Mumbai is a heady mix of cultures and regional influences. The city’s food reflects that, with a wide variety of regional cuisine on offer including Parsi, Maharashtrian, Punjabi and Bengali. Cafes, stalls, vans and small quaint thali spaces all entice and cater to the locals, the busy office workers and the tourists, giving them a flavour of what all the fuss is about.

I was born in Mumbai and grew up eating a lot of what we call ‘street food’ as part of my daily fare. Breakfast was at a local street cafe, where my mother and I would queue up early to sample steaming poha or puffed rice – a typical breakfast snack cooked with onions, chillies and a squeeze of lime. With a cup of tea in tow this was (and still is) the perfect start to my day.

From buttery pav bhaji (mashed spiced vegetables served with fried bread) at Juhu Beach and kebabs and biryanis at Kakori House, to the melt-in-your-mouth mutton curries and the coastal food that’s pretty much part of my DNA – I have eaten it all and then some. It still excites me to go back to the restaurants and cafes that I visited when I was younger.

My favourite dishes include roasted butta (above) a charred corn on the cob smeared with a chilli, lime and salt mix, and kheema pav, a minced lamb dish cooked in spices, vinegar and chilli. Cooking these dishes passes on an essence of what Mumbai street food is all about. The flavours, aromas, spices and recipes from my favourite city bring a joy that will stay with me forever.

Saturday Kitchen Talking Street Food ….

Cooking in a restaurant? Hard. Cooking on the street? Harder. Just ask high-end chef (and the winner of Best Main Dish at the British Street Food Awards) Jun Tanaka. “If you’re working in a professional kitchen, the only limitation is you” says Jun. “And your creativity. In a truck you’re limited by everything else. In Pearl, my restaurant, if I’m trying out a new dish I don’t think ‘Well, I’ve only got a certain number of chefs and they won’t be able to cope with anything too complicated’. Or ‘I don’t have the right equipment to make this dish work’. But when I’m working on the street, I just have to do the best I can.”

Jun, and his partner Mark Jankel, launched their Street Kitchen during the 2010 London Restaurant Festival. It was high concept. “We were very clear about our ethos from the start – it was all about sourcing everything from great farms within the UK. But because we wanted the food to be accessible to everyone, we had in our mind a price point that we couldn’t go over. We had seen people in London prepared to pay £6 for a burrito or a gourmet burger. So we decided to set our top price at £6.50. That seemed fair.”

On a “research” trip to New York, Jun did the round of the city’s famous food trucks. His favourite was Schnitzel & Things, where the queues regularly snake round the block. He thought their lightly breaded cutlets of chicken, pork and cod were fried to golden perfection, but awkward to eat. “I got a big platter, a knife and fork and a huge deep-fried schnitzel, and I needed a table to put it on. I just grabbed mine in my hand and ate it like a sandwich. Street food should be easy to eat – I think they had forgotten that at Schnitzel & Things.”

With Street Kitchen, Jun wanted people to be able to hold their bowl in one hand – and their cutlery in the other. He didn’t want the food to feel too cheffy. “At Pearl, people come to eat my style of cuisine. They’re already foodies, and they’re coming to experience what I want to put on the plate. But street food is different. It’s all about catering to absolutely everybody. If someone come up and see a fancy-sounding dish on the menu, and it doesn’t connect with them immediately, you’ve lost their custom forever.”

To see how service should work, Jun visited Daddy Donkey Kick Ass Mexican Grill in London. The business has gone from a rickety wooden barrow to a big, bright burro-mobile by serving 500 people in a lunchtime. The staff of eight have to work, flat-out, in a production line. “It’s the most efficient way to do it” says Jun. “The customers follow the food. They order at one end, follow it along, and they pay for it at the other. The staff don’t move. That’s one thing we learnt very quickly. The staff have to stay in a line.”

He learnt how to manage his queue from Roland at Flaming Cactus, one of the founding fathers of the British street food movement. “He taught us that people love to see a queue” says Jun. “Whether it’s in front of a nightclub or a food truck. If there’s a queue, people think you must be okay, so maintain your queue. When you don’t have a lot of people, you slow it down a bit, and when do you have a lot of people you serve them as quickly as possible. But I’ve been in a restaurant kitchen for 20 years – I found it quite difficult learning to make people wait.” He had better get used to it….

I love ambling through Whitecross Street market, mid-morning, when the traders are sizzling onions, slicing lemongrass and swearing at the pigeons — in equal measure. Apart from the fact that most of the food isn’t ready to buy, it’s the best time to look around the market without bumping into the slow moving traffic of curry-seeking suits and quinoa-craving hipsters. There’s been traders at Whitecross Street since the 17th century but, by the 19th century, the area was a by-word for poverty and alcoholic depravation. Unfair really — it was just the ‘morning after’ the City-wide piss up that was London’s Victorian gin epidemic.

The area still gets a bit Crimewatch on the weekends, especially outside Waitrose, with kids swirling around on BMXs and hatchbacks gobbing out rap music. And if you want a snapshot of the ravages of generations of alcohol abuse then do pop into the Whitecross Street Wetherspoons – anytime from 9am – which is, incidentally, the city’s best value old people’s home. But if it’s not social anthropology you’re after, you come to Whitecross Street to eat the food.

There’s Wholefood Heaven, who won the Best Main Dish at last year’s British Street Food Awards. And Luardo’s, proving the real depth and diversity of Mexican food. But new kid on the block is Andy Waugh, with his Wild Game Co serving up top-notch game, mostly in the form of sausage and stew, for a little over a fiver. As he says, “There’s a demand for upmarket food here. I’m going to step it up this year with a stunning steak and chips, which will be a bit more expensive. People here don’t mind paying for quality”.

The history of this particular game stand is as rich as the Wild Game Co venison stew. For over 30 years Andy’s family have been butchering game at their farm in the Scottish village of Ardgay, 45 minutes north of Inverness. During summer holidays away from university Andy worked at the family farm, learning about the business, but found himself in the capital working a string of ‘City’ jobs, none of which he could get too excited about. Increasingly, he was taking orders for his family’s superior meat on the side. “One thing led to another,” says Andy, and in August 2010 The Wild Game Co was born.

Game is still seen as rich man’s food. The perception is that it’s ‘snobby’. But Andy’s charming and animated approach is starting to bring the meat of the field to a wider audience. When I met him, just before the lunchtime rush on a wet Friday, his grill was lined with game sausages and a huge hunk of venison steak. They are the best sellers, but — as we talked — he took orders for pigeon (let’s call it the market trader’s revenge) and partridge.The venison steak was sliced from a huge sizzling haunch (the buttock and thigh meat) — it’s a much less active muscle than shoulder or leg, meaning it can be cooked quickly, and served rare. The result was a soft, juicy and sweet-tasting steak that caused no problems for plastic cutlery.

As well as trading good volumes of steak salads, pigeon sandwiches and fresh meat to cook at home from his daily market stall, Andy co-runs the ‘part-time’ restaurant in Islington’s Chapel Market with seafood caterers Bonnie Gull Ltd. An old-school pie and mash shop in the day, replete with wooden booths, marble tables and artisan tiled walls, the diner is transformed by the flicker of candle light into the Bonnie & Wild. Here, head chef Iain Sim, of Edinburgh’s award winning Mussel Inn, offers a three course set menu for £29, consisting of a mixture of game and seafood dishes ranging from barbecued razor clams to pan-fried wild Scottish girolles.

★★★★

Lunch £5-7; you can find The Wild Game Co at the lunchtime market on Whitecross Street (EC1) Monday to Friday, Broadway Market (E8) on Saturdays and the The Bonnie & Wild at 71 Chapel Market (N1) on Friday and Saturday evenings.

Her accuracy rate is 95%. Most trend forecasters aren’t in business long enough to even have an accuracy rate. That’s why IBM, American Express and McDonalds fall over themselves to employ her. In America, Popcorn is chat-show famous. Even Oprah wanted to meet the 60-year-old woman who predicted the success of four-wheel drive vehicles and the failure of New Coke. Popcorn was the first to identify the stay-at-home syndrome (which she called ‘cocooning’) and the growth in home delivery, home business and home shopping. Back in 1981 she told companies that, because we were ‘cocooning’, we would buy more Haagen-Dazs and babygros. She was right.

Popcorn’s methods are suitably futuristic. To research ideas she conducts ‘Hypnotrend Probes’, which regress volunteers under hypnosis. After they have signed a release form, of course. She has even employed psychics. “I’m not like Nancy Reagan. I don’t interview psychics, and then predict what’s going to happen. I’m more interested in how people in general feel about psychics”. So it’s no surprise to discover she has a Third Eye – although you wouldn’t know it to look at her. It exists in only a ‘spiritual’ way. “Every culture talks about an extra sense. Having a Third Eye is like being in the present, but seeing from the future”. Let’s just say that Popcorn is open to whatever is out there.

When I predict rends, it’s hardly “buckle up – we’re on our way to tomorrowland.” I mean, I’ve got a reasonable success rate. I can show you the press cuttings. But I can’t get too excited about this new branch of what’s now being called social anthropology. I need a mission statement that will appeal to the American self-improvement tradition. The same tradition that underpinned Chicken Soup For The Soul, and Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. And a new name. Richard Johnson is just too dull. “We sell okay in Britain” says Popcorn. “But in Britain you don’t think you need to look forward. Even to tomorrow.”

Popcorn has become a multimillionaire by painstakingly identifying the societal trends of the future, and then giving them cutesy little names. There’s ‘99 Lives’ (we’ll all be busy), ‘Egonomics’ (we’ll all be selfish) and ‘Fantasy Adventure’ (we’ll all be wearing hiking boots). “The 17 trends we have right now seem to be pretty stable” says Popcorn. “If I see something that I cannot fit into the 17 trends, I hang on to it. That will kick me into another trend.” Critics say she is merely selling the blindingly obvious. “Well” she says, “Fortune 500 Chairmen don’t think it’s so obvious” says Popcorn. “Otherwise why would they pay me so much money?”

Here are some of my best guesses for next year. Olive Magazine’s 2012 Food Predictions. If they’re correct, I’ll remind you about them in 12 months time……

Set in Liverpool Prison, Can Cook and their team of chefs will take over the staff mess and work with a team of seven prisoners, transforming the current food offer into the first street food café within prison walls. The street food approach will drive the training and the enterprise model will sustain the café going forward. Pizzas, curries, pies, fresh stock-based soups and stews — everything will be home-made. Over 80% of prisoners leave unemployed, and they’re 13 times less likely to gain employment compared to those with no prison record. Street food has clear market opportunities. Phase 1 of the Can Cook plan starts next month with the first seven prisoners in Liverpool Prison — the British Street Food Awards hopes to be involved with phases 2 and 3. Watch this space.

The finalists will be coming from all over Britain to take part in the event, which takes place at Jimmy Doherty’s farm from September 9-11. “We’ve been inundated with entries this year” says Richard Johnson, the founder of the Awards and the author of Street Food Revolution, which is published next month. “A pitch at the Olympics is such an amazing prize, and it shows how far street food has come. We’ve had the Summer of Love – but this is the Summer of Street Food. Yeah baby!”

The general public will be able to taste the food of the 13 finalists, who will be cooking up restaurant-quality food at takeaway prices. And they will be able to vote for the Best Looking Mobiler. The traders will be competing in all the categories detailed on the British Street Food Awards website at www.britishstreetfood.co.uk, including Best Pie, Best Dessert, Best Cold Drink, Best Hot Drink, Best Main Dish, Best Sandwich and Best Snack. But the one they all want to win is Best Of The Best.

There will be a few familiar faces from last year’s Awards. The Fish Hut (with its own seagulls and sandpit) will be back to defend the Best Main Dish title it won for the perfect fish and chips – served out of a pretty little Southwould beach hut. So will The Laughing Stock, with its family recipe for salt beef. And Lulabelle, the deliciously pink VW camper van from Yorkshire, with its tea and cakes. But the competition from the new boys and girls will be tough.

Ginger’s Comfort Emporium from Manchester, for instance, is quite a looker. The lovely old ice cream van will win fans with its olive oil and smoked sea salt ice cream, and the team hope to continue the tradition started by Kitty Travers and La Grotta Ices, who won Best of the Best in last year’s Finals. Chilli Gone Barmy is a bit of a looker too, trading out of a vintage Citroen H Van. Brian, the chilli man, would certainly win the Award for Best Name. If there was one.

Jun Tanaka will be escaping his London restaurant kitchen for the weekend to serve up some high-end street food in Street Kitchen’s beautiful Airstream trailer. There is something about the trailer’s aluminum, rust-proof skin. Its clean, sleek lines lend it a look of the past – and the future. Its monocoque body shell is still turning heads, 75 years after it was first launched. President Kennedy used one as a mobile office. The Airstream comes with a pedigree. That’s why Jun chose it.

The Black Box team are less flashy. In black uniforms, and a black truck, they’re a fearsome sight. But their skills on the griddle are balletic. And the smells they give off are exquisite. They will be competing for attention with the fresh fish being smoked next door by Rich from Halls Dorset Smokery. There’s something primeval about the whole outdoor smoking thing. The judges (who include Richard Corrigan and Antony Worrall Thompson) will do the right thing – and try both.

In many ways, crepes are the perfect street food. And ordering from mobilers (especially ones as charming as Paul from Lemon Jelli) is much less awkward than having a waiter make crepes at your table. They can’t be made in advance for a large group of people. They must be created, one by one, and eaten immediately to retain their essential crepeness. Which means that the eating must be done in the same location as the cooking. And what better location than the food field at Jimmy’s?

It’s the same story over at Churros Bros, who will be competing in the Best Snack category. George and Rachel’s crisp fingers of batter, served with a pot of rich dark chocolate, have to be enjoyed straight away. Leave them standing around for a few minutes and they will be chewier than old shoe leather. It’s hypothetical of course – no-one has ever left a pot of churros from Churros Bros around for a few minutes to find out.

Pizza is another classic street food. Although street pizza is very different from the pizzeria pizza. Unlike the 12” rounds you find in a restaurant, “pizza a taglio” is generally made on large square trays, and sold by the rectangle. It’s easy to hold, and leaves you one hand free to steer your Vespa. Jalopy cook their pizzas in an authentic Ephrem wood fired oven, and taste as good as anything you’ll eat in the South of France.

Angus Dunoon will be trundling up to Jimmy’s with his theatrical Kolkata Street Food Experience. His jhal muri – the snack that you find on every street corner of Kolkata – is the stuff of legend. It’s the snack you can eat between meals, with drinks, or with family. “Or slowly slowly, with your love,” says Angus, “because everybody love love the jhal muri. I don’t mind about winning the Street Food Awards – I just want people to love my jhal muri.”