Food Feature - Street Food

Smoked meats and spicy sauces fill Little Blue Smokehouse's buns

The gardens are filled with sizzling, chatting, polystyrene boxes, plumes of steam and sticky fingers – it can only be another busy day of street food trading, the culinary phenomenon sweeping the UK. But what makes street food so popular?

To find out, I visited Street Diner, Brighton’s first street food market and a great example of street food’s popularity. It celebrates its second birthday this May and is going from strength to strength with plans to expand into Hove.

Co-founders Christina Angus and Kate O’Sullivan say: “Brighton needed a street food market. There wasn’t one in the city and we couldn’t work out why. We wanted to create a market that could be a vibrant public platform for new and seasoned street food traders.”

Great pans of yellow wonder from Crocus Paella

Perhaps this is part of street food’s appeal, the vibrancy. There is a great energy around the market, informal and buzzing with cooking. It is a pleasant change from the slightly sterile restaurant experience. Here, the table is your hands, the waiter cooks your food in front of you and serves it straight away and there is no dance around “gratuities” – a smile and a thank you are enough.

There is also an accessible feel to street food. There is no need to book a table and one can rely on being fed whenever the market is open, which is often. Street Diner trades all year round, setting up every Friday from 11am-3pm in Brighthelm Gardens, just behind Brighthelm Church and Community Centre.

Angus and O’Sullivan add: “We trade at all types of major events. Brighton Marathon for the past two years with a view to continuing.”

They say: “We are about to work with the Brighton Fringe Festival for a month long residency at The Warren outside St Peter's Church.”

Who said vegetables were boring?

The stalls themselves cover a vast range of food types. This adds an element of the unexpected when compared to restaurant menus, which specialise in specific cuisines. If I go into a Chinese restaurant, I know what will be served. Chinese food…or at least a European approximation of it. Still worse from this perspective is the fish and chip shop. But street food offers the diner a whole world in a field and the chance of adventure, the chance to taste something new and unexpected.

At Street Diner, meat-lovers can revel in the experience offered by Troll’s Pantry’s burgers and Little Blue Smokehouse’s meat-filled buns. Vegetarians and vegans are catered for by such stalls as the Indian vegetarian Ahimsa, Beelzebab’s vegan kebab and Sultans Delight’s Middle Eastern food. Those looking for something sweet can buzz off to Honeycomb Cakes while those in search of exotic flavour shores can explore a range of world cuisines including food from Spain, India, Portugal, Mexico, Hungary and the Middle East. Maria Romero of Tostón Tolón sells the exotic-sounding arepas , cornmeal patties from her Venezuelan homeland.

She says: “We open them and stuff them with either veal, pork or chicken and people can add cheese, beans and plantain.”

Looks like lunch has just been sorted for someone

Another difference between street food and many restaurants is that many of the stalls make a point of the locality and ethics of their food. Perhaps I am the only one but, if I order a steak, I often wonder what kind of life the animal has had. Certainly, it makes me think twice about ordering the chicken. Yet, with street food there is an easy rapport with the stall holders. They will answer questions and quite often there seems to be a deep caring for the quality and locality of their products.

Martyn Cotton of Little Blue Smokehouse, winner of the People's Choice award at the British Street Food Awards 2014, says: “We go out of our way to source as much local produce, as much seasonal produce, as possible.”

He says: “We make all our own sauces, we make all our own pickles. All our meat is sourced from farms within Sussex.”

Paul Clark, aka “The Troll”, of Troll’s Pantry does much the same, even foraging for some of his ingredients such as the wild garlic and sorrel which go into his woodland burgers.

He says: “We just try and, basically, make everything from scratch and create something that’s truly unique and different to all the other burger offerings out there.”

Life is sweet when there is cake about

As well as being local, many stress the ethical side of their produce. Rebecca Letchford of Honeycomb Cakes focuses on the purity of her ingredients. This includes using her mother’s fruit and vegetables to make her cakes. She also uses the jams her mother makes using the same home-grown produce.

She says: “It’s about making something that tastes as it should. So if it’s meant to be a strawberry cake, it tastes like a strawberry cake, not chemicals and a strawberry cake.”

Forgotten Cuts tackles a different side of ethical eating.

Ellie Ledden, who runs the stall, says: “It’s kind of nose to tail philosophy and a waste free ethos.”

The idea started when Ledden and a farmer she was working with at the time decided to open a street food stall.

Ledden says: “Originally we were going to do a steak sandwich and then we just thought that felt ethically very wrong.

“So I said to him what do you have left over at the end of the week?”

The meat she sells includes both farmed and wild animals and the selection is always open to change in keeping with Forgotten Cuts’s ethics. They started by selling a lot of ox cheek but, when it started to become trendy, they stopped.

Who is for Mexican?

Of course, sometimes a high-end restaurant is just what you want. You want to go in, relax, get treated like a king (at least that’s the idea) and eat a dependable meal in a civilised fashion. Likewise the takeaway. Sometimes your body, tired and stressed after a hard day’s work, seeks solace in familiar comfort food. Certainly, there seems to be no great drop in restaurant numbers or the flow of people tucking into fish and chips.

Yet, judging by Street Diner, street food offers something fresh, something exciting, something vibrant. Who can say no to a whole world of food, cooked in front of you and served so convivially you can talk to the cook about their passionately held culinary ethics? Perhaps this is the secret. In a world ever more conscious of what it is eating and what flavours are out there to be experienced, street food offers a culinary adventure and a new bond of trust between the seller and the diner.

Customers sitting upon the grass, enjoying a hot lunch on a hot afternoon