British Street Food Awards 2012

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’.”

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The BSFA have always seen street food as an agent for social change — a vital ingredient in the regeneration of city centres and our broken society. Thank God, we’re not the only ones. This month, a cookery school in Liverpool starts training prisoners on how to run their own street food businesses – it’s a radical idea. Read more…

This Friday, London’s street food sellers take on a challenge of Biblical proportions. They are feeding the 5,000 — in Trafalgar Square. And they’re hoping Nigella will lend the event her support. The domestic goddess did the catering for her own wedding, but when she left for honeymoon, she couldn’t help herself. She took leftovers. There she was, a rich wife with a rich husband, but she took on a chiller bag of scraps as hand luggage. Waste not want not.

We can see it in her television series. At the close of a show, after the credits have rolled, we see Nigella sneaking down to the fridge to wolf down the leftovers. It’s not just put on for the cameras. “To tell the truth,” she says, “I’m happy to eat them standing, leaning on the still-open refrigerator door, for my finger-picked breakfast. But I also love the culinary fiddling to which they can lend themselves with great satisfaction.” Read more…

Remember the spork? I never got to grips with its spoon/fork interface. And now I’ve come across something just as useless – let’s call it the fopstick. The fork/chopstick was sheer bloody craziness. But maybe I should have expected it – after all, I was eating at the Crazy Bear, the Thai restaurant chain. The idea of ‘East meets West’ cutlery was a good one, but a bugger if you happened to be hungry.

I ordered two steamed king scallops (£3.50 each) on a salad of coriander, spring onion and crispy garlic. When the scallops arrived, the fopstick became an issue. Not just its shape – its size. It was big. I felt like a character in a nursery rhyme – when was the giant due back? And it looked even bigger because the table was so small, with a lamp slap-bang in the middle. I couldn’t even reach my gai lan (£4). Read more…

The drunker I sit here, the longer I get. I blame the Armagnac. Like it’s written in the Bible:
“And God said, ‘Let there be Armagnac’.
And He saw that it was good.
Then God said, ‘Let there be light!’
And then He said, ‘Whoa — too much light!

I do like that Armagnac’s robust, assertive character doesn’t mix easily in the fruit-and-vegetable world of cocktails. I do like that it has a distinct air of the old-fashioned. And I do like that it’s linked, atavistically, to a decent cigar. But when I wake up tomorrow, it will – of course – be a different story. Read more…

I love chili. It’s sexy food. Add a bottle of red wine, a generous helping of candlelight, a dash of Johnny Mathis and my 220 pounds of pure Grade-A man-meat, you’ve got a freak fest to write home about. So judging Chili Standoff — the fourth Tweat Up event — was a real pleasure. Read more…

In the new series of the Apprentice, the candidates will try their hand at street food. I interviewed Lord Sugar, back when he was plain old Sir Alan. And I loved every minute of it. Almost……..

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I love chilli. Love it. I just wish I knew how to spell it. My favourite recipe is for a Layover Chili — note the use of a single ‘l’. Please don’t write letters. When Yianni from Meat Wagon agreed to give me the wonderful recipe to feature in Street Food Revolution, I was delighted. And it was Yianni who pointed out that ‘chili’ is the American spelling. Chili has always had a special place in Yianni’s heart – it was the first savoury dish he cooked from start to finish as a child. Read more…

The news that Birmingham is Britain’s foodie capital (see our Facebook Fanpage) took me by surprise. Birmingham was always somewhere you drove through. Or – thanks to Spaghetti Junction – round. Birmingham was like Calais. Never somewhere you chose to stay. But now the council want to change that. They want Birmingham to become a destination – a boulevarding city with fine pastries. So they have pulled down the Bull Ring, filled in the subways down Corporation Street, and begun to regenerate their city centre. Just as everyone else was regenerating their out-of-town. The Rough Guide even listed Birmingham as one of the world’s most desirable places to live – 60th in fact, ahead of Rome, Milan, Barcelona and Hong Kong. And no-one is quite sure why. Cool Britannia was difficult enough to swallow. But Cool Birmingham?

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Yes, the Bible has a lot to say about life and death. But it also has a lot to say about bread. There’s transubstantiation – and the episode with the loaves and the fishes. Scholars of bread are still debating the time when Jesus changes Simon’s name to Pitta. And “You ask for a miraculous sign, but Naan will be given”. But one thing is certain – when God establishes his kingdom on earth, bread will play a big roll.

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Andy Bates was there at the very beginning of the Street Food Revolution. The launch was of the British Street Food Awards was held on Whitecross Street, the London market where Andy sold his custard tarts and black pudding scotch eggs, and I remember him sending Marco Pierre White and Antony Worrall Thompson home with enough samples to feed an army. But he has that special ‘something’. And a knack with pastry. Which explains why he still holds the Best Pie title at the British Street Food Awards, and he’s now a tv star on the Food Network. It’s well deserved.

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No-one walks in Los Angeles – apart from the hookers. It’s a city of cars, which is why I’ve been sitting in traffic for an hour. At least Sunset Boulevard has got curves, unlike the other east-to-west arteries which cross LA. And the curves throw out ever-changing views across California’s wide-open spaces. In America’s sunshine state, they say you can surf, ski, and see the sun set over the desert – all on a single tank of petrol. I want to see if they’re right. If I can ever get past the junction with La Brea.

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