Street Food Happens Anywhere but the Street

Last week’s post and a thought-provoking comment by a fellow caterer made me realise that when street food happens on the street it’s a rarity rather than a regularity. By any linguistic definition of the word, we shouldn’t be called street food vendors, and neither should most of our colleagues.

At the moment, for example, we are cheating on street food most abominably with a series of hot, loud and under-dressed festivals.

That said, last weekend we were at two different events that were both so gosh darn street food you could see eddies of hipsters forming in the coolest places, and neither of them were on streets.

Down in London, where ultra-hip street food markets materialise only for a matter of milliseconds and are gone before any of us normal mortals know they exist, the definition actually works. Select any side road at random in one of the pre-defined cool boroughs and street food happens as a symptom rather than due to any organised London activities.

For the rest of us events on the street are hard to find, and our position as a street food vendor therefore harder to justify. We (everything outside the M25) will probably be within driving distance of a street-based produce market. This is where most street food folks start out, hoping for a miracle involving regular custom and predictable income. With the best will in the world though, not all hot food found at produce markets can be defined as street food.

Perhaps food festivals are a better place then. Alcester has a rather lovely one that snakes right up the high street. It’s where we started, after all. The hot food found at food festivals is almost always interesting, often well sourced and generally cooked and prepared by the people serving it to you. In 2012 we served toasties at 6 different food festivals across the region, so perhaps that would be the ideal place for defining street food.

Except that this year we are only doing one. If food festivals = street food, then we are not playing nicely.

Music festivals, our main stomping ground for most of the summer, have been clamouring for street food offerings this year. Yet the main arena remains largely the domain of the festival caterer. There are festival crews out there who do care about what they serve, yet wouldn’t describe themselves as street food (see last week’s comments). Then there are people like us, who spend most of the summer between music festivals but still happily call ourselves street food.

I think street food in this country is, by its very nature, a flexible occupation. It was born in the recession as a way to cut the cost of eating out, and it survives wherever it can (pending risk assessment and health & safety review). Streets are not really practical, because the Highways Agency gets upset that people will catch fire and/or explode, but the name is not about the location any more. Street food is a motley collection of folks who are trying to earn a living serving something delicious, properly sourced and cooked, wherever they can get away with it. We also like being our own boss, and people trying to tell you what is and isn’t street food just doesn’t seem to work.