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