee-loving mind. But she says she’s tasted the future. And, apparently, it will be served with gingerbread biscotti.

I remember a time when it was different. When a ‘free refill’ was a threat rather than a promise. When coffee tasted like tea. I remember industry insiders talking about toasted bran and chicory as “the new coffee” because coffee was dead. But then came Frasier and Friends, and all of a sudden we were ordering double skinnies like we knew what it actually meant. Now coffee shops are everywhere. Baristas are busily swathing espressos in hot milk, whipped cream and flavoured syrup, and handing us back something that looks like an ice-cream sundae. Which isn’t always a good thing.

You see espresso isn’t a solution but a colloid—a mixture of liquids, gases and finely dispersed solids. It has more than 1,500 chemical components detectable by taste and smell—far more than wine. A good espresso will give you an aftertaste that can last for 20 minutes, making it a good match for a short cigar. Wine, which we get terribly uppity about, is judged to have ‘a long finish’ when its aftertaste lasts for over 60 seconds. So the bean and the roast are important. The double dash of raspberry syrup doesn’t really help.

My biggest gripe is with the big coffee chains who buy pre-ground coffee. Or grind enough to last them for two days. I’m here to tell you that oxidisation is public enemy number one. Which is why I liked the smaller places. All the mobilers I know use freshly ground beans. They don’t extract the espresso too quickly (anything under 20 seconds, and I recommend a simple grinder adjustment) and they don’t try to pull multiple shots from one load of coffee. They even put the right amount of steamed milk into my cup.

All I want is my uncommon grounds. Like the coffee I tasted this week from Lean Green Machine. They deserve their success. I know that it’s fashionable to knock Starbucks. And I would always prefer a good coffee cart, given the choice. But all Starbucks is actually doing is free-market capitalism. Better than anyone else. Go live in Cuba, I say. Which doesn’t sound much of a threat any more. And it’s not like we’ve got a British coffee culture to get sentimental about.

To judge by the applications I’ve had so far, Best Hot Drink is shaping up to be a busy old category. This piece in Caterer Search explains why……. 

Click here for coffee article.

Okay this is getting really exciting. Aside from all the ‘trade’ attention the Awards have been getting (and I’ll blog about it soon), the rest of the world is starting to take notice too. Even the respectable Reader’s Digest. Yes. The Reader’s Digest. It’s the biggest selling magazine in the world. And the fact that the well-mannered, reasonable people who run it (with their jokes, general knowledge quizzes and terrific Word Power) want to reclaim the streets for good-quality food, cheers me no end. Thanks to them, the revolution will begin in the dentist’s waiting-room. Fantastic — and it makes my run-in with the Islington Gazette (see below) that bit easier to deal with…..

Click here to see the Reader’s Digest article.

Pardon my French. But journalists do like to stir. And the journalists on the Islington Gazette are no different. According to one of their recent stories, everyone was up in arms about the launch of the British Street Food Awards at Whitecross Street Market in Islington because the event was “private”. Of course it was PRIVATE — it was a private launch. For journalists, who were (hopefully) going to write about it. So I didn’t invite along the market traders. Or my friend Alan. Or my Mum. That’s torn it. If my Mum finds out, I’m in trouble.

September 2009 saw the launch of the British Street Food Awards at Whitecross Street Market in London. It was one heck of a job getting the banner there on the tube. Can I just say — do you have any idea how much a banner costs? I didn’t. This one (and I did a bit of comparative shopping beforehand) came in at just over £150. So no wonder I’m holding it up for all the world to see. Which created a bit of a problem for Antony, who didn’t have his heels on. It was the culmination of a lot of hard work — and the beginning of a lot more.