British Street Food Awards 2012

There’s an old saying in streetfood — your flash is your cash. And at Churros Bros (the finest purveyors of crispy batter fingers in London) they like to put on a bit of a show for the audience. One family member does the frying, one does the serving and one works the dough table. “But when Dad is dough boy, you can’t go near his station” says bossman Read more…

Oh my goodness – Street Food Revolution has been shortlisted for Food Book Of The Year. The annual Guild of Food Writers Awards, which are the most prestigious in the field of food writing and broadcasting, are always hotly contested. Will Hugh beat Yotam? Will Peyton upend  Read more…

It’s not a name you naturally associate with food. But it soon will be. In C4’s Gok Cooks Chinese, Gok Wan will be taking an affectionate look at the food that he grew up with in the family takeaway in Leicester. And miraculously (for the presenter best known for How To Look Good Naked) everyone manages to keep their clothes on.

The book which accompanies the new series is dedicated to Gok’s father – Poppa Wan. As a child he would Read more…

My least favourite word? ‘Produce’. There’s something about it that sounds so smug and self-satisfied. But there’s a new word that is starting to run ‘produce’ close — ladies and gentlemen, I give you ‘sustainable’. Aaargh. Simone Miché tells me to shut up, and get on-board the ethical streetfood groove train…

I love streetfood. It’s fresh, quick, no-fuss food which costs a tenth of the stuff you find in restaurants. And there’s never this ‘queue for a table’ malarkey, because quite simply, there are no tables. Read more…

This story doesn’t get any less embarrassing to tell. But I still need to tell it. It was a summer lunchtime – in a New York park – and Marco Pierre White and I were hungover from a night of Sambuca at Jay-Z’s party. See what I mean? Embarrassing. Anyway. Sat on the grass, and eating a street-vendor’s burger slathered with ketchup, we wondered why we weren’t offering the same thing in Britain. I decided, then and there, that I would do something about the state of British street food. Once I had ordered another burger. Read more…

Norwood High Street in South London – cars, noise, dust and chaos. It’s the last place you would expect to find food growing wild. However, hidden in the urbanity exists a fragile, fertile world of flowers, plants, and herbs. Ceri Buck – expert urban food forager – aims to open our eyes to this world with her ‘Invisible Food Foraging Tours’ when the Slow Food Festival opens in West Norwood next weekend .

 Invisible Food responds to the global necessity to live more locally, and to rely less on transport. It responds to our lack of earthly connections in our inner city areas. It provides an opportunity Read more…

I travelled to Japan to fulfil a lifetime’s ambition to see, smell and taste a food culture that has fascinated me for years. Of course, I started with the street food. But on this trip – so close to the anniversary of the Fukushima disaster — I also wanted to find out what impact the nuclear crisis was having on the way people viewed their food. How had Japan’s relationship with one of the world’s great cuisines changed? I’d heard of campaigners arguing over inadequate testing – of mothers taking to the streets, raising questions over the safety of ingredients in milk formula and school meals. Had – as I’d read in newspaper reports – beef, tea and rice been contaminated with radiation for decades to come? Had the government scientists, who’d appeared on television night after night, failed in their mission to reassure the nation its food was safe? Please listen to my documentary for the Food Programme on BBC’s Radio 4 as I try and find the answers.

Every once in a while you stumble across something special. Something that hasn’t already been flagged up by an army of bloggers and trend analysts. Ananda Pellerin, who writes a regular food column called The Hunger, had her epiphany in London’s Chinatown. With — of all things — a steamed bun. Photos: Neil Wissink

We came to the cha siu bao (pork bun) stall at Newport Court in Chinatown via a vegetarian friend of ours. Victoria, who Read more…

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 Read 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) Read 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 Read 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. Read 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 Read more…

After Sanjay Kumar’s recent eulogy to Kolkata street food, Maunika Gowardhan – the food writer and cook behind www.cookinacurry.co.uk – wanted to sing the praises of Mumbai

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, Read more…

Sanjay Kumar is the chef behind www.sanjayskitchen.co.uk. He’s now settled in Cornwall, working at the Amethyst in Truro, but he recently went home to Kolkata “to breathe in the cosmic city air”. It was his first trip home in eight years. “I just wanted to soak in the smells and sights of the road side food stalls that roar into life as dusk falls….”

In Kolkata, the city that never sleeps, a lot of the economy still exists on barter. When I approached the enterprising street food seller, and convinced him to share his secret recipe for a tummy tickling Egg Roll, I Read more…

Cheese on toast? Mashed potatoes? Deep fried anything? Comfort food is the trend that just won’t go away. But is our love of the stuff getting stronger, now the economic indicators are the worst in generations? Couldn’t we all use a bowl of comfort food right now? That’s the question I pose at the beginning of a new Food Programme for broadcast on Radio 4 later this year. And I started my search for an answer at SpagWednesday, the pop-up pasta night run by Daniel Young.

For me, comfort food needs to slather on the fat – for for a bowl of spaghetti to be truly comforting, it needs a creamy sauce. But I kept quiet in case I offended anyone. I didn’t want to get involved in the politics of pasta even though Read more…

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.” Read more…

It’s finally happened. France has its first mobiler. Le Camion Qui Fume – literally, “the smoking truck” — hit the streets at the end of last year, and its burger has been declared “incroyable” by the elegant citizens of Paris. Californian expat Kristin Frederick, a former chef at Spago in LA, had the right idea with her meat menu. “Even the French were waiting for a real American burger,” she said. Frederick might be American, but Le Camion Qui Fume owes a definite debt of gratitude to the Meatwagon — and the stars of the British Street Food Revolution. It says as much here. I think.

It’s the latest victory in the ongoing democratisation of French food. Read more…

Andy Waugh is a Highlander in London who spotted a gap in the market for good quality, decent value game. His company — The Wild Game Co — supplies the city with venison, duck, pheasant, hare, pigeon and partridge, and 90% of it comes from his parents’ farm in Scotland. Here, Adam Layton — food writer from the esteemed Noshable — writes about the new street food trend for wild meat. Read more…

Faith Popcorn wants to know everything about you – and I mean e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. From the vermouth in your martini to the groceries in your refrigerator. The world’s leading trend forecaster works from a town house in New York, ‘brailling the culture’. And there’s an awful lot of culture to braille in New York. “I remember driving through Harlem” says Popcorn. “This guy was wearing pants, and – I swear to God – they were the biggest pants I’ve ever seen. They were like a skirt. I stopped and asked if he’d made them himself. By sewing two pairs of pants together. I just had to know. If I understand people then I can really understand the future.” Read more…

I have found a new recruit for Daniel Young’s Burger Monday. You might recognise him. It’s just that, right now, Jamie Oliver isn’t allowed to cook up burgers the way he likes them at his London BBQ restaurant – because of the Environmental Health. “They said ‘We don’t want you to cook them medium rare’. I said ‘Look – we’ve got steak tartare on the menu. Raw meat. What’s the difference?’. But the thing is, when you’ve got my name, they’re all over you like a rash’.”

Read more…