The British Street Food Awards – founded back in 2009 — went all European this year. The festival of vans, trucks and trailers showcased the very best of street food from across the continent. Traders travelled from Stockholm, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels and Berlin to compete, but the winners were Katie and Kim from Bristol, who baked out of a converted horse box to be voted Best of the Best.
Best of the Best
Katie and Kim won the title for their amazing cheese scones, still warm from the oven, and bowls of stovies with oatcakes spread with thick curls of Scottish butter. As Best of the Best, they have now secured a premier pitch at Trinity Kitchen, the new retail development in Leeds.
British Street Food are curating the new TK food court, which will involve an ever-changing roster of the new wave of Britain’s street food stars.
Street food captures the public – and retail – imagination
2013 has been the year of street food, with markets popping up all over Britain. And food retailers are working out how best to engage with the new bloods. Manchester Airport, for instance, offered Ginger’s Comfort Emporium – the winners of the British Street Food Awards 2012 – a pitch indoors. Restaurants that began on the street (Pitt Cue, Pizza Pilgrims, Daisy Green, Yum Bun, Homeslice and Meat Liquor) have been doing well. And even the supermarkets are trying to get in on the act with their ‘street food’ ranges. There’s something about the way of eating that has captured the public’s imagination.
Richard Johnson, the founder of the British Street Food Awards, sees 2013/2014 as a period of real growth. Johnson (who is a regular presenter of the Food Programme for BBC Radio 4, and writes a street food column for the Guardian) is even working with Leon and the government to put street food swagger into children’s school dinners. “It feels like the original idea of street food – to make good fun food accessible to everyone – is finally starting to turn into a reality.”
4,500 attend the Awards
The 4,500 people who attended the 2013 BSFAs, in London’s Dalston Yard, voted for the People’s Choice Award on the new British Street Food app.
Bao from London were clear winners: they make every element of their signature Gua Bao, or steamed pork belly bun, themselves — from the soya milk to the peanut powder that’s hand-shaved from gigantic peanut brittle. Probably why they were also victorious in Best Main Dish (sponsored by NCASS).
The winners
Cookery writer and actress Fay Ripley joined food writer and broadcaster Tom Parker Bowles and Simon Anderson, one of the Pitt Cue team, to judge all 40 dishes. They were all kept in line by the founder of the British Street Food Awards food journalist Richard Johnson.
There was a caravan from Kent making sponge cakes, and an army field kitchen cooking up the best of ingredients foraged from the Scottish countryside. Snow cones came from 13-year-old Stan, Britain’s youngest street food trader. And a ‘Snoop Hoggy Dog’ that Tom Parker Bowles declared the best hot dog he had ever tasted.
The most hotly contested category this year was Best Sandwich. Even last year’s award-winning Manjit’s Kitchen couldn’t quite beat the sublime No Lobster Roll from Tongue ‘N Cheek which – for reasons of price and sustainability – replaced the lobster with cod cheeks. The juicy BBQ pork roll from the wood-fired oven of The Tinderbox and the crisp, buttery sourdough on Keep On Toasting’s British Croq, made it a close run thing.
The Best Dessert category was hoovered up by Ginger’s Comfort Emporium – for the third year running – for their take on a 99. This soft-serve olive oil ice cream came with Hawaiian black salt sprinkles and a dark chocolate flake that was studded with black olives.
But it was nice to see, after all their efforts, that our continental cousins managed to take home a bit of silverware. Best Drink and Best Burger, for instance, which went to the French for an obscenely rich milkshake and a boeuf bourgignon burger. And Highly Commendeds for the extraordinary beetroot couscous from the Netherlands and the soft shell crab taco from Sweden.