Category — Street Food

by Kanko

If the Mumbai daily DNA is to be believed (and why not? It’s got absolutely ALL the gossip about Bollywood celebrities!) it’s goodbye tiffin, hello take out! “Menu is always such a problem,” my husband’s cousin Anju once told me as she described getting up each day at 5am to fill her husband’s stainless steel dabba – lunch pail — with a selection of poli, bhaji, curry and other hot, homemade food without being repetitive.   Now fashionable Mumbaikers can enjoy a Japanese-style Bento box of rice, protein and vegetables (and a Kingfisher beer!) or a “China Box” filled with chicken teriyaki or tofu long rice. Inspired by the Chinese food boxes he saw in American movies as a child, Chef Ristic Milos hopes to offer “a nice small meal that is easy to handle, one you can eat alone without having to sit at a table.” Read: one you can scarf down without leaving your desk. I’m all for freeing Anju from having to get up at 5am to fill her husband’s lunchbox. And for treating yourself occasionally to a fun, take out lunch. But I hope it doesn’t mean India’s also importing the take out culture — of eating at your desk, alone, without your colleagues, of looking on food not as social, but as fuel. A disturbing hint of things to come? “The meal contains everything you need to power you through the rest of the day,” the Milos tells DNA’s reporter.

Gourmet magazine reported on street food years ago. Long before anyone even cared. The magazine may be gone, but its peripatetic editor Ruth Reichl is just as savvy as ever. Check out her thoughts on street food as a cultural exchange, why you should never waste parsley stems, and on what’s next for her….

Roy Choi and his Kogi BBQ Korean taco truck have been media darlings for nearly a year now, but it’s only in person that his full passion reveals itself. His voice quavers, he sometimes even sheds a tear as he describes this cuisine that bubbled up from his very soul. “What Kogi is, it’s not a fusion, it’s not a mash up, it’s just a window into my country,” Choi says.

Choi was born in Seoul, raised in Los Angeles, and trained at CIA and Le Bernardin, but his country lies between LA’s downtown Alvarado and the famously diverse Western Avenue. His food is nothing short of indigenous to the region. “I see tamales, al pastor, pupusas, that fills my life,” he says. “The spicy pork, in Korean it’s bulgogi. But every time I made it, it looked like al pastor to me. So I played around with the elements. And it’s so friggin’ delicious.”

If his classical training taught him to measure and chiffonade, Choi’s soul has told him to cook “with the spirit of a grandmother.” Here he is, channeling the grandmother.