EAT THE STREETS
AS SingApore’S hAwker culture mAkeS it on to the uneSco world heritAge liSt, Tamara Hinson roundS up the beSt Street food mArketS for your bucket liSt
Treats:
singapore swing
Singapore’s food scene dates back to the 1800s, when its status as a trading hub meant entrepreneurs from all over the Malay archipelago flocked there to make their fortune. Many set up food stalls and Singapore’s food scene is now one of the most diverse in the world – you’ll find Chinese, Indian, Indonesian and more.
In the late 1900s, the government started building hawker centres, and you’ll find these all over Singapore, whether it’s Little India’s Tekka Centre or the Newton Food Centre. Check out StraitsKitchen at the Grand Hyatt Singapore (singapore.grand.hyatt restaurants.com), where you can sample hundreds of dishes prepared at theatre-style kitchens specialising in different types of cuisine.
Must-order dishes include Hainanese chicken rice (steamed or roasted chicken on white rice with chilli sauce), Hokkien mee (fried
Go LaTEr prawn egg-noodles served with pork, squid and fish cake), and satay skewers (grilled chicken, pork, beef or mutton served with a peanut sauce).
south american specialities Lima, Peru
Lima boasts some of the best street food in South America. Ceviche – chunks of raw fish cured with lemon juice – is a favourite dish, closely followed by picarones (pumpkin and sweet potato doughnuts drizzled with syrup) and mazamorra morada, a tooth-rottingly sweet delicacy made with purple corn. Popular places to fill up include Al Toke Pez in the Surquillo district, a no-frills restaurant where owner Toshi serves up six types of ceviche, and Miraflores’ Picarones Mary for delicious picarones.
Dutch delights amsterdam, Holland
Amsterdam’s street food scene is seriously underrated. Dishes to put at the top of your hit list include raw herring, which is served at haringhandels, or herring carts, throughout the city (ask for a broodje haring for a takeaway), stroopwafels (a layer of caramel sandwiched between wafers) and kroketten (meat and potato croquettes, eaten with mustard). A great place to order the last of these is one of the city’s FEBO vending machines. Here you will also find the likes of kaasouffle (deep-fried cheese) and a variety of sausages.
Portuguese classics são Paulo, Brazil
No foodie should leave São Paulo without paying homage to the city’s street food scene at Mercado Municipal de São Paulo (portaldomercadao.com. br), a food hall filled with hundreds of vendors. Start with the Hocca Bar, where you can grab one of the city’s famous ham, mustard and cheese sandwiches, or a pastéis de bacalhau – a salt cod fritter. Elsewhere, keep an eye out for coxinhas (deep-fried balls of batter with a variety of fillings, though chicken is most popular), and pastels, which are dainty pastry parcels encasing meat, cheese, shrimp or sweet fillings such as guava paste, banana and chocolate.
savoury snacks osaka, Japan
Osaka is famous for its culinary skills and one of the best places to experience this is Shinsaibashi-suji, a covered street known for its animatronic seafood signs and mind-boggling range of food. The food is sold at tiny stalls and vending machine restaurants, where customers order and pay before entering. Unmissable dishes include okonomiyaki (savoury pancakes with shredded cabbage) and takoyaki (battered snacks filled with octopus). Don’t forget to check out Osaka’s famous depachikas (food halls in the basements of department stores).
French fancy
Ho Chi minh, Vietnam
Ho Chi Minh has some moreish street food, whether it’s bún bò hu (a beefbased broth) or spicy bánh canh cua (crab soup). And then there’s the bánh mi – an Asian bread roll. The Vietnamese put their stamp on the French baguette, adding chilli and other local ingredients. The best place to grab one is Banh Mi Huynh Hoa on Lê Thi Riêng, where you’ll pay around 80p for a hot, fresh baguette stuffed with deliciousness.
Top dogs nuremberg, Germany
What makes Nuremberg a brilliant street food city? One word: sausages. In 2003, Nürnberger Rostbratwurst became the first sausages added to the EU’s PGI (Protected Geographical Indication) registry. The accolade came with certain conditions – a Nuremberg bratwurst must be made within the city limits, using the original recipe, which includes pork, sheep’s intestines, marjoram and other spices.
The finger-sized sausages are sold at hundreds of bratwurst stalls throughout Nuremberg and the most popular version is a delicious hattrick known as Drei im Weggla (three in a bun) – three sausages stuffed inside a bread roll.
Our Destination Time Warp tour across Germany in 2019. Time Warp Festival is one of our most loved events and the idea was to travel through the country, playing smaller clubs and events in towns such as Leipzig, Münster and Nuremberg until the big final show in Mannheim (time-warp.de). We don’t usually travel for that long by tour bus and it felt like being in a band, living the rock ’n’ roll life. We had smoke machines, loads of booze and a fun crew. The top floor of the bus would be full of smoke, Firestarter by The Prodigy would be pumping out of our speakers and we’d be drunk, running around and dancing. The best show was at Kalif Storch in Erfurt (kalifstorch.com). It’s such a lovely club, run by a collective
Thomas was petrified of flying until we became successful DJs. Flying is part of the job
of very caring, social, enthusiastic music nerds who cooked for us before the show and welcomed us into their lives for a night.
What’s your favourite city?
My hometown Templin, a tiny village about 50 miles north-east of Berlin. It dates back to the 1200s and is medieval in its aesthetic with a really interesting ancient city wall. I love it because the people are still real. If they are having a bad day they will let you know immediately, just as I would too. I own a restaurant there with my mum, which is named Café Pina, after my eldest daughter. All the fish and meat served is sourced from the forest in the area and it serves traditional Brandenburg dishes such as bockwurst sausage with potato salad.
What keeps you sane on the road?
Thomas [Benedix, the other half of Pan-Pot] and I play a lot of sports together and explore by running, which helps us to connect with each other but also with the places we go to, in a healthy way. Besides that, we use the travel hours between shows to produce and prepare music, read books or magazines and play games. If you do it right, you don’t go insane.
When have you been most frightened while travelling?
In Hawaii, when we played a boat party at Diamond Head, a volcanic ash cone on the island of Oahu. Someone broke the jet ski that was supposed to bring us back to the beach so we had to sail back to Honolulu in the middle of the night. We were a group of way too many people for the boat, the water was wild and cold, the captain was drunk, and the boat was being tossed around by three-metre waves in an ocean full of sharks. It was pretty scary.
Have you ever taken anything from a hotel room?
Mostly we leave and forget stuff but over the years we’ve taken towels, pillows, cosmetics, mirrors… basically everything that hasn’t been nailed to the wall.
What’s been your most
Quieter spots: Tassilo’s hometown, Templin, and Patagonia in South America, right
Thomas was petrified of flying until we became successful DJs. Flying is an inevitable and regular part of the job. He faced his fear head on and is no longer fearful, flying freely between gigs, which is amazing and life-changing and makes our work far easier.
Where’s the strangest place you’ve spent the night?
One of our first international shows was in Poland. We played in the middle of the forest in what looked like an old amphitheatre and our bedrooms were next to the venue in a disused youth hostel. We were surrounded by really weird people all night, sharing one room and sleeping in two tiny beds fitted with wet sheets.
And the best place you’ve spent the night?
We once played at Ozone Bar at the Ritz-Carlton Hong Kong. The hotel manager liked what we did so he gave us the two top suites, which have indoor and outdoor infinity tubs and telescopes so you can take in the waterfront vistas across Victoria Harbour and the skyline. I’ll never forget waking up in the clouds (rooms from £219.40, ritzcarlton.com/en/ hotels/china/hong-kong).
Have you ever come close to being arrested?
Yes, in Argentina. I can’t say much but thankfully they found out I was not the guy they were looking for.
Where are you hoping to go next?
The consequences of the pandemic have paused the party scene and travel life but we really hope to start touring again this year. I really want to go to Patagonia as I’ve seen so many pictures of the endless nature there. I want to go by motorcycle, crossing in the Andes, and explore everything.
Let’s Play With DJs, Pan-Pot’s bridge between the worlds of gaming and music, streams every Wednesday at 6.30pm on Twitch, twitch.tv/letsplaywithdjs