When Street Food goes indoors - Pitt Cue, Bone Daddies, Rita's and Frenchie to Go by Bruce Palling

 How does a trend go mainstream? There are numerous stories of an idiosyncratically dressed teenager being spotted in a market or nightclub, suddenly becoming the new “face” of a perfume or fashion line. Something similar is occurring with casual food, where a food truck near Waterloo Bridge or a Pop Up bar in a hip part of East London, both suddenly morph into standalone restaurants. There a host of other elements that make these transitions into something unique and that is the way that all sorts of regional and lesser-known national cuisines are combining in different parts of the world.

These days, thanks to the power of social media, two kids with a skillet and an iPad can suddenly become a viable business model. It is almost as if with the lessening of the power of haute cuisine and fine dining, the food scene has become a free-fire zone with a greater array of food styles coming together than ever before.

While some of the combinations hail from Korea and Japan, they all seem to have been tweaked and converted by coming to Europe via the USA. The ramen and noodle craze here arguably was inspired, as much by American Korean chefs, like David Chang and Danny Bowein as from the countries themselves.

 One chef said their mission “has always been about the democratisation of food and the breaking down of barriers.” However, they are not all decidedly aiming at the lower end of the food chain.

One of the most fashionable new bars in central London goes very high-low by serving designer hot dogs with a range of excellent Champagnes. Called Bubbledogs, in the zone either known as “NoHo’ (North of Soho) or Fitzrovia, this perfectly combines chic with street. It is merely one manifestation of chef James Knappett’s talents, as he has a highly regarded set menu establishment behind it called Kitchen Table.

 Another example of a successful transition from the street to a restaurant is Pitt Cue (www.pittcue.co.uk), a tiny restaurant just off Carnaby Street, where they serve classic Southern USA BBQ along with an encyclopaedic range of Bourbons. Pitt Cue began as a food truck under the arches of Hungerford Bridge on the South Bank, between the London Eye and Festival Hall, where long queues formed to try their 14 hour slow-roasted pulled pork with beans and salad or beef brisket with pickles on toast.

Now, Pitt Cue has its own best-selling cookbook, which is published in the US in June and has set new standards for quality sourcing of ingredients. Co-owner Jamie Berger, with a PhD from Harvard in Chinese Civilisation, is anxious to stress they never really wanted to be part of any trend, whether it is called Grunge, Dude or Dirty Food. “We are not interested in trying to replicate any particular genre or region. We are actually more interested in taking the very best techniques and then marrying it to the finest products we can find over here. We are rearing nearly 100 Mangalitza pigs in Cornwall – a rare breed from Hungary, that has exceptional flavour and fat that is high in monosaturates, which we use in our demi-brioche buns. And we experiment a lot with ginger, garlic and soy – ingredients that a southern USA cook would look at in horror.”

Pitt Cue pulled pork - not a burger

Pitt Cue is also very nose to tail – they bring up whole beasts from Cornwall and use them in as many variants as they can: “We use as much as we can from the whole animal – the lard from our pigs ends up in the demi brioche buns. We even take the skin off the shoulder of the pig and turn it into pork scratchings and we use the brine in our pickle bags.”

Jamie with his Bourbon

Jamie wants to dissociate himself from the hamburger boom, not just because it is too simplistic – after all, whatever else it tries to become, the basic composition of a hamburger is mince and a bun. (I personally like burgers and pizzas but don’t waste my time considering them as art forms – even the very best pizzas in Naples don’t really take you any further than the best ones in London or elsewhere – same goes for burgers).

“I think that some of the hamburger-led dude food whatever you want to call it, isn’t necessarily as scrupulous in their sourcing perhaps as we are. I also think there are a lot of people who spend their time copying each other and there is a bit of a bandwagon and inevitably there are cycles of boom and bust – we certainly don’t want to be part of that.”

Jamie is also big on different types of Bourbon and claims that their prices are around half of what everyone else charges.

Hackney, a once deprived area of East London, is home to Rita’s, (http://ritasbaranddining.com) a restaurant that is happy to combine New York-inspired street food with serious Asian overtones. It began as a Pop Up restaurant in a noisy bar in Dalston, with food that one critic described as “pimped junk food” or in a more polite phrase, “American classics”.

Lunch is dominated by dishes that would not be out of place in Pitt Cue – Ham Hock Hash with Duck Egg, fried chicken and waffles or

Kentucky Hot Brown

Kentucky Hot Brown, a Southern USA sandwich dominated with bacon and melted cheese. However, at night, there are far more Korean or Japanese elements, including a miso-grilled aubergine and mushroom dish with soy and spring onions or rice noodles with beetroot and lardo (though here it is referred to as pig’s head ham).

Gabriel Pryce, the young co-chef, is happy to admit he is heavily influenced by what he calls “second generation American immigrant food” especially as interpreted by Danny Bowien, a Korean-American chef currently operating from a Pop Up in Brooklyn called Mission Chinese. Pryce pointed out that “We don’t do anything traditional or by the book, but our food has its roots in America, probably because I lived in New York for five years. We are not bastardising but tweaking – in some ways, I guess what we do is second-generation American immigrant food. We can also do Mexican or we might also venture off into a specific regional Chinese style but I haven’t worked it out yet.”

Like in many of these new places, table wine is not a factor in what people drink or if they do, it tends to be from the so-called Natural End of the spectrum, which traditional wine lovers often find completely undrinkable. Instead, there is a big emphasis on cocktails or even obscure bottled beers. Rita’s must be one of the very first new restaurants here that attracts outsiders from the neighbourhood. Many of the world’s most renowned chefs came here during last month during the Top 50 restaurant Awards, curious to see what sort of innovation is happening in London.

This new generation of chefs are not bothered about how they are categorised or what boundaries inhibit or inspire them.  “Behind all of our food there is technique and “cheffiness”, but you take it at whatever level you want – people come just to enjoy themselves or to explore the sort of methods and produce we use,” said Pryce.

“In the past decade food has become a far bigger part of peoples lives – there is exciting stuff happening everywhere and chefs now are being influenced by a lot of different styles. I don’t see a lot of people coming here and getting confused – people are very comfortable about asking about things on the menu – we are not a food blogger place but we still have people coming from a fair distance to try us.”

This next section on Ramen in London is not strictly relevant to the story line and I didn’t include it in the original article. However, given that there are fewer rules or restrictions of what works on my site, thought I would plonk it in anyway, as Ross Shonhan of Bone Daddies in Soho, has some interesting things to say. A former chef at Zuma, he has spent quite some time cooking in southern USA and makes very gutsy ramen, which I like.

“I think when food has strong flavours and not shy about being unhealthy, it gets labelled as Dude Food – I don’t actually think there is anything about our ramen that puts us into that category – hamburgers yes, because they are a sort of junk food.

You can customise your bowl of noodles in many ways so we had to limit it and I wanted to stay true to asking for extra fat. It’s not quite the point but if it makes people happy… I suppose you can turn it into dude food by adding a fat pipette into it.

Our food is less street, more fast. In Japan, there are ramen stalls between train platforms where you stand and eat it. Paris also has strong ramen noodle scene and there are at least a dozen in Soho itself.

Five years ago, Wagamama had such a hold that it wouldn’t have worked, but now they have become a mass band, there is more scope.  I did a whole ramen tour of New York and I found David Chang’s to be horrific – they have cut corners – they don’t build it up in layers from the base on site like we do – all they do is ladle it out from large containers and you can’t cut those corners and create great ramen. The power of marketing and PR is a lot greater in the states. We have a new venture now near Five Dials - Flesh and Buns – but is more like a Japanese gastro pub.”

American-inspired cuisine is not just making waves in London – even Paris is feeling the impact. Last year, Greg Marchand, of Frenchie, (www.frenchie-restaurant.com) one of the most influential of the younger generation of French chefs, opened an American-inspired bar and takeaway called Frenchie to Go. Marchand named his establishments after earning the nickname Frenchie, while he was head chef at Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen restaurant in London. 

However, he also spent several years in New York, including at Grammercy Tavern. Frenchie To Go is packed from breakfast onwards, with its bacon sandwich served in an English muffin to cinnamon sticky buns while lunch might be a smoked trout bagel, a pulled pork sandwich or a lobster roll.

Marchand says he “always like to open places where I like to go myself, so when I lived in London and the US, I loved eating street food – a great bacon sarnie, fish and chips, hot dogs. When you have been slaving in a kitchen all day and night, that is the sort of food you crave.” It is just down the street from Frenchie (where – declaration time - my son works in the kitchen) but because of its success, it has generated a whole range of other first-rate food shops in the street.

 Although Greg spends virtually all of his time in Frenchie, the reason for creating Frenchie to Go was because he “loved creating a space where you can come with your computer for breakfast, or come for a late lunch at 4 pm – a fun place that is authentic using the same care as we do in the restaurant. Most people just assemble ingredients, whereas here we produce everything – we ferment the sauerkraut in the cellar, we smoke our own bacon, we stuff our own sausages, we even do our own ginger beer.”

Marchand, like the other chefs mentioned here, refuse to serve Hamburgers, as they see them as something that doesn’t benefit from the sort of care and attention they devote to their dishes. “French people love this food – after all, they travel so they know what fish and chips or hot dogs should taste like and they come back. The only downside is the cost, because we use the same produce as we do in our restaurant, so that comes at a price.”

A shorter version of this story originally appeared in Newsweek

www.newsweek.com/street-food-takes-cover-252824