Hard times give the UK a taste for street food

Freshly made flatbreads, filled with seafood and wild ingredients foraged from the Pembrokeshire shore, cooked on a hotplate right in front of you. It’s a far cry from a greasy burger van – and food of such quality that it won Jonathan Williams’ Cafe Mor the coveted title of Best of the Best at last year’s British Street Food Awards.

Thanks to the award, Williams will be setting up his “shack” inside the Olympic Village, with five more around the park – instead of 300 wraps a day, he’ll be selling close on 70,000.

Private investors are helping with the cost, plus expert mentoring from M&S. Not bad for a business that has only been up and running for a year.

Nominations for this year’s awards closed this weekend, and competition is certain to be fierce, with more than 2,000 entries vying for that top prize.

Booming scene

For despite the dodgy weather and a host of council regulations to get past, the British street food scene is booming.

With the cost of setting up a brick-and-mortar restaurant prohibitive for most young food entrepreneurs, the idea of a mobile food truck has allowed them to go into business for a fraction of the price: it can cost as little as £3,000 to fit out a basic van, ready to go on the road.

The revolution in street food has transformed the culinary options at music festivals, as well as turning lunch into a veritable trip around the world. Bored with your usual tuna salad bap? Try traditional Kolkata street food from the wonderfully named Everybody Lovelove Jhal Muri Express, or Austrian goulash from the Speck Mobile, sweet, sticky churros in chocolate sauce from the Churros Brothers, or traditional American-style hot dogs with a gourmet twist from Big Apple Dogs.

In fact street food is so popular there are now entire festivals devoted to it, like the one on London’s South Bank which ran over the Jubilee weekend, or the Food Truck Revolution which brought some of the country’s finest offerings to Bristol in May.

Quality offerings

Richard Johnson, who set up the British Street Food Awards, says its popularity is partly down to these straitened times, when people are trying to find good quality offerings, minus the high price tag: from hot dogs to haute dogs, if you like.

“People don’t have so much cash, but that doesn’t stop them from eating something that’s exciting,” he said.

“A great hot dog or a burger for a fiver can be as memorable as a fine dining meal that costs an arm and a leg.”

High demand

Fabio Diu, from the Real Food Festival, which organised the Jubilee weekend event, says there might be even more mobile food businesses out there, if some councils were easier to work with and permits easier to come by. “Outside special events and markets, it can be hard for vendors to find space to trade in,” he says.

Demand is so high, that some new markets are springing up on private property, where anyone already registered as a food business, with the right insurance, can set up and trade: one of the most successful is Eat St, behind London’s King’s Cross station, with an ever-changing roster of trucks.

Nick Friedman, who has been running his Spanish street food van, Jamon Jamon, for eight years, says it is just as well that it isn’t possible for any old trader to park on a random street corner and start selling food: “Everyone would hate us”, he said.

‘Forced out’

And he’s not keen, either, on the big restaurant chains that are suddenly jumping on the bandwagon and taking their wares on the road: “That could mean the small people who are doing beautiful food will get forced out,” he warned, “but hopefully it’s just a trend.”

At the moment, though, it is still an opportunity for creative chefs to get their food out on the road, building popularity through word of mouth or social media.

In New York, home of street food, sites like Twitter and Facebook mean devoted followers can track their favourite food truck and find out its location, in an instant.

Lunch hour exhibition

In fact this weekend New York’s public library is paying the ultimate accolade, with a new exhibition devoted to the history of the lunch hour.

The idea was first born in the city, it explains, because workers stuck in offices downtown didn’t have time to go home to eat in the middle of the day, and wanted to grab something quick before going back to work. New York simply reinvented lunch in its own image.

Along with a lovingly recreated oyster cart and an interview with the man who invented the stainless steel hot dog cart in the 1940s, a special space has been set aside in a plaza across the street, featuring a different food truck each day. Schedules, naturally, will be posted on Twitter.

On the hoof, on the cheap

There will always be room for the hot dog cart and Britain’s equivalent, the kebab van. But the desire to create fresh, seasonal food, on the hoof and on the cheap, has started to win over some rather more accomplished chefs.

Jun Tanaka and Mark Jankel, who have trained with the likes of Le Gavroche and The Square, now operate the Street Kitchen out of a glistening steel Airstream, selling the likes of slow roasted pork with crushed potatoes and salsa verde for just a few pounds.

There’s a genuine democracy about it: junior office workers mingle with top city earners in the same queue. All the food is locally sourced and expertly cooked, and as Jamon Jamon’s Nick Friedman says, “It’s enabled people stuck behind a desk to try something new, which has to be good”.

If the success of Cafe Mor, who’ll soon be supplying those Olympic athletes with their fresh, innovative flatbreads, is anything to go by, Britain’s booming street food business is much, much more than simply grabbing a hasty lunch.