The Wisdom of Street Food, May 2, 2006 — Convenience has always been a selling point for food the world over. People don't always have time to get ingredients and cook, or go somewhere they can cook. (I'll also add just to annoy everyone that not everyone is a good cook either.) So food that is readily available when and where people need it is undeniably a product with a large demand.

In the United States the bulk of this need is currently filled by "fast" food. Convenience is king. Convenient restaurants that are the same wherever you go. They're also in such number that often you can't go anywhere without passing one of them. The stiff competition between the fast food restaurants has resulted in most optimizing their offerings with the huge amounts of fat, sugar, and salt that represent the weapons in this ever escalating global arms race. Much better and more informed writers than I have written extensively on the sickness this country is going through when it comes to eating and over-eating as well as the role fast food chains play in this vicious circle. And while I won't paint the results of globalization as either all good or all bad, this aspect of American culture is being exported at a rapid pace to almost every corner of the planet.

But before the fast food hegemony is complete (and there is some fast  food that I quite enjoy), there is another form of convenient food that doesn't optimize around cartoon characters and obesity - street food. It's found in many countries in the world, and it has a lot to offer - both in terms of the pleasure of eating it as well as the lessons that full service restaurants can learn from this deceptively simple approach to serving food.

Anyone who's traveled reasonably extensively on this planet has likely been exposed to some street food. In the most elaborate case this is a cart on the sidewalk outside Shinjuku station in Tokyo serving big bowls of soup and noodles made on the spot to people sitting on stools at a built-in bar in the cart slurping happily under a canopy. In the simplest case this is the Arab merchant selling huge freshly baked rings of sesame covered pretzelish bread  (called "Baygeleh") off a wooden rod outside Damascus gate in Jerusalem's old city. Both cases I assure you are absolutely yummy. The soup fresh, hot, simple, bubbling, and available at all hours. The sesame bread ring super clean sesame flavored, fresh, warm, and also - delicious. Both are also super inexpensive.

The beauty of street food is that the constraints of the venue are in fact the things that lead to the quality of the culinary experience. In a future post I'll talk more about how important constraints are to highlight creativity, but for  now let's examine which limitations make street food often delectable.

The first of course is space. Sometimes it's a cart with seating. Sometimes just a cart. And sometimes just someone carrying their entire inventory. In most cases whatever facilities exist for storing, preparing, and serving the food have to be packed up each night and carted home - sometimes miles away. As much of a limitation as space can be for these vendors, it also forces some tradeoffs that ultimately result in good food. If you have no space in which to store food for more than a few hours then you need to stock your mini-restaurant each day with fresh ingredients.

Space also limits not just how much food a vendor has in reserve but it limits how many different dishes a vendor can offer. While some squeeze a surprising amount of variety into a tiny cart, often you can find street stalls that specialize in one item alone. And even if they have multiple items they are often all of a certain genre - like five varieties of freshly grilled meat on sticks. Having only a couple of dishes to prepare means that the proprietor can really focus all their energy on making those items great. It's sad how often people compensate for lack of quality with an overly complicated number of offerings. I suppose they think diversity is a sign of depth. Often it can just be random. I'd rather have the focus be singular on making me one great dish. When there are a number of street vendors in close proximity they can provide the diversity in numbers that one vendor can't do in his or her own.

The next constraint is the lack of marketing. Street food vendors don't have ads. Often they don't have names for their small enterprises. They rely exclusively on street traffic. But no sign can be as effective as something that smells really good. A yummy smell can literally stop someone in their tracks and even get them to come and by something when they thought they weren't hungry. This can be tough because food that  smells good from a distance is pretty much always hot. It's not that a huge cup of icy lemonade with beads of water slowly traveling down its sides isn't great on a hot summer day. It is. But hot food really can attract customers. And when it's on an open grill the aroma really travels. The visual is pretty good too. Heating food in such a small space can be a challenge. For the sesame ring vendor it meant constant trips back and forth to a nearby bakery. Either way, the look and smell of the food is pretty much make or break for the street vendor. It's got to look and smell great.

Simplicity, focus, freshness. Looking and tasting great. These are simple lessons all laid out before us in street food the world over. And yet, it's surprising how many chefs use all their abundance of space, storage, and shelter to deliver  food that's, well, much worse. I suppose it's now come full circle. High end parties in Bangkok bring some of the most famous street food vendors together (stalls and all) in rented hotel ballrooms to "cater" for the guests. Jean-Georges Vongerichten opened Spice Market in New York City which specializes in pan-Asian street food in a highly designed restaurant setting. I think a good litmus test for any chef is whether every single one of their dishes stands up to the freshness, flavorfulness, and simplicity of street food. And if it doesn't, odds are, it's not good.