The Rise and Rise of Hackney's Street Food Culture

The unedited version of my article on Hackney street food that appeared in Feburary's print edition of the Hackney Citizen...

From the streets of Cairo to a cathedral in London, 2011 was a year that will be remembered largely for its revolutions and rebellions. Always evolving rapidly, the gastronomic world was not to be left behind. The start of a new year is the classic time to reflect on what has come to pass and what is still to come, and those of us who live life on a fork’s edge have plenty of tasty developments to mull over.

With English wine now more or less an established entity, 2011 became the year of the microbrewery. Scottish-based Brew Dog grab a lot of the headlines – be sure to venture out and check out their new bar in Camden – but closer to home the London Fields Brewery and Redchurch Brewery both bring the pleasures of craft beer to our doorstep. Redchurch’s rich Hoxton Stout is particularly well suited to the grimmer side of the calendar, while the crisp London Fields Lager is one to get us dreaming of sunny days lounging by the lido. It’s a trend that’s likely to continue well into 2012 and beyond.

But for many of us with ever expanding waistlines, 2011 will be most remembered as the year of the mobile food vendor. Street food in less pretentious terms, it’s a movement that can be traced to the beginning of the century and the cult surrounding a car park in Peckham and Yianni Papoustis’ Meatwagon. Last year, the London scene came of age. Of course, there’s a still a fair way to go before we can honestly claim to match somewhere like New York in terms of widespread quality and diversity, but our capital seems to be rapidly rising to the challenge.

The Great British Burger Debate

The seemingly small matter of where one finds the best burger in London inspires a disproportionately large amount of deliberation and debate. From bona fide food critics to aspiring hacks like myself, everybody has an opinion - the only thing we seem able to agree on is that if you have it well done, yours doesn’t count. To date, Daniel ‘Young and Foodish’ Young has put together what comes closest to being a definitive list of the capital’s best bits of flattened beef, declaring the best burger in London to emanate from the Goodman kitchens. This is a fairly accurate assertion in so far as it is probably the best I tasted to date, despite a major balls-up with regards to cooking time. I sampled their wares late-December at Burger & Lobster, a Mayfair offshoot devised to satisfy public demand for the more humble end of their menu (and presumably free up tables in their restaurants for people spending vastly superior sums of money).

Even though either the person working the grill or the wait staff seemed to have got something pretty badly wrong – medium-rare arrived completely well-done – it was still a pretty awesome hunk of flesh and not at all dry, a minor miracle given the way it had been cooked. Crucially, the fries were the real deal – thin and overly salted in the disgracefully moreish, McDonald’s tradition, while the lobster dish consumed by my companion was deemed pretty flawless. I certainly deemed it an absolute steal for £20. Added to the fact that the concept was beyond brilliant – a three-item menu, spectacular cocktails, the simplest of price schemes – I was a very happy punter indeed, especially after the management offered me free drinks to compensate for the unsatisfactory greyness of my patty. 

At the other end of the spectrum, many believe that life for London’s burger aficionados began not in a well-heeled steakhouse, but in the car park of a south-east London industrial estate with Yianni Papoutsis and his Meatwagon. Again, there’s a certain amount of truth in this claim. For sure, some of the best burgers I’ve tasted this side of the pond came courtesy of Papoutsis and his #Meateasy tenure above a dilapidated pub in New Cross that just happened to be dangerously close to my university. Yet by the time the rest of my art school comrades caught on, the place hadn’t just become a cesspit of pretentiousness, it had started to churn out inconsistent bordering on average burgers, including one that was, for lack of a more eloquent phrase, burnt to shit. Don’t get me wrong:  I’ve always been one of Papoutsis’ biggest fans and love the new joint, MEATliquor, where the deep-fried pickles elicit a particularly strange type of nostalgia (I used to eat them at the now deceased branch of Hooters in Boston). But that doesn’t mean to say that I’m blind to the occasional failings of his restaurants.

The Scavenger Gourmet's Top 10 Brews for Christmas (and the Cold Months)

N.B. – The Scavenger Gourmet would like to apologise. It appears he had a bit too much fun doing the ‘research’ for this blog and has only just realised that it is, in fact, February now. Whoops. Still, these ten beers aren’t just for Christmas – they’ll complement our cold, shit weather perfectly for months to come.

Treasured food and drink pairings like champagne and smoked salmon, port and Stilton, and sherry or whiskey with dried fruit and nuts are all associated with the festive season, while few aspects of our existence seem quite as ritualised as getting pissed at the office party or quietly sipping brandy around the fire with friends and family. Like it or not, Christmas is as inextricably linked with booze as it is to the mistletoe, Santa Claus, and depraved mothers ramming you up the backside with prams on the high street.

Super Bowl Sunday

Thanksgiving in November, Christmas in December, Burn’s Night and Chinese New Year in January: it seems that every calendar month has an event that defines it from a gastronomic standpoint. February is no different. Valentine’s Day stands out in a particularly cringe kind of way, the scores of men and women suddenly fancying themselves as little Heston’s and trying to impress their sweethearts with generally misguided culinary exploits occasioning a strange brand of pity. Equally pathetic is the way people willingly buy into below average restaurants offering ludicrously priced ‘special’ set menus that get you little more than a weak prosecco-based cocktail and something bland tasting but inevitably heart-shaped for the premium. So if V-Day is generally accepted as being a shallow marketing exercise, what does the evangelical food perv have to look forward to before the slow dawn of Spring elicits wet dreams of barbeques and new season lamb?

For something original, follow the lead of our American brethren and go all out for the Super Bowl this weekend. Of course, you could do the easy thing and go for a usually ill-advised Sunday night out. London offers several good options: close to my home in Hackney, Road Trip Bar on Old St is renowned for its sizeable ex-pat contingent and seems a decent bet for a good time, though this is based on word-of-mouth rather than personal experience. Spread fairly democratically across the capital, Bodean’s BBQ offers a good value night out, with £25 getting you a table and food before the big game and at half time. Sure, it can’t even shine Pitt Cue Co’s shoes, but it’s not that bad. Honest, I’m sure the food poisoning I got a few years back was a one-off! The Sports Café in Haymarket is the rowdiest atmosphere, generarally made up of American students - sorry, 'college kids' - and perfect if you want to satisfy your inner Bluto. If you can beat my personal best of fifty buffalo wings in one sitting, I'll post your photo on Scav Gourmet!

Food and Drink Trends for 2012

2011 was the year that London got serious about street food, craft beer became a hipster status symbol, and gourmands swapped oysters and periogold truffles for the pleasures of the humble hamburger. So what dining innovations are on the cards for 2012? Here are five trends for culinary explorers to take note of going forward

Barbeque

Now that the burger has been almost totally re-invented, it’s the turn of another American classic, the BBQ, for a makeover.

A cuisine and tradition in and of itself, BBQ has already found its standard bearer in the U.K.: Pitt Cue Co. started off on the asphalt and recently graduated to a full bricks and mortar operation in Soho.

Most people go for ribs and pulled pork, with the more adventurous fighting over specials like smoked pig’s head.

Everything is washed down with appropriately cheap American lager, or a pickleback – the house special is a shot of whiskey followed by a shot of gherkin brine. Sounds nasty, tastes awesome.

Always at the fore of the UK’s culinary developments, expect quality brisket and bourbon to be flowing freely across London by the end of the year.

My Thoughts on Sausage & Mash

Food in winter is all about comfort and familiarity. Even though I rarely have the heart to admit it those well-intentioned souls who try and maintain super-healthy diets in the depths of December, there’s something that seems a bit unnatural about grilled red mullet at this time of year. If I am going to have fish, it’s almost certainly going to be in a pie, a stew, or a curry – hold the rocket salad and the mango salsa until April, please. In place of the light, Mediterranean style of cooking many of us favour in the warmer months, we have the tried and tested favourites more commonly associated with British cuisine.

Everybody has a favourite in the comfort food stakes. Usually, it’s something that takes them back to their childhood. For me, my mum’s roast chicken dinners will always hold the top spot, with brow-mopping curries - like the lamb farcha from the superb Cinnamon in New Cross - being a close second. Also definitely in my top five is sausage and mash. I don’t expect for a moment that I’m alone in this. Unfortunately, it’s a dish that’s frequently abused, most obviously by the identikit Ye Olde Pub Grub menus that curse our country’s drinking dens. Instant mash, granulated gravy, and cheap, fatty sausages might fool a few hapless tourists, but not those of us who live life on a fork’s edge.

MEATliquor, Marylebone

If Roti Chai has enjoyed its fair share of blogospheric activity in recent weeks, it's nothing compared to that provoked by the burgers of a certain Yianni Papoutsis over the last couple of years. Now, I must admit that I'm a bit biased when it comes to Papoutsis's enterprises and, more specifically, to the food they revolve around. I was expanding my gut to the tune of his carnivorous revolution yonks before pretentious hipsters gave #Meateasy their blessing and have always found him to be an affable character - I'm still grateful for the interview he gave me for an Eastlondonlines article. But more importantly, it's the sort of food that takes me back to my misspent youth in Massachusetts. One bite of a jaw busting Dead Hippie burger or a gob-full of buffalo wings heavily doused with blue cheese sauce and I'm thirteen again, it's Friday night in West Concord, and the waitress at Pub 99 is casting disapproving glances at my table as we empty whisky-filled water bottles into refillable soda cups under the table.

It was extremely unlikely, therefore, that I was ever at risk of disliking his latest venture and first genuine bricks and mortar operation, MEATliquor. The only pertinent critical question was: how much would I like it? Al and I decided to tip up after our dinner in Marble Arch for some nightcaps - always plural in my book - and sample the vibe of the place on a Saturday night.  I'm happy to report that the new joint is as gloriously seedy as ever, though the sleaze factor is perhaps partially mitigated by the fact we were in Marylebone, not New Cross. Still, he is clearly a man who sticks to his principles, and when those principles revolve around burger-fueled debauchery, it's fairly certain to garner approval from the Scavenger Gourmet.