New York Street Food

I haven’t been able to find any street food near where I’m staying in London (Kensington), but I did find a small Lebanese restaurant called Falamanki that would fit nicely into our Honorary Street Food category.  It only had about 6-8 tables and serves what I would call street food – falafel, shawarma and similar dishes.

Today’s Lunch is a lamb shawarma sandwich £3.75 ($6) from Falamanki at 221 Kensington High Street.  You can see from the stripes on the left that after the sandwich was made, it was put onto a sandwich press for a few minutes, which warmed the sandwich up and toasted the pita bread a little.

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With a couple of days free in London over the weekend, I wanted to check out what street food was available here.  In the research I’ve done, it seems that most of the street food in London is served at various markets around town, but it hasn’t really seeped into weekday lunchtime like in New York.

With that in mind, I hit Portobello Road today and expect to visit the Brick Lane Market on Sunday, which has more of an Indian and Asian feel to it.

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Tubby Isaacs Jellied Eels (since 1919)

When you think of London, street food is not the first thing that comes to mind.  Come to think of it, food in general is not what people generally associate with London.  However, there are some vendors worth searching out.

Simon Majumdar of the Guardian UK put together a video and list of the best street food vendors in London.  Although the first item on the list is jellied eels from Tubby Isaacs, there are also tastes more palatable to American palates such as Mexican street food from Luardo’s, the Brick Lane Sunday Market with Tibetan momos, Jamaican meat patties and banh mi (which we told you about back in January) and Exmouth Market with Thai food, Jewish deli, schnitzel and lamb kebabs.

There’s also old-fashioned London street food available – the aforementioned jellied eels and F. Cooke’s pie and mash, which has been prepared and sold pretty much the same way since 1867.

New York Street Food is heading to London in mid-October, and we hope to hit at least one or two of these places.  Place your bets now whether we try the jellied eels or not.

Click here to watch Simon Majumdar’s London street food video. [Guardian UK]

Banh mi at Mon Me stall in London's Brick Lane

A couple of months ago, we told you about Hot Dog University in Chicago, run by the Vienna Beef Company.  Did you know that more than 80,000 (gasp!) people have graduated from one of the Hamburger University campuses run by McDonald’s.  There are HU’s in the US, UK, Japan, Australia, Germany, Brazil, Hong Kong, and now China.

This news item reminded me of a funny story that happened to me in London a number of years ago.

It was one of my first business trips to London and I was staying at the Regents Park Hilton, a decent business hotel.  I was in London nearly 2 weeks and had to be there over the weekend, so on Friday night I went down to the hotel bar for a drink.  It was pretty quiet, and being in London, I ordered a Guinness on tap, which I figured would be better than Guinness in the US.

All of a sudden, 5 or 6 nicely dressed British couples came into the bar in a celebratory mood.  The guys were each holding something I couldn’t make out, and they all ordered bottles of Budweiser.  I commented how amusing it was that the American was drinking a Guinness and the Brits were drinking Budweiser.  They laughed, and I asked what they were celebrating.  They had just graduated from Hamburger U, and proudly showed me their diplomas.

Well, that explained the Budweiser.

Fish and chips celebrate their 150th anniversary this year.  It started as street food in the Dickensian era and continues to be a staple diet of the British working class.  It was also one of the few foods not rationed during the Second World War.

There are 10,500 fish and chip shops in Britain, and the industry is worth £1.2bn a year.  Some 229 million portions of fish and 227 million portions of chips are sold every year.

The actual date and year is in dispute, but who cares?  The anniversary is being celebrated in Britain this year, and it’s a good excuse to indulge in one of the great pleasures of life, fish and chips. [Huddersfield Examiner]