Riverside Grazing at Strada

When we first came to London we used to eat in a few different Strada restaurants quite a bit, well we were new to the big smoke from a small old market town.

I did become a little addicted to their pizza’s over time, as they reminded me slightly of the ones in Argentina and it was really all I ate off their menu.

L is for Lebanon @ Yalla Yalla

Somehow we’ve managed to get to L with completely stopping, well we had some breaks but part and parcel of the course really. We are in this for the long haul, so upward and onward.

There really was no competition really with the letter L. It was Lebanese or bust. It was the obvious choice really.

Street Food with Pizza Pilgrims

So many times I had wanted to try the pizzas from Pizza Pilgrims, but somehow I was always drawn to those delicious baguettes of Banh Mi 11.

But this time I was determined to give them a go, so walking past my favourite stall, I somehow pushed myself further on down Berwick market past those wonderful looking banh mi. Somehow.

Foto Friday # 94

A hot dog vendor selling his all beef sausages on the streets of New York

China Videos - Part Four - How to make Mapo Tofu in less than 2 minutes

We were only in Kaili for one night, before heading up to Xijiang. Thankfully right next to our rubbish hotel was one of the best night food markets we have ever eaten at.
We ended up eating at this place, amongst others, just because of how great the Mapo Tofu looked.
I think I missed about 10 or 15 seconds of actually cooking, but it was a pretty good dish for being cooked in less than 2 minutes.
Now who said this isn't fast food.

Big Apple Hot Dogs @ Chatsworth Road Market

By the time the wife and I remembered to take a picture of the finished article they were both well and truly polished off.
Most Sundays Big Apple can be found at Chatsworth Road Market in E5, and of course his normal spot on Old Street during the week, which I cannot get to during my lunch break from Ealing. 
The sausages were really good, so full of taste and flavour that knock most franks out for 10. The rolls were too dense and filling, well that was my excuse for doing two, although just having a sausage would have been just as good. 
I just wish Big Apple would set up his stall outside my work, as i know several greedy buggers in Ealing who would also devour these on a daily basis. 
Hail to a proper hot dog.

Foto Friday # 61

The ultimate in street food. Cuy is the Ecuadorian national dish and is eaten by everyone from rich to poor.
It is mainly an indigenous dish as they do not take up much room in the house as they are being fattened up.

The Lucky Chip Burger Van

I am hoping we are on the verge of a revolution here in London. Food vans. Street food has come along with leaps and bounds in the last few years, but over the last 12 months it has jumped years into the future.

Going are the days of the cheap doner kebab vans, greasy bacon butties and bad and burnt burgers. Sad to say they are still around, just head out to any festival and you will see them, but a new breed of heroes are coming forward and showing us how it can be and should be done.

Even with all these new and exciting people selling their delights, we are still light years behind LA and New York. I read recently that no new street food licences are being issued in New York, and people are auctioning theirs for up to $70,000. Madness. But they have this tradition of food vans that we do not. Yet.

The newest guys on this rollercoaster ride of street food heaven here in London, are the Lucky Chip. This van is run by 2 friendly, cheery guys who serve up some of the best burgers I’ve tasted in a long while.

They say they use Ginger Pig meat in their burgers, but I overheard them saying the meat they were now using was holding together a lot better. So not sure if it’s from Ginger Pig now or not. But who cares, as it is bloody good.

After gazing at their short but sweet menu for an age, we both decided on the Sheen burger, a juicy fat patty with beer soaked onions, Philadelphia cheese, apple wood smoked bacon, cheddar and a lush garlic aioli. It was a monster of a burger, but oh so easily was it to eat.

The meat was well seasoned, cooked to a juicy perfection. The sweet onions mixed with the bacon and cheeses made a good change from my normal cheeseburger ordering.

Even though it was a big boy burger, there was a perfect ratio of meat to bread, unlike a few pubs in Stokie where there is so much meat the bread disappears in your hands.

The hand cut chips with a scattering of grated cheese were a true delight, which really sent me back to the Shake Shack in NYC.

I’ve not tried the Meat Wagon, so I cannot compare, but the thought of queuing up for 2 hours for anything is something I will not do. Even with a drink or two in hand.

The Lucky Chip burgers however, have been the best burgers I’ve had outside of New York, they were that good. But we are going to the next Burger Monday so we shall see.

However as these burgers were cooked in a food van in a small market in East London gives me joy for the future of street food here in London. Something that I hope to join in with something in the future. We’ll see.

Foto Friday # 58

I love street food, but sometimes it can really damage you.
This is some typical street food from Ecuador. It's called Chugchucara. No idea what it means, but the wife suffered for a couple of weeks because of it.

Food on the Street with the Pitt Cue Co.

I am a great lover of Bar-B-Q. Anything to do with meat cooked over burning embers sends me into such highs that I start dribbling. Literally.

To feed this addiction I am forced to cook bar-b-q style foods in my own oven at home, as I do not have a garden and therefore no bar-b-q.

It’s the one thing we want in London. A house with a garden or even a balcony. We had a front porch once and I used to cook bar-b on a small portable cue there. Heaven bloody heaven it was. Ahh how I miss those days in Brentford. It’s about all I miss.

Anyhows I’d heard about the Pitt Cue Co. on the South Bank a few months ago and have been meaning to get my sorry arse down there to check it out, but with work and generally being a lazy shit recently I haven’t managed it. Gotta change that.

My last adventure with street bar-b-q was at the recent Street Food Fest on the South Bank. A video of this day will be released too much pomp and ceremony soon. The bar-b-q I had to be honest was pretty poor. The sauce lacked any real flavour and it looked like the guys woke up that morning and said what shall we do today. I know we’ll do some bar-b-q. It was very lame.

Bodean’s are the big bar-b-q player in London, but with their major expansions (4 branches to date) has left this small chain spiralling downhill, as corners seem to be cut on quality to make up for quantity. Although their smoked hickory and hot chipotle sauces are pretty damn good.

As the Victoria Line was down this weekend, yet again, and the thought of getting on the bus replacement service out of Victoria was just too much to contemplate.

So off I trotted to the South Bank to finally sample this supposed bar-b-q truck heaven. The truck is silver and I want one. I really do. I think this is what I want to do, buy a truck, do it up and sell cheap heart warming comfort food to hungry eaters. What kind of food do you ask. Well it would have to contain every cheap cut of meat known to man. My favourite.

But enough of my dreams, back to the review. I never actually read the menu I just saw on the blackboard pulled pork and I was hooked. The pulled pork comes with either bar-b beans or coleslaw, bread and some pickles. I chose the beans of course. Silly question. And of course there has to be beer as well. Well bar-b-q with out beer is a sin in my books.

It comes in a nice little box and a piece of toasted bread to mop up the juices. I parked my arse down on one of the yellow stalls and tucked in as they say.

To be honest it was underwhelming. I was expecting a whole lot more than with what I got. I was expecting some wonderful smoky taste to dazzle me, instead all I got was a good but average bar-b-q that I reckon had not been smoked at all. Maybe oven cooked with spices.

The pulled pork was juicy and tender, but it lacked any real flavour at all. It was really rather bland. Disappointing. Those pickles however were awesome, they were really bloody good. I need to know where they get them from. Awesome. The bar-b-q sauce was thick and unxious, but the small black beans were slightly undercooked. They were a little too al dente for my liking. It’s just a shame that the star of the show was just so dull, and at £11 for the pulled pork and a beer, it is not cheap street food at all.

But with what London can offer at the moment with bar-b-q it is the best of a disappointing bunch. As I mentioned before it was much better than the bar-b-q truck at the recent street food fest, and the over sweetened bar-b-q ribs around Brick Lane every Sunday.  But not as good as Bodean’s in its hey day, although that place is becoming more miss than hit recently.

But with my slight obsession with bar-b-q no doubt I’ll be back. Hopefully it was a one off. Please let it be.

Foto Friday # 46

These Northern Thai sausages were the highlight of the street food to be had at the sunday Chiang Mai market.

Foto Friday # 31

One of the many street stalls outside the Emirates. This jerk chicken stall is one of the better ones. It was even tastier after our 3-1 win over a certain Russian owned south of the river team.

Foto Friday # 21

The sign for stall number one at Djemaa el Fna in Marrakesh, the greatest show of street food on the planet.

Foto Friday # 15

The street food in Calcutta is some of the best in India. This stall sold the best kathi rolls that i ate in Calcutta, and I ate quite a few.

Street Food Part 4 - Thailand

Street food in Thailand is where it's at. It's fresh, great and cheap. What more can you ask. The best street food we had was in Northern Thailand, especially in the two Chiangs'. Rai and Mai. 

Chiang Rai's was at the nightly food market, where at least 50 odd stalls are set up selling everything from Grilled Fish to Tom Yam. Although we were kinda fed up with deep fried foods by this point, we still managed to eat a few fried chicken wings. The best was the whole grilled fish we managed to devour in moments, closely followed by some grilled cockles, they tasted exactly how we remembered them from Vietnam. The huge amounts of perfectly grilled pork on skewers that we dipped in a sweet chilli sauce were pretty good also.

The day of our arrival in Chiang Mai blew us away. We turned up to witness the Sunday Night Street Market. This weekly street market has to be one of the best street markets I have seen in a long long time. Really, only the street markets of the Middle East beat this one on sheer scale. The quality and sheer quantity of handicrafts was really impressive. An entire road is blocked off from the Eastern Gate right through to a Wat over a mile away. Dozens of small side streets are also filled with stalls also.

I'm not sure wether this started purely for us tourists, like the other daily night market in Chiang Mai, but after a while there were many more Thai's than Falangs. And we all know that shopping is hungry work, so with a market this grand there was an adequate supply of street food to keep everyone fed, and importantly waiting times were kept to a minimum.

I think we had a good bash at trying as much as we could. Especially good were the local selection of sausages. Well I am English after all, and you can never keep a good sausage down. All were filled with pork, and some had red paste inside, others had lime, others were just down right fierce. All were grilled, and most of them were delicious. There were rows upon rows of women turning out Phad Thai and other noodle dishes. The Papaya Salad we had was nicely spicy and sour, which our throats were saved by the passion fruit juices we were consuming. 

Sushi was on offer and at only 5 or 10 Bhat a piece definitely good value, although at some attempts I saw, even I could of set up shop and made a profit. 

There were some dedicated areas, mainly inside Wats that had tables and chairs to sit down on and consume larger meals, like curries, noodles etc. I tried a green curry noodle soup which to my surprise was pretty damn good for a snack food. Must remember that one for when we get back home. Also chose a couple of portions of other curries and a plate of rice to munch on also whilst Lina was busy shopping away. 

My old Thai favourites were there also, like marinated chicken pieces, tied to some wooden sticks and grilled over live coals. This served with a sweet chilli sauce is my idea of heaven. Huge amounts of satay sticks were available also, pork, beef, squid, prawn and chicken all coated in delicious sauces and all grilled to perfection. 

It really was paradise and writing this is making me very hungry. So I have to stop and go get something to eat ........

Street Food Part 3 - Luang Prabang Night Market

Street food in Laos is not that good. Mainly it consists of noodle soups, baguettes, grilled chicken or fish. This really does not happen in every town. Mainly just in the larger towns and cities. If you can call any place in Laos a city. 

In Luang Prabang there is a nightly market, mainly for the tourists. They block off a whole road in front of the old Royal Palace. Stalls are set up filled with locally made handicrafts. You have to walk a good 10 or 15 minutes through this before you get to the food. But at least you will have worked up an appetite. 

My memories from my first trip to Laos, 10 years ago are filled with my daily fix of baguette filled with paté in Vientiane from a small Vietnamese shop. The bread was fresh and as good as you would find in Paris, Laos pate, not the same you find in France but a good substitute, this was sliced and placed inside along with some other forms of luncheon meat. Sometimes they used to give me a piece of cheese, sometimes not. Some salad leaves, some thinly sliced cabbage and a good splattering of chilli sauce. Cut in half and wrapped in newspaper tied with an elastic band. They were delicious. 

Thankfully you can still get them in Laos, but in Luang Prabang they are slightly different now. Gone is the paté. In is sliced grilled chicken, all the other stars are there, especially the chilli sauce. Fantastic. Also had my fix of caffeine at the same time, as the stalls were next to eachother. Lina opted for an oreo biscuit milkshake. Very very rich. Breakfast was sorted that way everyday. 

But as I said it was at night that it all came to life. Most people simply walked passed the alley not even knowing anything was there. Only if you looked and looked again would you notice further down the alley a small collection of stalls selling everything from bar-b-q'd chicken, pork, fish, sticky rice, deserts, stews, Lao salads and even a vegetarian stall. (Which had the worst food there, over cooked soggy veg .. YUCK)

The times we ate there, we always had some grilled fish, plucked straight from the Mekong, gutted, cleaned, smeared in a spice mixture, strapped between two wooden sticks and plonked over some hot coals. The skin was crispy and the flesh still moist. No idea what fish it was, but it had few bones, thankfully, as those little buggers have caused a few near death experiences between me and Lina. We are also getting very good now at eating fish with chopstix. 

We also had a nice juicy piece of crispy skinned pork along with a lovely spicy sausage. Both went down well with some sticky rice and a local chilli paste and a cold bottle or two of Lao beer. We were tempted to have a whole chicken and the pigs head nearly made it onto our plates also, but there are only so many times a day I can eat without exploding.

But this just gives me an excuse to return, as if I really needed one.

Street food Part 2 - Bun Cha

Some of the best street food in the world comes from Vietnam, and the best street food in Vietnam comes from Hanoi. The streets are awash with small stalls selling everything from Pho to ....... ...... Everything comes to life early morning and ends long after dark. Some really good food starts to appears late morning, just in time for the lunchtime rush, and around sunset for dinner. 

We were wandering around old Hanoi around lunchtime, when I began to smell the aroma of bar-b-q'd meat. As we neared the corner the smell was becoming incredible. The closer we got, the more my mouth was salivating. What we came across was a small shop with some low tables and chairs out front. There were a couple of girls grilling the meat over some charcoal burners. What we had encountered was Bun Cha or bar-b-q'd pork and noodles. A popular Hanoi lunchtime favourite. 

We had to wait for a little bit as the place was packed. A very good omen. We finally managed to find two seats and a table under a tree. We were really not sure on what we were going to get, so we just ordered for 2. What came were 2 plates of fresh rice noodles, 2 bowls of bar-b-q'd pork in a fish sauce stock, and a dish of salad leaves. Everyone around seemed to have their preferred way of eating them. Some people were mixing noodles and salad leaves into the fish sauce and pork, others were just mixing the noodles and eating the leaves separate. I enjoyed dipping the noodles into the sauce and then eating them straight away. The pork was succulent and had a lovely chargrilled taste to it. The fish sauce stock, was just the right side of fishyness. Any more and it would had overpowered the pork. 

It was such a delight to eat. The noodles were as fresh as could be. The pork was chargrilling before our very eyes. The salad leaves were fresh and had a great taste to them. I am getting to love mint more and more as a salad leaf. This simple dish just typifies how fresh ingredients used very simply are worth their weight in gold. This is what I am trying to do with my cooking. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. But in Vietnam, the times it works, they are incredible. I hope that I can reproduce Bun Cha in my own kitchen one day, as good as we had in Hanoi. And what made it even better was that it only cost us 20,000 Dong each, about £1.50p for us both. Could life get any better. 

Street Food - Part 1

Doh !!! I had completely forgotten to write about the wondrous street food we have encountered on our travels so far. These have mostly been fantastic, though with everything you always get some dodgy street food, that could leave you in the toilet for the best part of a day or two. Touch wood this will not happen to us, it hasn't so far. But we have had some bad street food. Rule of thumb, if a stall is busy, then 99 tiimes out of a hundred it will be good and the food is fresh. 

One of the best street stalls we encountered early one was in Phnom Penh in Cambodia. Just a little stall with a girl deep frying various bits and bobs. She had a few low seats around two equally low plastic tables. I noticed the constant crowd of people always there from the balcony outside of our hotel room. So one day we walked behind the hotel, and decided to have a closer look. She had what looked like an array of sausages and meats, most were recognisable. 

We sat down, and pointed to a few bits and bobs. Quite a lot of different type of sausages, bit of smoked tofu, some spiced chicken wings. These were then deep fried. We were given different dipping sauces for the different bits we had. The sauces, some were hot, some were sour, but all worked quite well with the different bits we had. A salad was provided also which I ate. We were quite happy with what she had cooked for us, and it was quite a bit, as we repeated some of the sausages again, with some different ones. We noticed an animal, which I thought was some form of bird, but actually tuned out to be a frog. Why not we say. Have to say it was damn nice, little bloody bones though. One nearly got tuck in the back of my throat. After getting whacked on the back by Lina, who seemed to enjoy it, the bone was dislodged. 

All this for a few dollars, excellent. This would have gone fantastic with a bottle of cold beer. But hey ho. Until the next update ........