Street food is the oldest restaurant there is: a counter, a fire, and a line of people. These stories follow it around the world, from a painted takeout counter buried at Pompeii to a taco stand in Mexico City with four things on the menu and a Michelin star. Most of them begin with one cook and one good idea.
Every tile in a Street Food Around the World game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Asia
nine stories
1The street food UNESCO calls a dining room
On the tile: Hawker centers2020
Singapore once scattered its street cooks along the sidewalks, then moved them into tiled halls with shared tables. In 2020 UNESCO added the result to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, describing the halls as community dining rooms where people from different backgrounds eat side by side. It was Singapore's first entry on the list, and what it honors is not a recipe but the habit of sharing a table with strangers.
Michelin published its first guide to Singapore in 2016 and gave stars to two hawker stalls, Hong Kong Soya Sauce Chicken Rice and Noodle, and Hill Street Tai Hwa Pork Noodle. They were the first street food stalls anywhere to be awarded one. Chan Hon Meng, who ran the first of them, was serving his soy sauce chicken rice roughly 150 times a lunchtime at two dollars fifty in Singapore currency, a plate at a time, standing up.
Endo Tomekichi opened a stall in Osaka in 1933 and sold rajioyaki, a batter ball filled with beef, konjac and tempura scraps. A customer mentioned that nearby Akashi put octopus in its round snack instead. Endo tried it, switched from water to dashi and soy sauce so the batter itself had flavor, and in 1935 began selling takoyaki. His shop, Aizuya, is still treated as the birthplace of a snack now sold all over Japan.
Fukuoka kept a habit most Japanese cities gave up. Its yatai are wheeled out in the evening, set up on the sidewalk, and taken away again before morning, so the street is a restaurant for a few hours and a street the rest of the time. The city counts more than a hundred of them, gathered mainly in Tenjin and Nakasu, open from about six until the small hours. Each seats around ten people, elbow to elbow, which is rather the point.
The story goes that in 1966 Ashok Vaidya was selling batata vada, fried potato dumplings, and poha from a small stall outside Dadar station in Mumbai. Textile mill workers and commuters needed something they could carry and eat without a plate, so he put the vada inside a pav, the soft bread roll, and added chutney. Some accounts credit Sudhakar Mhatre instead, who set up at about the same time. Vaidya died in 1998, and his son Narendra still sells vada pav beside platform one.
Thailand's wartime prime minister, Plaek Phibunsongkhram, wanted a national identity and less pressure on rice. When a flood ruined paddies near Bangkok in 1942, the government pushed noodles instead, sending a recipe to restaurants and giving free carts to anyone willing to sell from the street. How close that dish was to the pad thai served today is disputed: the historian Chatichai Muksong argues the modern version took shape in the 1960s.
Supinya Junsuta, known as Jay Fai, cooks over roaring charcoal stoves at a shophouse in Bangkok, in a black apron, a beanie and ski goggles that keep the heat and smoke out of her eyes. The first Michelin guide to Bangkok, the 2018 edition, gave her a star, and she held it the following year. Her signature dish is a crab omelet: generous chunks of sweet lump crab held together by barely enough egg.
The story goes that in 1953 Ma Bok-rim was at the opening of a Korean-Chinese restaurant in Seoul when a rice cake fell into a dish of black bean noodles. She liked what she tasted, went home, and tried the same trick with gochujang, the red chili paste. The date is shaky, since few Koreans recall a red tteokbokki in the 1950s. What is solid is the street she started: Sindang-dong now has a tteokbokki town a dozen shops deep.
The baguette reached Vietnam in the middle of the nineteenth century, carried in by French colonial rule, and stayed long after the rule ended. Oxford dates the sandwich itself much later, saying banh mi is believed to have been invented in Saigon in the 1950s: a split baguette holding pate and mayonnaise from one side of the exchange, and cold meats, pickled vegetables, cucumber, herbs and chili sauce from the other. The name just means bread.
Nathan Handwerker opened a stand at Coney Island in 1916 and sold frankfurters for five cents while Feltman's, the swanky place where he used to work, charged ten. Cheap meat made people suspicious. So Handwerker hired young men in white jackets to stand at his counter eating hot dogs, and let the crowd draw its own conclusion about what kind of professional trusted the food. The stand outlived the doubt.
The favorite version has Ernest Hamwi, a Syrian immigrant selling wafer pastry beside an ice cream stand at the 1904 St. Louis fair, rolling his wafers into cones when the stand ran out of dishes. Several men at that fair told versions of the same tale, and no contemporary evidence favors one over another. Italo Marchiony had already filed a patent in 1903 for a machine that made edible ice cream cups. The fair spread the cone; it probably did not invent it.
Most restaurants in Providence closed at eight, which left the newspaper printers working through the night with nowhere to eat. Walter Scott, a pressman himself, sold them snacks from a basket, then quit his job in 1872 and built a horse-drawn night lunch wagon. From dusk until four in the morning he sold ham sandwiches, boiled eggs with bread, and slices of mince or huckleberry pie at a nickel each. His wagon is usually counted as the ancestor of the American diner.
Pat Olivieri sold hot dogs from a cart in South Philadelphia, and the story his family tells is that one afternoon in 1930 he wanted something else. He sent his brother Harry to the butcher for scraps of beef, grilled them with onions and piled them into a hot dog roll. A passing cabdriver asked for the same, ate it, and told him to forget the hot dogs. The cheese came later, and the family disagrees about it: Pat's son put it at 1951, when a manager added American, while other Olivieris say provolone.
Mohamed Abouelenein, Ahmed Elsaka and Abdelbaset Elsayed opened a hot dog cart at 53rd Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan in 1990. Every corner already had hot dogs, they found, while the city's Muslim taxi drivers had no hearty halal meal to buy mid-shift. The three switched to chicken and rice. The drivers told their passengers, the passengers told everyone else, and the cart grew into a chain that reached California.
Warwick says a customer asked Fernand Lachance to tip cheese curds into his bag of fries in 1957, and the family keeps a menu from that year listing poutine at thirty-five cents. Drummondville says Jean-Paul Roy served the finished dish, gravy included, at Le Roy Jucep, and hangs a framed certificate naming him the inventor. Both towns hold festivals. Neither has managed to settle it, and the argument is now part of the dish.
Taqueria El Califa de Leon in Mexico City has no tables, only a metal shelf to balance a plate on, and four things on the menu: bistec, chuleta, costilla, and the gaonera, a thin slice of beef filet. The first Michelin guide to Mexico, in 2024, gave it one star, the first ever awarded to a taco shop. Arturo Rivera Martinez had been cooking there for about twenty years when it arrived.
In Salvador, women in white sell acaraje, a black-eyed pea fritter fried in dende palm oil, from a tray called a tabuleiro. In January 2005 Brazil's heritage institute entered the trade in its Book of Knowledge, protecting not the fritter alone but the technique, the dress, the tray, and the link to Candomble, where the food is offered to the orixas. In 2022 the listing was widened to the whole country.
El Salvador settled the matter by statute. Legislative Decree 655, issued on April 1, 2005, declared the pupusa the national dish for its native origin and popular acceptance, and set the second Sunday of November as National Pupusa Day. What the law honors is a thick corn cake stuffed before it is griddled, with cheese, beans or pork, and sold from doorways and sidewalk griddles all over the country.
UNESCO inscribed the art of the Neapolitan pizzaiuolo in 2017, and what it protects is the craft rather than the food: four stages of preparing the dough and baking it in a wood-fired oven, including the turning motion the baker uses. About three thousand pizzaiuoli work in Naples. Apprentices learn by watching a master in the bottega, and the whole performance takes place in front of whoever is waiting.
Lampredotto is the thin, compact part of a cow's stomach, simmered in broth and enriched with tomato, then piled into a roll dipped in the cooking liquid. In Florence it is an institution, sold from the banchini dei trippai, the tripe stalls that keep their pitch in the shadow of old palaces. Tripe, intestines, udder and hoof were cheap enough for everyone, which is how a city of laborers ate, and the stalls outlasted the laborers.
Herta Heuwer is credited with mixing the sauce at her snack stand on the corner of Kantstrasse in Berlin on September 4, 1949. A patent would have meant publishing the recipe, so she protected the name instead: she applied for Chillup in February 1958, and it entered the German trade mark register in January 1959. The recipe she kept. She took it with her when she died in 1999.
Kadir Nurman set up a stall by the Zoo station in West Berlin in 1972 and sold grilled meat in bread, which made it food you could carry away. The Association of Turkish Doner Manufacturers gave him a lifetime achievement award in 2011. Others credit Mehmet Aygun, who says he did it in Berlin in 1971, or Nevzat Salim in Reutlingen in 1969, and the turning spit is older still, known in Turkey since the middle of the nineteenth century. Nurman made the Berlin version famous; the invention has no clear owner.
A genuine Cornish pasty is crimped into a D shape with the crimp along one side, and filled with beef, potato, onion and swede, which Cornwall calls turnip, seasoned mainly with salt and pepper. No other meat, no other vegetable. The Cornish Pasty Association applied for protection in 2002 and won it on February 22, 2011, when the European Commission ruled that only a pasty made in Cornwall to that recipe may be sold as Cornish. The register entry followed that July.
Eels once thrived in British rivers, which made them common and cheap, and London ate them. By the sixteenth century street traders were selling eel pies from portable ovens. Boiled and left to set in their own liquid, eels became the jellied eels of the East End, eaten cold with vinegar. Pie and mash shops opened there in the nineteenth century and spread across the city. The Thames eel population has crashed since the 1980s.
Dutch herring has a season and a ceremony. Hollandse Nieuwe is young herring caught between the middle of May and the end of June, with body fat of at least sixteen percent, gutted but left with the pancreas so that it ripens. The first barrel of the season is auctioned for charity, and the bidding is not modest: in 2025 it raised 89,500 euros for a school health charity. The rest is sold at herring stands, eaten with chopped onion.
Dutch folklore says a Gouda baker swept up the crumbs and dough scraps at the end of the day, pressed them thin, and glued two waffles together with syrup to sell to people who could not afford finer cookies. Gouda's own account is more careful: Gerard Kamphuisen, who opened his shop in 1810, was probably the inventor, and one of the oldest recipes found in the city, dated 1840, does call for scraps and crumbs. Around 1960 the city still had seventeen stroopwafel factories.
The tidy explanation is that American soldiers in French-speaking Belgium during the First World War heard French, assumed they were in France, and carried the name home. That version only began circulating widely in the early 1990s. Belgium's own founding tale, about villagers frying slivers of potato when the river froze, rests on a misread manuscript. The food historian Pierre Leclercq puts the modern fried potato on the streets of Paris in the early nineteenth century.
Every evening the open square at the heart of Marrakesh fills with food stalls, and around them storytellers, poets, snake charmers, Berber musicians, Gnaoua dancers and players of the senthir. UNESCO proclaimed the cultural space of Jemaa el-Fna a masterpiece of oral and intangible heritage in 2001, and moved it onto the Representative List in 2008. What is protected is not a building but the gathering, which has to happen again every night to exist at all.
In Morocco snails have been street food for decades, sold from roadside stalls and in the souks. They simmer slowly in a broth seasoned with aniseed, licorice root, thyme, mint, sweet and spicy pepper, bitter orange peel and crushed gum arabic tapped from acacia trees. The vendor scoops them out of the pot with a large wooden ladle into a small bowl. Customers pick each snail from its shell with a toothpick, then drink the broth, which is as much the point as the snails are.
A bunny chow is a hollowed loaf of bread filled with curry, and it is undoubtedly the invention of Durban's Indian community, most of them descended from indentured laborers the British shipped in during the nineteenth century for the sugar-cane plantations. How it started is legend. One version has an early Indian shopkeeper cutting open a loaf as an edible lunch pail for factory workers. A darker one says customers who could not be served in the same restaurants needed a curry they could carry. The name probably comes from those shopkeepers, the banias.
Falafel almost everywhere else is a chickpea fritter. In Egypt it is ta'ameya, and it is made from fava beans, mashed with cilantro, dill and cumin, fried and tucked into pita alongside ful, the stewed bean dish that comes with it. One of these small sandwiches costs about ten Egyptian pounds, and a busy cart fries several thousand pieces a day.
The name ful medames means buried beans. Fava beans go back a very long way in Egypt: a version of them appears in symbolic offerings made to the gods some three thousand years ago. The modern dish is the national breakfast, blended with oil, sesame paste and lemon, scooped into flat bread at a cart on the way to work, and priced so that almost nobody is excluded from it.
Koshari stacks rice, pasta and lentils in one bowl, tops the lot with tomato sauce and fried onions, and sells for very little from carts and small shops. In December 2025 UNESCO added it to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, citing the way it is eaten by everyone regardless of means. It was the eleventh Egyptian entry on the list and the first of them that was food.
Suya is thin beef threaded onto skewers, drizzled with groundnut oil and rubbed with yaji, a fierce dry spice mix built on ground peanuts with ginger, garlic and pepper, then grilled over an open flame. It is believed to have begun with the Hausa people of northern Nigeria, and it is now eaten all over the country, nowhere more than Lagos, where the sellers are often Hausa men known as mai suya and the smoke does the advertising.
Waakye began in northern Ghana and took its name from Hausa words for rice and beans. What sets it apart is the color: dried red sorghum leaves go into the pot with the rice and beans, stain everything a deep russet, and are lifted out before serving. Sold from roadside pots with stew and whatever else the seller has that morning, it is eaten by laborers and office workers with equal enthusiasm.
Forodhani sits on the water in Stone Town, Zanzibar, in front of the old fort. By day it is a park. As the sun goes down the grills come out and it turns into an open-air food market of grilled seafood, octopus, fruit salads, sugar cane juice and the fried parcel sold as Zanzibar pizza. The Aga Khan Trust for Culture finished a 2.4 million dollar restoration of the park in July 2009.