If it’s one thing Canada is lacking when it comes to the food scene, it’s a healthy street food industry. When it comes to street food, we seem to specialize in hot dog carts and fry trucks.
Of course, we live in an incredibly regulated society that makes it difficult for anyone to offer food on the street without jumping through so many hoops that make it next to impossible to actually make a decent living.
At least Tamarind and Rubina Tandoori are giving us a bit of a chance to try the street food of India, even if it’s within the food-safe confines of the restaurants.
What is your best, or worst, experience with street food? It can be from anywhere around the world, or maybe you did have something great in Canada…and food offered on the beach counts.
I think my favourite street food was the grilled swordfish skewers I gobbled down from vendors walking up and down the beaches of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. What about you? 
Was it the takoyaki (fried balls of battered octopus) on the streets of Tokyo?
To leave your entry, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on Comments. I’ll choose one winner at random next Monday night, who will win a gift certificate for two at Tamarind. Good luck!
Dear Don,
I have always been game to try street food whereever I have traveled, and like you I go to a busy vandor and watch it being cooked. The most adventurous taste experience I have had, and I have to say I broke the rule about watching it being cooked, was right here in Vancouver.
My husband and I were just married and decided to go to Wreck Beach for an adventure. Never having been there before, we didn’t realize that there would be vendors, and so brought our own food. We also decided that buying food from a naked person wasn’t for us, even had we not brought our own lunch. As the day wore on we went to get our sandwiches and realized that the ice had soaked them…as our hunger increased those naked vendors started to look pretty respectable! We buried our worries in the sand both enjoyed a fine but unremarkable burger…and then met the the triffle man. He walked the beach (naked but for the jewelry)carrying a tray of ice with the most beautifully presented little clear plastic bowls of homemade triffle. They were icy cold, made with fresh cream and absolutley the perfect treat for a hot day at the beach!
I have a wonderful memory of having roasted chesnuts at the Burnaby Village Heritage site. It was pre-Christmas and the Village was decorated for the season. Good times.
Dear Don,
My partner and I travel whenever we can. We always hit up the street vendors whether its in Bangkok, Penang or Oaxaca. It’s disappointing that here we are so uptight about street food vendors. I have never been sick. Just need to follow the basic rule of watching it being made. I am also reluctant to eat the deep fried items as the oil could be rancid. Apart from that, anything goes.
One of my first taste experiences was in Seoul, Korea where we found ourselves at a baseball game. The vendors were toasting silkworms like peanuts. A little bit of salt and??? Well, I did try one but it was a bit of a psychological challenge finishing them off. Next was the fried grasshoppers in Oaxaca. Crunchy is about all I can come up with to describe the experience. Best street food would be the banana and pineapple empanadas in Puerto Angel and late night eating after the bars on Silom Road in Bangkok.
happy grazing,
Esther
35 years ago, after wandering through parts of Europe, I made my way to Israel and, at the time of this event, found myself in the city of Tiberias. I had been on the road for several months and was yearning for a hamburger but I had to settle for a falafel from a roadside vendor. It was my first ever. I knew it was vegetarian but it looked like hamburger and came in a bun. It was better than any hamburger I had ever had. Regrettably, since then I have not found a falafel that came close to that first one but maybe that is because my memory keeps it that way.
On returning to live in England after 4 years in Canada, my husband and I were craving a good hamburger. As we left a cinema (movie theatre) one evening we saw a street vendor advertising ‘hamburgers’and couldn’t resist. Generally we have found these food vans to have good food. Not this one however!! What we bit into was cold Spam slapped into a cold bun. Nothing like the hamburger we remembered.Reminded us very much of the Monty Python skit for “Spam and more Spam” and kept us laughing all the way home.
Some years ago my wife and I were making the hot and dusty trek up the Acropolis in Athens after a day of sightseeing in that historic city. By the side of the path there was a vendor selling roasted corn on the cob. It smelled enticing and we were hungry. The food, however, didn’t live up to the aroma. The corn was dry, mealy, and almost entirely without flavour. Right after we had bought it we came upon a fascinating display of Greek folk dancing in the open air. Now my memory of that lovely day has a wonderful mixture of the beauty of a Greek sunset, the sinuous movements of the dancers, and the tepid tastelessness of the corn we munched on. Tender and succulent ears of corn wouldn’t have been half so memorable or amusing.
It has been my experience that taste and smell are inextricably linked to travel and memory. My own recollection of the many trips my family has taken to Malaysia over the years is tied strongly to its exotic culinary landscape, at once both familiar and foreign to my hyphenated Canadian Palette (Chinese-Malaysian-Canadian).
What springs immediately to mind are the hawkers stalls with crisp, golden Pisang Goreng (deep-fried banana), pulled straight out of the hot oil and onto newspaper to drain – cool, freshly pressed sugarcane juice to soothe in 35+ degree weather – steaming Char-Kueyteow cooked over gas stove while you wait…
You know it’s *that* good when the locals are perfectly willing drive across town to find the best hawker specializing in a certain food – I particularly remember being driven through the suburbs of Petaling Jaya in vain trying to track down the best pisang goreng stall that my uncle knew of, only to discover that the fellow had moved his cart to a new location!
And the “ambiance,” as another uncle there describes it, is sitting at a battered plywood table over an open drain, in front of plastic bowls, tin forks in hand, eating flavourful mee goreng (fried noodles), while you fend off flies with your other free hand. This is authenticity; the echo of which I am chasing after whenever I wander around the Richmond Night Market, trying to recreate that experience. Nostalgia, it would seem, is the strongest flavour in travel, memory and taste!
Favourite street food:
While living in Jakarta in high school, Nasi goreng with a fried egg on top, in busy street markets, late, on hot, humid nights, with a Beer Bintang. Stall would be built above open sewer, buses belching black diesel fumes just feet away, incredible parade of humanity going by.
Ahhh.. Street food. The wonder of travel.
The best street food I have ever tasted was from a Poutine truck parked outside of a bar, late, or rather early one cold winter morning. Rarely has a stolen treat tasted so good and been so appreciated. But, on the wild side nothing compares to the delicacies of the street in Southeast Asia where cooking on the street is the norm, nor the exception: cockroaches and various bugs fried to crispiness in Thailand; baby chicks on a skewer in Indonesia; and rats tail sauted with hotsauce in Vietnam. I doubt that I would order these items on a menu, but the experience is unbelievable and its one of the great things about seeing and tasting how others live.
Last year my girlfriend and myself backpacked around South America for just over 5 months and saw lots of street food but didn’t eat too much of it as we didn’t want to get sick. There were a few things that we couldn’t resist, such as the shrimp guy on the beach at Arraial da Ajuda, http://gallery.antiflux.org/Porto_Seguro/IMG_0057 . They deep fry the shrimp so much that you eat them with the shells on.
In El Bolson Argentina we had some very tasty waffles with fresh local jam, http://gallery.antiflux.org/album475/IMG_0008 .
One thing that I had to try was Ceviche but I knew of quite a few people that got sick from eating it so I was pretty cautious. It seemed that the restaurants and vendors in Peru would just leave their Ceviche out in the sun which was disconcerting. Someone told me that for this reason it is best to have Ceviche before 11am to ensure that it is somewhat fresh. I had Ceviche mixto, http://gallery.antiflux.org/album582/IMG_0002 , at around 11:30 am before a bus ride in an establishment that wasn’t quite a street vendor but not quite a restaurant either; a hole in the wall is probably the best description. It was delicious and even though it was after 11am and I didn’t know half of what I was eating I didn’t get sick.
My wife and I spent six months in Mauritius in 1990, and food was certainly a big part of that wonderful cultural experience. We regularly enjoyed a lunch of piping hot dalpuri roti (flatbread stuffed with ground split peas, garlic and cumin) with an assortment of vegetarian curries and chutneys, purchased from the same street vendor in front of the Quatre-Bornes market. This would be followed by a slice of fresh, juicy, sweet pineapple, with the customary chili sauce if we were feeling adventurous. For the equivalent of less than $1 Canadian, we were both able to have some of the best eat-out food ever.
I, like many people have never been too keen on buying food from street vendors due to health safety reasons. Once you’ve taken a FoodSafe course, it gets even worse. However in my young and carefree days, I was in Europe and had heard about Belgian frites and wanted to try them. Admittedly it’s not the most adventurous food sampling. We were in Bruges, Belgium and I had a chance to buy some from a street vendor by one of the many churches. They were incredible-a cone of french fries with a rich mayonnaise-type dressing.I have never tasted any better since. I’d love to win your contest and have a chance to taste Indian street food as I love the flavours from that part of the world.
By far the most bizzare and amusing experience I’ve had with street food is in Yanji, China where the temperature can drop to below forty in the winter. Although it was bitterly cold, there was this one alley lined with street vendors selling packaged popsicles and icecream on their stands. Of course, no freezer or icebox was required.
Not that strange, but when I was much younger, eating a cheese-filled sausage on a toasted bun in Vienna. The great scenery, the sausage stands everywhere. Cheese-steak hot dogs could never compare.
I always love trying the street food in mexico. The most memorable would be tacos from a vender late one night in oaxaca. I was very hungry and they smelled so good but i was a bit concerned with the item of meat on the cutting board. It was a very large and rather sad looking pig’s head… But I had ordered and it did smell good, and it realy was delicious ….
Several years ago while in Urumqi, China, we went in search of the Night Market. We didn’t find the market because we were side-tracked. In a street close to our hotel, we saw a crowd of people. Being curious (sounds so much better than nosy!) we walked over to see what was happening. As we approached a smell very close to popcorn reach us. What it was, though, was rice being puffed. A fellow had a cast iron, pressurized cooker that turned on a spit. Mounted by the handle was a pressure gauge. When it reached the magic number, the unit was directed towards a sack; he released the pressure and the contents exploded into the sack. For a few yuan, he would pop rice, beans, or whatever was brought from home – the entertainment was free. My friend and I were looked at curiously; I’m 5’10” and he was 6’2″. This area of China was just being openned to outsiders. We were as intrigued by the process as the crowd was in us. Eventually, a lady urged her little boy forward to offer us some freshly puffed rice. He came over shyly and, very carefully, gave my friend and me one grain of lightly sugared puffed rice which had a slight carmel taste. His mother admonished him and he gave us a bit more of the tender morsels. When the crowd saw we enjoyed it, we were treated to other tastes. This is one of my favourite memories of the trip – sharing a simple treat with people who seemed delighted that we were taking as much pleasure in the interchange as we were.