Category — Street Food

Uber theme: street food is not simple. Over the last 36 hours I’ve heard Rick Bayless talk about a street vendor who showed him how to make Mexico’s most complicated dish. I watched a Pervian chef make a YEASTED sweet potato dough for donut-like fritters. I’ve watched a Thai chef toss at least 10 different seasonings into a pan and gently fry eggs for pad thai and a Turkish chef make ANOTHER yeasted dough for lachmaajen (turkish/middle eastern pizza). This is serious food, even if you do eat it standing up.

John T. Edge is a Georgia boy, but his sensibilities might as well have stepped off a boat. “American street food is the food of outsiders, the food of the immigrant class,” Edge says. “To work on the street is to broadcast your traditions.”  No wonder that a Bush administration official railed against licking ice cream cones and public displays of eating (this was in 2006, people!!!! it reads like a Victorian screed) Edge says American street food came into its own just this year, when vendors from taco trucks to ice cream trucks began advertising their location and specials using Twitter. And perhaps, if I’m reading it right, this is the year that street food also went fusion, with dishes like papaya duck tacos being sold in San Francisco by a truck that calls itself “Kung Fu Tacos,” and the Indian tacos found in DC.  But there’s a caution here as well: “It would be a shame,” Edge says, “if the Twitter trucks pushed out the vendors who can’t pay for their SRO if they don’t sell enough tacos today.”

Rick Bayless, James Beard Winner, Top Chef Master, and creator of the Mexican street food restaurant Xoco, practically drools when he talks about the chicken tinga he gobbles on the corners of Mexico City. “To me this is the soul of street food,” he says. “It’s almost primal. There’s an alchemical reaction when you taste great street food.”

Chicken tinga merges roasted tomato and chipotles, “gutsy” flavors that stand up to their gutsy atmosphere. For more from the Mexican master, check out the video.