Richard Johnson  I’m a food critic. But the best meals I’ve ever eaten weren’t in a Michelin-starred restaurant. They were on the streets. The streets of Bethlehem, with its hole-in-the-wall falafel shacks serving up fat pittas, stuffed with hummus, pickle and broad beans. And the streets of Mandalay, where I first had fishy noodles – for breakfast – still salty from the sea. Street food is exciting. But you wouldn’t say that of street food in Britain. Until now. In the old days, British street food meant cheap sausages and overfried onions, served off rusty metal handcarts. But that’s changing. And about time too. For a nation that’s stacked with food magazines and food programmes, we’ve run out of excuses. Our food isn’t a joke any more – we’ve got more three-starred Michelin restaurants than Italy. So it’s about time we got our street food sorted too. And make every single one of us proud to be British.
The best street food is cheap and fresh. Unlike a lot of restaurant food, which is expensive and left standing on a hot-plate until some sniffy waiter deigns to pick it up and bring it to your table. And street food is all about offering the kind of food that the British people actually want to eat. Restaurants still seem to be hung up on some received notion of what constitutes ‘good food’. On the street isn’t the place for that kind of snobbery.
There are some real food heroes, out there working the streets of Britain. The best are specialists – they do a few dishes, and they do them very well. Their menu-not-so-fixe can change at a whim according to what looks good at the market that day. Which means that it’s seasonal and local. And they know that, if they ever let their standards slip, the public will just go to the mobiler next door. Only the strongest survive. Which is great news, now that the street is our dining room.
The new generation of mobilers have got none of the grit, or the grease, which used to authenticate the whole British street food experience. And their ingredients have changed too. Where you used to find limp white iceberg, you now find organic lamb’s ear. And where once you squeezed on an (unidentified) red sauce, you now find a rich, home-made tomato ketchup. That’s actually got tomatoes in it. The times are changing.
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