It starts as early 1 a.m. when a woman in Vietnam goes to market to buy snails. Any later and she won’t be able to pick the good ones to sell in the day. 


Or at 3 a.m. in Yogyakarta, Indonesia as a very old lady is already hard at work making what looks like rice cakes, jajan pasar (market food), cutting them to pieces by hand with a length of string. 


The routine is the same in seven other places featured in the first volume of the series, focusing on Asia: Thailand, Japan, India, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and the Philippines. The chosen street food vendors recount personal stories of how they began their trade as they go about their daily business. As you go through each of their stories, you will find that all of them have become masters of their creations, either through continuing a family recipe handed down through generations or for taking simple food to gourmet levels.


The stories also encompass a theme of survival and necessity: for the vendors who took to selling food in the streets to provide for family and overcome life’s hardships; for the people who eat street food mostly because, as in places like India or Taiwan, it is the only practical choice because many homes don’t even have kitchens. The food is cheap, easy to come by, and as pointed out by local food experts and journalists the series has tapped to provide context, their country’s culture is deeply rooted in these everyday fare. 


Some of the food featured in Street Food didn’t even begin as everyday fare. In Delhi, for example, there is a man who sells a meat stew that used to be only prepared for the royalty of the Mughal Empire. When British rule took over, the royal cooks were left with no jobs. The man who sells the stew is descended from one such cook who first sold it in the streets of Delhi more than a century ago. 


Thailand is generally considered to have one of the finest street food because of the explosion of flavors you can enjoy in one simple dish. The Street Food episode here chose to focus on a 74-year-old lady called Jay Fai, who owns a roadside restaurant of the same name. Jay Fai is a heroine of Thai street food, approaching her craft with the delicacy of a chef and the fortitude of a steel mill engineer—in fact, she wears welding goggles while she cooks to protect her eyes from smoke. Her specialty is crab omelette, one of 150 items on her menu. Jay Fai has expensive food. It has a Michelin star! But it is still street food. 


In Osaka, Japan we meet an elderly man named Toyo, who owns an izakaya (a Japanese bar for cheap food and beer). We find that he is a popular character in the Osaka food scene, a sort of roadside cook and neighborhood clown. Turns out in Osaka, earthy humor is part of daily routine. Toyo blowtorches tuna on top of a grill with one bare hand. He saves himself from getting seared by dipping the same hand in iced water. He began work in someone else’s izakaya but strove to put up his own. “Better be the head of a chicken than the tail of a bull,” Toyo says. 


In Taiwan we meet a young woman who continues her family’s fish head soup business, improving on a tradition by streamlining work and opening up new branches. In South Korea, we hear a woman’s story of being so deep in debt that loan sharks were breathing down their family’s neck, and what saved her was selling knife-cut noodles. In Singapore we meet a young woman who trained to become a pastry chef in the US, but had to come back home to save her parents’ ailing putu piring business. She has grown the business to five branches and hopes to pass on the tradition to her children.



And finally we meet Florencio Escabas from Cebu. Mang Florencio is very much Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. He is old and weathered and yet he exudes the simple essential wisdom of his years. He lives in a shack by the sea. He used to be a fisherman, but not of marlins but reef eels. He now makes a soup out of them. Not particularly appealing, but he is well loved for it. 


In a mild slur caused by a stroke and the absence of any teeth (because he loves to eat hard candy still), he tells his story in Cebuano. “I live near the sea to be close to the reef eels. If you eat reef eels your life will change. There are some people who are hesitant to et them because they don’t look appealing. Until I made my own reef eel soup. The people who tried them had changes in their bodies. Strength enters their bodies after eating. My reef eel soup can help in enhancing libido. Now they call my soup the Viagra of the Cebuanos.” 


Or as the local fishermen enjoy it, pair it with Red Horse beer.