#streetfood

Love for the Single Dish Restaurant: Focus, Efficiency, and Insanely Delicious Food 

Location: Danang, Vietnam

While exploring the central coast of Vietnam, we ate our way through the small town of Danang and its surrounding area. This region of Vietnam is packed with our very favorite type of restaurant: the kind that only serves one dish. There’s focus here, whether it’s at a food cart selling bánh mì or a restaurant serving up bowl after bowl of pho, when a restaurant only offers one dish, they tend to do it right. We lingered at the cart that just shredded, chopped and served coconut meat, and encamped with the lady selling delicate “rose” dumplings from a mobile steamer. But our absolute favorites were spots for Hainan chicken and rice, a typical lunch, and a back-alley dining hall serving crispy banh xeo, made on what can only be described as a ring of fire.

The restaurants in Hoi An are jewel-box-sized and often painted in vibrant colors, amplified by the light from bare fluorescent bulbs. We are on a mission to lunch like locals, trying to move through the tourist crowd in this riverside town. We see a Vietnamese groom and his red satin bedecked bride duck into a turquoise room advertising “Cao Lau,” or “Hainan Chicken and Rice,” the dish we are after. Naturally, we follow suit. The place was simply called Cao Lau PHÚC, and the kitchen is indistinguishable from the dining room, which seems to flow into a bedroom just barely hidden from view. Sitting amid the large plastic bowls of the mise en place, the chef could hardly pick herbs fast enough to meet the demand—always a good sign.

This dish originally hails from the Hainan islands off the coast of China, brought to Singapore and Vietnam by immigrants. The recipes and variations multiplied with the diaspora, but the defining feature of Hainan chicken and rice remains the same: The chicken is poached, and its broth and rendered fat are used to cook the rice. Sometimes, the leftover stock from one batch is used to poach the next chicken, concentrating the flavor over and over again. The broth is served on the side, with a few aromatics tossed in. The chicken is cut-up, skin and all, tossed with sliced white onion and herbs, and served beside that flavorful rice. With a little pile of shredded green papaya on the side and a side of chile sauce, you’ve got a meal worthy of your wedding day.

From Hoi An we head to Danang to find the crispy rice crepe of a lifetime. The drive begins with charm and cobblestone streets, but soon the setting morphs into flashy casinos and nightclubs that seem as though they sprang from the ground overnight. Deeper into the heart of Danang, smaller, squirrely streets house some of the best food in the country. Tonight’s reward lies at the end of an alley crammed with stalls selling packaged beef and pork jerky shredded, flossed and in flat sheets—some sweet, some salty, some covered in a thick layer of chile, some made for snacking and others for adding to soups and salads. We stumble upon a sign that reads “Bánh Xèo Bà Dưỡng,” filled with families and tables of young people drinking beer, all eating the very same thing: banh xeo, a rice flour crepe, filled with seafood and bean sprouts.

At Bánh Xèo Bà Dưỡng, there is no menu. Claim a plastic stool at one of the stainless steel work tables throughout the stark bright space and food comes shuttling toward you, piled high on trays. First, a plate with some kind of beef and pork kabob, a mountain of herbs, shredded papaya salad. Dry, almost plasticy rice paper wrappers and a bowl of water follow suite. We take a queue from our neighbors and re-hydrate them one at a time to make our own delicate fresh rolls. The banh xeo comes next, crispy on the edges, yellow from just a dash of turmeric. It’s piping hot.

The open kitchen is in a tizzy, with slicing, dicing, plating and drama. A horseshoe-shaped stovetop encircles a crew of women, heads wrapped in bandanas, pouring batter into molded cast-iron banh xeo pans. Flames flare up every time they approach with a ladle full of rice batter speckled with seafood. It’s sensational and theatrical, and it’s hard to imagine the stamina required to do this all night long. The meal, paired with ice cold Vietnamese beer, is a generous balance of herbs and fresh veggies, charred meat and those decadent crepes. The kitchen hums in the background, and customers beam as they get exactly what they came for, making a communal activity out of crafting the perfect bite, over and over again. Sitting at industrial tables, there is an unspoken sense of camaraderie in knowing that everyone around you is eating the same exact meal. This is a restaurateurs dream, an operation that promises to deliver the very best version of their namesake dish, day after day, to a constant flow of happy, well fed customers (myself included).

El Guero: Chocolate Clams and a Flat Bed Full of Hot Sauce

Location: Ensenada, Mexico

Just down the street from La Guerrerense, is another fresh seafood cart that specializes in fresh ceviche and raw shellfish called El Guero. With fewer bells and whistles, and an emphasis on simple, straight forward seafood, you won’t find a bevy of homemade sauces here. Instead, there’s a pick up truck parked in front of the stand with a flatbed that doubles as a hot sauce trolley (I know, why didn’t we think of that?). 

You might be wondering whether or not it is wise to eat raw seafood from a street cart, and your hesitation is just. But, this is an exception. Just steps away from the All Saints Bay, the shellfish could not be any fresher. Look closely, and you’ll notice that pile of clams is squirming and very much alive. The little red feet of the chocolate clams peak out of their shells. These are served with nothing more than a generous dose of fresh lime juice. Feeling adventurous? Order a couple of blood clams. They are less briny than a littleneck clam, super rich and incredible to behold. 

El Pizon Uni Tostadas

Location: Ensenada, Mexico

Ensenada is not your typical beach town. It’s less postcard images of pristine beaches, and more urban coastline, with car repair shops, junkyards, mega supermarkets and a congested tourist center. Here, you can find all the leather Bud Light beer can holsters, Mexican jumping beans, sombreros and a slew of “American Pharmacies” selling viagra and valium over the counter. But if it’s street food you’re after, the city is a major port and the possibly the only place where I would eat raw seafood from a street cart for three meals a day. Even the cheapest tostada stand is shucking oysters, clams and fresh scallops to order, charging only a couple bucks for what we consider a rarified delicacy just North of the border.

The best example of this kind of briny indulgence can be found on the outskirts of town, on the corner of a dusty gas station at El Pizón. You can find the owner, Alan, setting up his cart sometime between 10am and noon on any given day, unloading his collection of hot sauces and cutting boards so worn down, they look like topographic maps of Mexico. He rolls his cooler full of fresh sea urchin from the flatbed right onto the street, and it’s game-on. Characters come out of the woodwork – it’s like Alan sent it tostada bat signal out into the universe, and the universe responded.   $10 miracle of freshly caught sea urchin seasoned with homemade pico de gallo, cilantro, lime juice and black pepper. This mish-mash is gently stirred to combine all the flavors, then served with tostadas and a side of ranchera music blasting from his impressive sound system. Once seated, Alan proffers up a magazine, frayed edges, the cover’s color faded from the sun to nearly a monochrome cyan, and proudly flips to his portrait, positioned amidst a story on the region’s best chefs.

Alan himself is no minor character in this dining experience; storytelling is part-and-parcel of ordering his proprietary uni platter. To serve uni this fresh, you have to have a hook-up. Once an uni diver himself, the business is a family tradition. The portion we scooped up onto our fresh corn tostadas that day was caught by his sister, who keeps that side of the family business afloat, collecting uni from Baja waters and delivering them to Alan every morning. Alan has traveled as far as Japan with his Uni, selling Mexican product at the famous Tsukiji market. But these days, he stays close to home, receiving a steady trickle of loyal guests and the occasional tourist, looking for the best deal in town: a plate of the most coveted product of the sea, served in the most casual way, “blessed” with a few drops of olive oil.

Restaurante Laja and Roadside Carnitas 

Location: Baja, Mexico

I didn’t realize it at the time, but my first hour in Baja would come to represent much of my unfolding trip. I drove across the border at Tijuana, and within an hour, I had arrived at the pin on my map where Bichi vineyards were purported to be, but alas, there was no sign of an entrance. Of course, cell service had long since vanished. Massive trucks zoomed by, making every U-turn more unnerving than the last. Just as I was contemplating crossing back into California with my tail between my legs, Noel, the co-owner of the winery, came flying in to show me down the camouflaged road. “Was it so difficult to find?” he asked. When I looked at him incredulously, he replied, “Good.” In this part of Mexico, the best things are hidden in plain sight.

I arrived at Bichi, Baja’s only natural winery, in the midst of a vineyard staff Christmas party. I was meeting up with my friend, chef and mezcal producer Niki Nakazawa, who had just finished touring the country’s best palanqués (mezcal facilities) with the team from Noma Mexico. I found her seated at a long table at the base of the vines, surrounded by the families who make this operation tick. They were drinking the funkiest organic wines and reheating Domino’s pizza over a wood-burning stove. Isn’t this exactly the way beautiful wine should be consumed? The bottles Noel was pouring were made in collaboration with his mother and brother, chef Jair Téllez, who was off in Mexico City running his award-winning restaurant, MeroToro.

Bichi has been enjoying a moment of recognition, as the U.S. consumer warms up to the more complex, unpredictable palate of naturally produced wines. While American wine lovers are just getting hip to the idea that there is indeed a vibrant wine region south of the border, for the Téllez family, Ensenada has always been the gustatory capital of the world. They were born and raised here, and this is where Jair made his mark in the restaurant industry with Laja, Mexico’s first farm-to-table restaurant, located just an hour south of the winery. That would be our next stop.

Housed in a stand-alone Spanish-style hacienda, the restaurant is surrounded by sprawling organic gardens that provide 100 percent of the produce for the kitchen. There is nothing of this sort for many miles, so anyone who has eaten here has made the journey for that reason alone. After spending the day with Laja’s chef Rafa Magaña and his brother Maro Magaña, the restaurant’s organic gardener, I got the sense that this remove was, again, very intentional. For the people who work here, this is a way of life, a family and a mission, rather than a means to food-world stardom or notoriety.

I wanted to taste their famous food and visit the grounds where they grow nearly every ingredient we ate that day. What I didn’t expect was the marathon of cookery and culinary backflips that ensued. First, we picked the veggies with Maro under misty skies — monster parsnips, beets and bushels of salad greens that were even more vibrant against the gray of the day.

Back in the kitchen, Rafa was already scheming, enlisting his full staff to create a rolling meal for two. I watched closely and tried to take notes as he diced parsnip and browned it, picked herbs and gingerly prepared the most tender baby vegetables. I was ready to eat standing up in the kitchen, but Rafa wanted us to have the full experience and sent us into the dining room. When the waiter arrived, those parsnips had been transformed into a silky parsnip purée, spread over a crunchy seaweed based tostada, topped with a quick stir fry of fresh, thinly cut veggies. I would have happily made that my meal, but this was only the first course.

Having devoured the most delicious tostada of my entire life (and I have eaten a lot of tostadas), I expected Rafa to pack up. I was very, very wrong — we were in it for the long haul. There was a salad of baby lettuces and butter-poached Japanese turnips. There was fish caught that morning, perfectly seared, served with the simplest presentation of charred garden vegetables. My personal favorite, a dish I still think about regularly, was poached eggplant in tomato jus, topped with fennel fronds and microgreens.

Hours (and countless glasses of wine) later, Rafa finally hung up his apron and joined us. When he first showed up at Laja looking for a job, he was just a kid looking for menial job to pay the bills. Back then, Jair was the chef de cuisine. While Rafa is quick to attribute everything he knows to Jair, he clearly has an intuition all his own. He rose from kitchen assistant to sous chef, and eventually chef de cuisine when Jair went on to Mexico City to open his next enterprise. There were no recipes involved in Rafa’s culinary education because he never learned to read or write. Instead, he learned by trusting his senses — watching, tasting and smelling. We were witness to his laser beam focus. There was no script required.

When it all seemed to be coming to an end, Maro must have seen our faces drop. He was quick to up the ante with the next adventure. “Te quiero carnitas?” he asked. Clearly a rhetorical question, he handed us a piece of scrap paper with a handwritten map and an X at the anonymous intersection where we were to meet him at 2 a.m. We were going to see the other side of the family business, a roadside carnitas stand passed down to Maro from his father who had perfected the art for 12 years before him. Fine dining might be relatively new to the Magaña family, but Maro tells me, “My father taught us how to make birría, carnitas, barbacoa, consume, menudo — traditional Mexican food. Food that people like.”

Track corn
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#streetcorn #subway #tracks #streetfood #82ndstreet #alfresco (at New York, New York)
https://www.instagram.com/p/BwkuKcbjq6u/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1mq5089m72eo5

Nasi bebek sambal pedas khas Madura. Ada di Kebayoran Lama arah Ciledug.

Tampilannya sih sederhana banget, tapi rasanya orgasmik banget. Sambelnya yang oily itu yang bikin rasanya jadi amoral.

#streetfood #ciledug #indonesianfood

southkoreanfood:

PIZZA CONES at KONO PIZZA, South Korea:[Credit]

southkoreanfood

FOOD SERIES: part4, Pinoy Street Foods

My favorite street food vendor

#streetfood #Užhorod (v místě Uzhhorod, Ukraine)
https://www.instagram.com/p/CT9iwg0s1kr/?utm_medium=tumblr

#streetfood #Užhorod #Zakarpatí #Ukrajina
(v místě Uzhhorod, Ukraine)
https://www.instagram.com/p/CP2U54QrYlb/?utm_medium=tumblr

Dumpling twins #jinan #dumplings #streetfood #chinalife
https://www.instagram.com/p/BvnaXXZlgY7/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=vy0cfvx4i2qp

I had a great time illustrating a Rosie Birkett food feature in July’s issue of EasyJet Traveller magazine. The article was all about the trend of exciting Asian restaurants popping up over London, from street food to sit in’s, Londoners are very happy to queue for taste of something new and unusual. 

http://www.hannahwarren.com

炸醬乾麵好食 (圖文不符之拎北就是忘了拍啊)

@大貓扁食麵

#taiwan #Ilan #taiwanesefood #chinesefood #streetfood #localfood #yummy #tasty #delicious #lunch #noodles #soup

人滿為患 但還真的好吃欸

#delicious #yummy #streetfood #taiwan #tainan #chinesefood #taiwanesefood #localfood #chicken #yam #sweetpotato #tasty （在 葉麥克炸雞）

章魚鵪鶉蛋 倒真的沒吃過

#food #taiwanesefood #chinesefood #taco #eggs #taiwan #streetfood #seafood #yummy #tasty #delicious （在 大溪漁港）