New York Street Food

While street food is rapidly gaining in popularity across the USA, the pace has been much slower in the UK.

We were in London 5 months ago, and the street food scene was pretty small.  There were some decent street food stalls in the Portobello Road market and tons of international street food stalls at the Sunday Upmarket in Brick Lane, but not a whole lot more.

We did speak with the owners of Daddy Donkey, who were opening a 2nd location at Brick Lane the week after we left, but we couldn’t get over to their original location on Leather Lane.  That’s definitely on the agenda for our next London trip.

The Independent recently had a feature on the best food vans in Britain.  They included Daddy Donkey on the list, as well as The Meat Wagon (lovely name) and a few others.

Click through for the full list.  If you want to read the full article prefacing the list, click here.

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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

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]

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

Looks like banh mi, one of NYSF’s favorite street foods, is catching on in London.  According to Tim Walker in The Independent, “Like a lot of street trends, this one has been appropriated from the developing world, popularised by urbane New Yorkers, and is now finally reaching our shores.”

I’ve never been called an “urbane New Yorker” before, but I’ve certainly been called worse.

“For some time, the only place in London to serve this delicious south-east Asian snack was the Loong Kee Café on Kingsland Road in Shoreditch. But in the past few months a number of the capital’s establishments have added it to their menus: Viet Baguette in Fitzrovia; Banzi in Surrey Quays; Café Bay in Denmark Hill; and the Banhmi11 and Baguette+More stalls in Broadway Market and Greenwich respectively.”

I generally get to London around once a year, and have stayed on the edge of Shoreditch, so now I have a new place to try.

Here’s a little banh mi history from Mylo of the Mon Me stall in Brick Lane: “Bánh mì has its origins in the French occupation of Indochina from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century.  Like all countries in that part of the world, Vietnam’s staple dish is rice. But when the country was colonised by the French, it was introduced to bread and pâté. Vietnamese culture revolves around food, so they took that palate and added Vietnamese elements to it: pickles were common because it’s a poor country and uses a lot of food preservation processes; the Vietnamese also eat a lot of pork, which is the filling for the original bánh mì.” [The Independent]

Now that banh mi is put in it’s proper historical context, I STILL LOVE IT!.