The Great Outdoor Kitchen

When you combine Hong Kong’s notorious lack of space with the natural tendency of people in warm climes to prepare food outdoors, you get scenes like those above. In all but the poshest and most sanitized neighbourhoods, kitchen workers crouch over brightly-coloured plastic buckets, washing innards and greens. It might not be hygenic, but it gives Hong Kongers a more honest relationship with the food they’re eating; its ingredients and preparation become part of the public spectacle.

Late Lunch

2:30pm in a restaurant on the outskirts of Saigon’s District 1

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Free the Street Vendors

Hot dog vendor at Spadina and Queen. Photo by Kevin Steele

Toronto is finally getting the street food it deserves. After suffering under years of legislation that prohibited nearly everything but precooked sausages from being sold on the streets, vendors will now be able to serve food from hundreds of culinary traditions.

There’s just one problem: rather than embracing liberalized street food and all of its potential, City Hall is taking an overly bureaucratic approach. Just eight street vendors, out of a total of 19 that applied, will participate in a pilot project that will see Afghan chapli kebabs in Nathan Phillips Square, Ethiopian injera at Roundhouse Park and jerk chicken at Yonge and St. Clair, to name a few delicacies that have been specially chosen for their “nutritional value” and representation of Toronto’s ethnic makeup. Every aspect of the vendors’ operations will be tightly controlled: each one must use a custom-designed food cart (which range in price from $21,000 to $28,000) and they can’t deviate from their designated location.

City officials are concerned about food safety, naturally enough, but they’re also fussy about the nutritional value of what street vendors dish up, having gone so far as to pass a bylaw last December to ensure that street food is not only more “culturally diverse,” but “wholesome and nutritious.” It seems they want to discourage competition among vendors, too, since they’ve gone to great lengths to designate a handful of disparate locations at which street food can be sold under the new program.

It’s a remarkably heavy-handed approach, one at odds with the world’s great street food traditions, which are grounded in the ability to adapt quickly and flexibly to customer demand. Think of something like the now-famous Kogi taco truck in Los Angeles, which serves up Korean-inspired tacos from a roving truck whose location is announced only by Twitter and word-of-mouth. It’s innovative, delicious and exactly what people want — but it would be impossible in Toronto, where food vendors aren’t allowed to move around.

People less cynical than me can consider Toronto’s new approach a step towards street food freedom. But it’s an awfully small step. Even if this pilot project works out, what will dissuade city officials from micromanaging every future street food venture?

Morning Coffee: Coffee on Demand

Coffee is a big part of the social life of Saigon, a city that somehow manages to be both languid and relentlessly energetic in nearly equal measure. Hundreds of cafés and coffee stands dot the city: relaxed neighbourhood hangouts with a few plastic seats out front to watch the city go by; leafy park cafés where middle-aged women chat and men bring birdcages; multistoried cafés with elaborate fountains and gardens, oases hidden in unremarkable lanes. But even when there isn’t a café, it’s still easy to get coffee.

On a warm afternoon earlier this week, a few friends and I found ourselves in a small park in District 1, just around the corner from the Notre-Dame Basilica and Saigon’s tourist hub. Not long after we sat down, a woman came up to us and asked us if we wanted any coffee. We ordered three cà phê sữa đá (iced coffee with condensed milk) and one black iced coffee. About five minutes later, a man on a motorbike arrived with the coffees in a wire tray and the woman brought them to us. We paid 26,000 dong (about $1.80) for the four drinks.

Somehow, the fact that the coffee woman was wearing a Parasuco t-shirt emblazoned with the words “Montréal, Québec, Canada” made the candy-sweet coffee even more delicious.

Taipei Street Food

Lime juice on sale in Shida

Deep-fried chicken in Ximending

Brochettes, squid and other treats in Shilin

Buying Seafood in Sai Kung

In most of Hong Kong, buying fish for dinner involves a trip to the neighbourhood wet market, or maybe to the seafood aisle in a slightly more sanitary supermarket. But in Sai Kung, an old fishing port in the midst of one of Hong Kong’s more verdant corners, many head straight for the source: the sea. Every evening, next to the minibus terminus and a few metres down from the strip of waterfront restaurants, dozens of people flock to a public pier where they look down at a handful of seafood vendors selling fish from their boats, tied to the wooden pillars of the pier, where the water swells with every passing boat. Questions are asked, prices are quoted and the vendors pass up buckets of fish to customers with the help of a long metal rod.

Earth to Mouth

For all the times I went to buy groceries at Montreal’s Chinese supermarkets, it never once occurred to me that much of the food I was buying was in fact locally-produced. Then I saw Yung Chang’s short documentary, Earth to Mouth, which my friend Cedric screened last year in a fifth-floor room in Chinatown. In his disarmingly quiet way, Chang introduces us to Wing Fong Farm, just outside Toronto, which grows the produce sold and consumed in the city’s big Chinese malls and supermarkets. In a particularly inspired scene near the beginning of the film, the farm’s 73-year-old matriarch, Lau King Fai, introduces us to some of the produce she grows, like gai lan (best prepared with smashed ginger and stir-fried with wine and salt) and go lai choi (stir-fry with vinegar and serve with oyster sauce).

As you would expect from someone who made Up the Yangtze, which put a defiantly human face on a massive technological achievement, Yung Chang has made a film that is more about the people who run Wing Fong Farm than it is about the food they produce. We learn about Lau’s path from Changsha to Guangzhou, and then, late in life, to rural Ontario, where she slipped quietly into the role of a farmer after a lifetime spent in cities. She rises at dawn each day, putting in long hours overseeing the farm’s operations, but it is the six Mexican workers she and her son employ who do the real grunt work. Watching the interaction between the farm’s Chinese owners and their Mexican employees is one of the things that makes Earth to Mouth so fascinating: this is the ordinary, everyday face of globalization.

Le spécialiste du melon d’eau

Watermelon stand at the Jean Talon Market

3am at the Casse-Croûte

It’s a bit past 3am and I’m sitting with a few friends in the Nouveau Palais, a 24-hour diner just around the corner from my apartment. It’s a classic Quebec casse-croûte with plastic booths and wood-panelled walls, a décor so timeless that, when the restaurant was damaged by fire a few years ago, its interior was painfully reconstructed to look just as it did before.

As we sit down, the waitress, a squat woman with a broad chest, narrow waist and constant frown, hands us our menus. Her skin is always tanned a deep orangey brown, even in the depths of winter, and her mood tends to swing from guardedly friendly to frighteningly surly with only the slightest provocation.

“I hate her so much,” mutters one of my friends, who grew up a few blocks away from the restaurant. She likes to annoy the waitress with snide remarks and passive-aggressive questions.

“Once I asked her how often she went to the tanning salon and she freaked out. She was like, ‘Tu penses-tu que j’ai le temps pour ça?’ But it’s so obvious!”

I open up the menu, a small book of photocopied paper, and try to decide what to get. My choices include all of the casse-croûte standards: hamburgers, poutine, souvlaki, fried rice, pizza, spaghetti and, of course, pizza-ghetti, that unbeatable combo of soggy pizza and overcooked pasta served side-by-side.

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A New Way to Eat the City

Over the holidays, the Tyee, a Vancouver-based webzine, published a series of twelve “New Ideas for the New Year.” Here’s one that really caught my attention: planting fruit trees on city streets.

While the benefits of greening the city are well-known — street trees provide shade, suck up storm water, remove carbon from the atmosphere and reduce the urban heat island effect — the notion of actually eating the things we plant in our streets is still quite novel. By doing so, however, we would gain an important local food supply and a way to bring people together.

That has been the experience of the Edible Campus, a container garden on McGill University’s downtown Montreal campus that I wrote about last November. Over the course of last year’s growing season, it produced one third of the food needed by Santropol Roulant, a meals on wheels service, and drew together a diverse group of volunteers who helped maintain the garden.

What really struck me, though, was the way that ordinary passersby used the garden. People make a point to pass through what had previously been an barren concrete space between a Brutalist highrise and the entrace to underground lecture halls. They stopped to examine the plants, sat on the benches near the garden, and walked through a wood archway that had been erected in the midst of the containers. Little kids were especially delighted when they ran around the garden, which must seem more like a forest when you’re three feet tall.

Fruit-bearing street trees could have a similar effect. Cultivation would be a communal activity; imagine a neighbourhood apple-picking festival. The Tyee goes even further by suggesting that fruit trees could reinforce neighbourhood identities and immigrant cultures, much in the same way that community gardens allow people to plant varieties of fruits and vegetables that are hard to find in Canada.

In Vancouver, the parks commission has already started planting 600 fruit trees in city parks; community groups will harvest the fruit when it’s ready in three to five years. Meanwhile, the Fruit Tree Project arranges with homeowners to collect fruit from under-picked trees on their property. The harvested fruit is donated to community kitchens and people in need.

Here in Montreal, there is a far more limited variety of fruits that could be grown. Still, climate would not be as much an obstacle to fruit trees as the risk of neglect and mistreatment. For years, street trees weren’t given enough space to grow, and many sidewalk planters were left unprotected by grates, as anyone who has tripped into one can attest.

Since it passed a “Politique de l’arbre” in 2005, the city has cleaned up its act, but Montrealers haven’t: hundreds of trees are killed each year because of vandalism.

The Taste of a Japa Dog

In Vancouver, like in most Canadian cities, street food vendors are limited to hawking pre-cooked meat: hot dogs, in other words. But, even within the restrictive confines of the law, innovation is possible, especially in a global city like Vancouver. You can taste as much by wandering over to the corner of Smithe and Burrard. There, across the street from a supermarket and a megaplex cinema, amidst the daytime downtown bustle, is an ordinary-looking hot dog stand. Its hot dogs, however, are anything but ordinary: they are “Japa Dogs,” a new type of street meat invented by Noriki Tamura, an ad salesman who left Tokyo for Vancouver two years ago.

I read about Japa Dog in Maclean’s a week before I left for Vancouver. “Behind the spitting grill, Noriki Tamura keeps up with the crowd, dressing still-sizzling turkey dogs with pale brown miso mayonnaise, sesame sauce and a layer of crispy green radish sprouts,” writes Nancy Macdonald. “His $5 Oroshi packs a motley punch. The bratwurst frank is loaded with an inch-thick layer of finely shaved daikon radish and green onions, topped with wasabi and soy sauce. As the grilled German sausage burns a trail down the gullet, the wasabi delivers its unmistakable kick to the nose. Hands down, Japa Dog marks the single biggest innovation to hit city street meat since Vancouver vendors started hawking the Yves Famous Veggie Dog a decade ago.”

I had to check it out so, last Wednesday, on the kind of bright, impossibly fresh day that only the Pacific Northwest is able to produce, I wandered up to Burrard Street for lunch and bought a Terimayo, a beef hotdog topped with teriyaki sauce, Japanese mayonnaise and strips of dried seaweed. My food vocabulary is fairly limited, so I’ll describe it like this: it tasted Japanese. It was probably the combination of the seaweed and mayo, the former naturally savoury and the latter full of MSG, which combined to create a brothy, full-mouthed umami flavour. The $4.25 price tag was a bit steep, but not terribly overpriced when you consider that the going rate for the most basic Vancouver street meat is $3.50.

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Street Food Freedom!

While Montreal obstinately refuses to allow any sort of food vending on its streets — ostensibly for health and cleanliness reasons — Toronto has convinced the Ontario government to liberalize its street food rules so that vendors may sell more than just hot dogs. Soon, in addition to the several hundred sausage stands and chip trucks that dot the city’s landscape, Torontonians will be able to buy samosas, brochettes, crêpes, Taiwanese fish balls — and pretty much anything else you can imagine — on the street.

Considering the extent of Toronto’s cultural diversity — half of its population is foreign-born — you can pretty much bet that this move will introduce the city to a vast array of street vending traditions from around the world. Immigrant entrepreneurs will finally have a way to build a low-overhead business selling the food they know best; Toronto’s pedestrians, meanwhile, will have access to an international food fair on every block.

In fact, last Friday, a street food festival was held in front of Toronto’s City Hall to celebrate the new rules. According to the Toronto Star, one of the highlights was murtabak, an Indian Muslim wrap that is a popular street snack in Singapore and Malaysia.

Down the 401 in Montreal, however, in a city supposedly known for its laissez-faire attitude, cosmopolitanism and joie de vivre, politicians and bureaucrats claim that allowing street vendors to sell food would put the city’s hundreds of cheap restaurants out of business. Yet Toronto has no shortage of hole-in-the-wall falafel joints, take-out jerk chicken restaurants and inexpensive Korean cafés. Montreal certainly wasn’t hard-pressed for cheap eats back when street food was allowed in the 1950s and 60s.

Like most Montrealers, I’m a fan of the occasional shish taouk from Basha or soggy steamé from La Belle Province. But wouldn’t it taste so much better if you could buy it on the street?

Market Potential

The Calgary Farmers’ Market

Calgary and Lachine are rarely mentioned in the same breath—actually, make that never. The prosperous city of one million and the working-class Montréal borough of forty thousand have little in common but for one thing: new public markets. The Calgary Farmers’ Market and the Lachine Market, both of which opened in 2004, differ significantly in size—the Calgary market could swallow its cousin in Lachine several times over—but with good management and a keen eye for community development, both could radically transform their respective neighbourhoods.

What exactly is a public market? Generally speaking, it’s a place where independent merchants gather to sell many different things—usually fruits, vegetables and other food products; but also crafts, books, antiques and anything else. Unlike an ordinary retail street, it’s centrally managed. Unlike a shopping mall, rents are low, overhead costs minimal and market management is not out to make a profit. Markets make a point of providing an alternative to mainstream retail, and this is accomplished with panache by some of North America’s biggest and best-known markets, including Seattle’s Pike Place Market, Vancouver’s Granville Island Public Market and Toronto’s Saint Lawrence Market.

Above all, markets are public spaces. Market-goers go to meet friends and neighbours and witness their city’s diversity. They go because merchants and vendors know about the products they’re selling, can cater to special requests and can offer recommendations on what to buy and how to use it. It’s the kind of relationship that is impossible to foster with faceless chain merchants, and one that is set amid the exciting sights, smells and noises of a lively, distinct area.

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All the Fruit a Market Bears

Notre Dame St., Lachine’s beleagured main street

The Lachine Market comes as a surprise: a small, pleasant outpost near the end of the Lachine Canal. For years, like the neighbourhood around it, the market suffered from neglect. Now, with a new format meant to better serve its community, it hopes to become a central part of life in the area and reinvigorate its sleepy surroundings.

Lachine’s market history dates back to the 1840s, but it was in 1909 that a permanent public market was built on the town’s main drag, Notre Dame St. By the end of the century, however, the market had faded out of existence, mirroring the commercial decline of Lachine’s old downtown.

Then came the market’s second act: In 2004, the Corporation de gestion des marchés publics de Montréal, which also manages the Jean Talon, Atwater and Maisonneuve markets, proceeded to transform it into a partially enclosed, year-round market open seven days a week. Strung along two blocks of Notre Dame St., between 17th and 19th Aves., the new market consists of a covered flower market and an indoor market hall, the two joined by a small plaza.

Originally, the market hall contained a number of boutiques and merchants, but they were too upscale for the neighbourhood; despite an initial burst of popularity, the market’s business soon declined. By the end of 2006, many of the businesses were ready to leave.

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