First Contact With Street Food

The best meal of most trips costs less than the airport coffee. It comes on a paper plate, or a banana leaf, or wrapped in newsprint. It's cooked over charcoal by someone who has been doing exactly that one thing for twenty years.

Street food scares first-time travelers, mostly for the wrong reasons. Once you learn how to read a stall, you eat better than the guidebook restaurants ever quite manage.

The turnover rule

The single most useful thing you can know about a street stall is how quickly the food moves. A stall with a line of local commuters at lunch has ingredients that have been in the open air for minutes, not hours. A stall with no line and a full tray of pre-cooked food is a different risk.

Pick busy over pretty. Pick a stall that cooks to order over a stall that reheats. Pick a stall where the cook's hands are visible and moving over one where the food sits under a lamp.

Hot, fresh, and cooked in front of you

The reason cooked-to-order street food is generally safer than restaurant food is that you can see the whole process. High heat kills what needs killing. If your bowl of pho or pad see ew or tacos al pastor is steaming when it hits the table, you're on solid ground.

Where street food gets riskier is in the pre-prepared items. Cold rice salads that have been in the sun. Sauces that haven't been refrigerated. Cut fruit sitting out. When in doubt, order the thing that gets fired on the grill in front of you.

The cities where street food is the point

Some cities almost require you to eat on the street to understand them.

• Bangkok, especially the alleys of Chinatown after dark
• Mexico City, from the taco stands of Roma Norte to the market kitchens of Coyoacan
• Marrakech, at the Djemaa el-Fna as it fills with smoke at sunset
• Palermo, where the panelle and arancine are older than the buildings
• Ho Chi Minh City, where the best pho is in a plastic chair on a curb
• Istanbul, where the fish sandwich on the Bosphorus is worth planning around

In every one of these, the sit-down restaurant version is a shadow of the version you eat standing up.

Learning the names before you arrive

Almost every street food culture has ten or twelve dishes that make up 80 percent of what's actually sold. Learn those names before you land. In Vietnam, know pho, bun bo hue, banh mi, banh xeo, com tam. In Mexico, tacos, tlacoyos, quesadillas, elotes, esquites. In Thailand, khao kha moo, pad see ew, som tam, khanom jeen.

Then you can point at what you want without needing English on a menu, and you're eating what the country actually eats, not what the country thinks tourists want.

Watching how locals order

Every food culture has a rhythm to ordering. In a Bangkok noodle stall, you point at your noodle, then your protein, then your broth. In a taqueria you say the meat, then the number, then either "con todo" or the specific toppings you want. In a Turkish balik ekmek boat, you queue, you pay, you collect.

Two minutes of watching in line saves you the awkwardness of holding up the person behind you.

The drink question

The old advice about bottled water still mostly holds. In many street-food cities, the safe bet is bottled water, canned drinks, fresh coconut still in its shell, or hot drinks. Ice made from purified water at a busy stall is usually fine. Ice at a tiny stand in a rural market is a gamble.

If you're going to eat street food seriously for two weeks, bring a small course of a preventative like bismuth or a light dose of activated charcoal, and know what a rehydration salt packet looks like at the local pharmacy. See First Contact With Jet Lag for related notes on your body's first week.

What to do if it does go wrong

Even careful eaters lose a day sometimes. The playbook is simple.

• Drink rehydration salts, not just water
• Eat plain rice, plain toast, or plain crackers when you can
• Skip alcohol, dairy, and coffee for a day
• Sleep more than usual
• If it lasts more than 48 hours or comes with fever, see a doctor

Almost every mid-size city in the world has an English-speaking clinic that will see a foreign patient the same day for a modest fee.

The joy that matters

Street food is not about being brave. It's about eating in the place where the culture eats. A plastic stool in a Bangkok alley with a bowl of noodles you can't quite name is a better memory than most tasting menus.

Come hungry. Come curious. Bring small notes. Leave the fear at the hotel.