Street food: a distillation of a country’s aspirations

IF CHEF and journalist (though he doesn’t call himself one) Anthony Bourdain is to be believed, what unites people is neither creed nor color, but food.

The host of CNN’s travel and food show Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown was in Manila last week to participate in the World Street Food Congress ( WSFC), held from May 31 to June 1 in the Mall of Asia Concert Grounds. Here, a long line of street food vendors from all over the world sold their wares, as a way of letting people get a taste of what their country cherishes.

This is completely in line with Mr. Bourdain’s interests, seeing as he is planning to open a street food market in New York City in about two years ( bourdainmarket.com). “New York is a city of immigrants. It’s not a place, it’s an idea,” he said. This project will give New York a space akin to those in Bangkok, Vietnam, and Singapore, which promote the simple joys of street food.

He talked about one of his worst meals, a miserable cheeseburger in an airport Johnny Rockets, where a cook plopped an already- cooked cheeseburger on a plate, put some already- cooked fries on the same plate, and pushed it towards him. “We looked at each other, all of us,” he recounted. “We all shared a moment of perfect misery. They understood that they were at the tailend of a long corporate machine that just didn’t give a fuck, and so did I.”

“Street food is the cure to this. It’s about a single person, or a limited number of people, who have figured out, ‘This is what I’m good at; this is what I’m proud of.’”

Seeing as the bulk of Mr. Bourdain’s travels in his television shows takes him to the backstreets and the holes- in- the-wall of certain cities, street food is dear to Mr. Bourdain’s heart. During a talk he gave during the WSFC, he said that street food is important — as a practical matter, according to him, it’s because when Americans are asked where they would like to go on vacation to spend valuable tourism dollars, the number one factor they consider is the food.