How many different ways are there of saying tortilla in Mexico? All roads lead back to them – albeit with different levels of crunchiness and shape. Tortilla with eggs for breakfast. Tostadas. Totopos, Tacos. Chilaquiles. Flautas. Giant tortillas covered in frijoles and cheese and eaten with arms outstretched. Blue ones, corn ones, flour ones. Papusas, gorditas, sudados (‘sweaty’ ones – liked them).

It’s all about the maize. Sin mais, no hay pais – Without corn, there’s no Mexico. And I love the way the food traditions of the Toltecs, Olmecs, Mayans and Aztecs have stood firm regardless of being raped by the Spanish. This is a country where you can see the culture, feel its history, in the rhythms of its street-side food prep and life of its markets. The smell of corn tortillas curls up from every other griddle and the slap, slap, slap of the dough being patted into neat little discs accompanies the other sounds that give those places their pulse: cumbia/merengue/salsa, and “elote! elote! elote!” shouted nasally from passing corn sellers, carts rolling past laden with veg and people shouting “Güera!” at you as you get in amongst it.

The vendadores set up from shopping trolleys, carts, baskets, tricycles. One guy had converted his VW Beetle (the Mexican national car) into a sugar cane juice-mobile. I stopped and chatted to him – turns out matey’s been to London and even had burrito action chez Luardos.

Mundo pequeño.

In Tulum town guys hook power to their puestas from nearby electricity lines. Nearly 30% of electricity is stolen in Mexico and I reckon the vendors have got the lion’s share. White light illuminates glistening meats and griddled tacos. The whole of Mexico favours the white light to such an extent that, from afar, cities make the sky glow silver, rather than the low orange of those over here. It’s kitchen-like, functional, a glow under which stuff gets chopped up, racked up, scooped up and sliced up. The street belongs to everyone and the warmth of the night makes you happy to stay and stay.

Watch how the Mexican eat their tacos. So neat. They say you can tell a lot about a person from the way they scoff it. Spot the tourista who’s over-loaded theirs, losing skids of beans through the bottom and meat shards over the top. They say that Mexicans are distrustful by nature but that all falls away when you’re at the stand getting your food on. Help yourself from the bowls of salsa, beans, papas, salads, then pay up at the end once you’ve counted up. When it comes to food the trust is right there – people who don’t know each other sitting like family round the same table.

One day I tried grasshoppers – chapulines – then hormigas – ants. Then they had me try a freaking dried (and very crispy) earthworm. Everyone on the stall stood around me encouragingly as I munched through it, eyebrows raised in anticipation of my reaction. ‘Ricisimo, verdad?’ they’d ask. ‘Mmmmmm!’ I’d reply.

In Mérida I spent the whole day with something to eat in my hand. From the little bags of fried pumpkin seeds that they open and throw chipotle and half a squeezed lime into (seriously delicious), to the corn ice cream (not for me). I troughed tamarind balls, flan, bags of chilli-d fruit and flors de Jamaica. Puerco profundo – the ‘deep’ bits of the pig all roiling and moiling around on a hot griddle, ready for chopping – was super-tasty and the botanas you get in the cantinas keep you loaded with food while you drink. This is tapas, Mexican style. For every beer come three plates of food – chicharrones/potato salad/cucumber salad. Or chopped hot dogs with habanero/macaroni with tomato sauce/frijoles. Kind of made you want to stay and drink all day….

In Laguinilla market in Mexico City we got lost under the yellow canopies. Pure, crazy gaud-fest amongst the 15 Años dresses – folds and layers and frills and ruches of every possible colour of satin for the girls’ big day. Made ‘My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding’ look like a dress rehearsal. Next door people ladled horchata from huge plastic urns into giant polystyrene cups. Further along the cochinita pibil stall lured us in as always. This stuff is the business: achiote and bitter orange marinaded pork, slow-roasted in banana leaves and served in toasted buns with loads of tang. Seriously, when is someone going to start a torta de cochinita pibil stall in London? I imagine one called ‘Porksville’ which gives the tired old hog-roast a run for its money. Spice and lime my pork up, man. It’s the only way to go from now on.

Then to cool down your inflamed mouth afterwards, a choice from the sorbet pallet of ice cream flavours in the trolleys going by. Those colours! Mirroring the houses and signs everywhere and calling ‘try me! try me!’.

You end up trying everything because it all looks and smells so good. This is not a country of slimmers, avoiding the bad stuff, this is a nation of proper eaters who don’t care who knows it. This is lusty, healthy, proper eating and its streets would be ghostly without it all.

I’m a fan. Bring on the next trip over there…

Curated by Jo Whiley, in aid of Mencap and in association with Milk & Honey, eat.st has been invited hawk our wares for these super-sessions. Each night will feature an incredible headliner, plus support – starting on Tues 22nd November with freaking ELBOW! And as the acts roll out over the week, so too will the eat.st crew – each night bringing two or three of our finest to keep the moshers replete and vital.

Although most of the nights are sold out (save for Wednesday and Sunday – check it out) , the good news is that you don’t need a ticket to come get your dinner on. So, if you’re in the Hackney way and want to swing ours, then St James….. is where it’s at Tuesday-Sunday, 6.30pm-10.30pm. Or, if you’re prone to a little urban rambling in the shape of a food hunt, this is your moment to head East for a taste of eat.st flavour.

eat.streeters showing out are Buen Provecho, Creperie Nicholas, Jamon Jamon, Luardos, Banh Mi 11, Jamon Jamon, Big Apple Hot Dogs, Tongue ‘n Cheek, Bhangra Burger, Kimchi Cult, Homeslice Pizza and Hardcore Prawn – and introducing for the first time under our umbrella, all the way from Nottingham, Mauritian Street Food. So if you’ve been wanting to try any or all of these curbside food crusaders by night, the time is now!

Slinging kicks off on Tuesday night with Bhangra Burger and Creperie Nicholas at the helm. All in aid of the amazing charity that is Mencap – eating well has never felt so right.

Find the full rundown of traders on the eat.st site HERE

http://littlenoisesessions.org.uk/

St John-at-Hackney Church, Lower Clapton Rd, London, E5 0PD

I’m off to Ridley Road, I told him, To look for Luca.

“Three-quarters of the way in, park in the Sainsbury’s carpark so you don’t get rinsed out on the meters and don’t buy fish from any of the stalls along the front”. Then more gruesome tales ensued. A picture emerged of a highly questionable hotbed of open-air and not-quite-so-open-air trading. A postcode poll of the punters found them coming in from Northampton, Kent, Peterborough. Places that held nothing like the cacophony of stuff that Ridley Road regularly puts out there. Stories of international smuggling, trade routes used to pass along illegal, unmentionable, unfathomable goods.

“All put paid to now of course, all cleaned up”.

I doubt it, I thought, It’s probably just receded further into the crevices, the cracks…

Coming out onto Ridley Road from the Kingsland Shopping Centre there is an amazing amount of sky stretching up out there. No high-rises, no office blocks, just sky above a great rambling encrustation of stalls and holes in walls. I felt all way up high and out there – from the low-slungness of Brixton to this perched strip of Hackney that was just full of people. That’s the magic of a good market – it throws you together with everyone and our natural human predisposition for sociality gets off on it, feels reassured by it.

After I’d walked about the 3/4 of the road I did, indeed, find Luca, purveyor of the truth as far as polpette go – or so they told me. Up on the deck of the Ridley Road Market bar sits his set-up – a 2m/1m trad market stall adorned with New York deli boards announcing the menu:

We all love a good meatball, let’s not even try and pretend. And all the signs around the place were leading me to believe that this would be one of the good ones: The box of really serious looking bread thrusting out of a hanging box to one side, the bowl of green bean salad, glistening with salt crystals, the little pot of Tiramisu sat casually by the till – none of which has anything to do with meatballs, but you can soon spot someone who knows about food.

Just give me a bit of everything, I asked, All the sauces and all the balls. Luca obliged, lining the box with the ‘creamy polenta’ and then layering on the different sauces – gorgonzola, roasted tomato and wild mushroom (but leaving out hot peperoncino so it wouldn’t obliterate the taste of the ball).

Then came the balls – two of ricotta & spinach, two of beef. “Always beef, never pork”, Luca told me. On top of this went more sauce, baby spinach and the aforementioned green bean salad which was winking at me, despite the availability of the balls. I staggered off with this great brick of a box to a nearby bench and began excavating this beast of a lunch. I flicked the spinach to the side and didn’t get too involved with the polenta (not my thing), but finally coming into contact with those polpette, all roiling and moiling in such wholesome sugo, was a great moment for me up in E8.

Luca explained the addition of ricotta and 10% of parmesan. Yes, that’s what it is – that’s what makes you think of Italy where other versions never will. Served with real charm and generosity as well. This is a guy who is enjoying being street-side and it shows. Luca Italian lifts Ridley Road, and Ridley Road gives L.I grounding in a truly interesting place.

I hope that we might persuade him to uproot himself from time to time to come and join our gang. Luca Italian is right up our strada.

Jean-Pierre PJ Stephan, the founder and soul of the culinary photography festival, has chosen the theme “Street Food” for this year’s festival. Far from the tablecloths and snooty waiters, street food expresses the unvarnished culture and history of a people and its rituals. “Tell me what you eat in the street, and I’ll tell you were you come from.” From the most commonplace to the most sophisticated, all types of flavor, color, presentation, and packaging are on display.

International Festival of Culinary Photography, 3rd Edition: Street Food

From October 28 to November 13 2011

Three exhibitions (free admission):

Espace Mobalpa,15 bd Diderot, 75012
Bercy Village, 28 rue François Truffaut, 75012
La Coupole, 102 boulevard du Montparnasse, 75014

Jimmy, Jesus and Mary have all had the INSA midas touch – now it’s the time of the eat.st collective as a whole to be treated to a bit of that sparkle.

When we first began speaking with King’s Cross about bringing eat.st to King’s Boulevard I knew that we needed some great signage that would reflect what eat.st is about – but also that would signify a departure from tradition and a nod to the future direction of open-air food slinging.

For this task, INSA was the only guy. As soon as we began talking about it we was picking up what I was putting down and then throwing it back even harder. The result – and with plenty of support from King’s Cross – is the following: dozens of separate painted boards that fan out from the King’s Boulevard ivy-clad hoarding, giving a brilliant 3D effect and firmly stamping eat.st’s name on the strip.

Or, as INSA says, we’ve created an incredibly elaborate frame for a blackboard…

We’ll be here for a while and now it’s official. Have a look at the different elements and how they were slotted together – and then come and see the thing in the flesh while you chow!

Choc Star, Bean & Gone and Luardos getting ready to mount.

Sizing up the women.

Drilling them on.

The first of the blackboard dates. People coming by were asking ‘Is it for bands? Who’s playing?’. Different kind of party, but still a performance.

Me with my mini-Jimmy.

And the final touches. Quiff-o-rama. See you there soon!

No one could ever accuse INSA of not liking pink.

El Dia de los Meurtos makes itself known throughout the van…

And the L.A-inspired Mexican roses soften the blow…

Them headlights on Mary’s grill get me every time.

Aztec coming through…

The man with the magic gun.

And suddenly, after several days of hard graft, a new icon on London’s street food scene emerges…

Look out for Mary (LuarDOS) at King’s Boulevard 21st and 28th October.

This has been the result of an ongoing dialogue between ourselves and the King’s Cross developers – taking place over a number of months. They had seen what we were about at other events in the City and wanted to bring a bit of what we were slinging to their brand new street.

It was back in July that I donned hard-hat, steel-caps, goggles, gloves and hi-vis to go lagging around what looked like a rather unprepossessing scenario…

What has since occurred – transplanted trees, set-design leaf hoarding, beautiful gravel underlay and a steady flow of PEOPLE – makes it look like a STARchitect’s utopian vision of mixed-use urban space. I rarely believe those ‘visions’ – can’t seem to reconcile what’s there now with what is being reimagined for the future. But here it is, happening, and there are all sorts sweeping up the Boulevard.

My personal favourite was the Korean guy in the future-Aztec poncho and Cuban heel/legging combo. I saw him striding around our micro-market, perusing the options and finally settling on a bit of Hardcore Prawn. He is joined by a whole swathe of quirksters emanating out of the new UAL Building. God damn, that place is amazing. If you’ve not been in you should drop in. You’ll either be pining to be a student again or trying to recall which dark recess of the place it was where you used to have it when it was Bagleys.

From along Goods Way come the food fans of Kings Place – many of them Guardian workers and looking to fill the hole that being ripped from Exmouth Market left in their lunchtimes. One guy Tweeted about King’s Cross having been an ‘erstwhile culinary wasteland’ until eat.st showed up. This is what’s great – how you can spend endless amounts of time and money on place-making from a structural point of view – but then as soon as you bring in the food the whole place springs to life.

It may only be four stalls at the moment and only two days a week, but we are just settling in to our new spot. We are open to suggestions from anyone who thinks they might visit it. This micro-market is here for a while and we want it to be used by all.

Come and see us here:

So you can get stuck in to some of the good stuff, enjoy a gentle perambulation up the Boulevard and get some fresh-ish air. The trees rustle well, anyway.

To find out who’s trading when head to www.eat.st/kings-cross – All traders and their menus listed under each Thursday and Friday in October.

After that we’ll have more for you. See you stall/cart/van-side soon!

We were there on the invitation of the Homeslice Pizza boys – linked up with us most deftly by our own erstwhile pizza boy, Charlie Nelson, of Robin’s Artisan Pizza. Chaz may have chucked in the trowel, dough-wise, but it hasn’t stopped him from having his ear to the ground on the pizza scene.He had discovered them in Hackers a few weeks back and was taken by their home-made oven, producing really special pizzas.

After getting lost and finding ourselves surrounded by blocks of condo-style buildings – all strangely US-seeming – and with the surprisingly warm evening, I really started feeling like I was indeed a very long way from Whitechapel.

At last we entered the Homeslice zone – an industrial park reached through a great moaning metal gate – and there to greet us, along with our hosts, was this:

Courtesy, along with these great pics, of Louis Fernando/Tuck & Vine. Now I knew that the holiday had really started. Always up for some proper tequila, I got stuck in immediately. MMmmm – the sweet, sweet taste of a reposado slinking over all the London-ness and enveiling it in softness.

David, George and Rowan were all ready to hit us with some Homeslice action. There was Rowan, rolling out the dough backstage, David immediately furnishing us with Cannonball beer and George looking debonnair by the oven, all Phileas Fogg moustache and formidable stance.

Ahh, the oven.

It is a hand-moulded mound of tactile beauty. I stood over it, rubbing that warm, clay Buddha belly with anticipation. Inside, a fire roared…

Outside the excitement grew. More beers, more tequilas, a group of twelve or so pizza fans awaiting for the marathon that was about to start…the table stood by, ready:

And soon enough, out of that oven came a succession of some of the best pizzas I’ve had in London.

We ate and ate and ate. Waves of hot, be-jewelled discs of delight hitting the table. Hands reaching in, decimating each arrival…

Margarita; pizza fresca; pizza with chorizo; pizza with lamb, pine nuts and sultanas; with creamed leeks and prosciutto; zucchini, mushroom & lemon – and more, many more. I gave up after about round seven, knocked out.

Maybe it was the warm evening, the newness of Brockley, the allure of the encased flames or the great people. Or it could have been the tequila. But that pizza, made so well and with such thought by those Kiwi lads, was out of the ordinary and I can’t wait to have them join our gang. Watch this space!

All photos by Louis Fernando of Tuck & Vine

Here are some of the sights – albeit with a certain eat.st bias-cut…

Bella did an amazing job with the boards. Look out for this girl – she good.

Here’s Abiye of BAHD with his small, medium and large Wieners, the likes of which the River has rarely seen. The punters lined up in serried ranks of devotion.

Arturo of Buen Provecho smiling all the way as he served up la comida buena from a dazzling array of silver receptacles.

Mama Churro held the fort while our Jorge represented for eat.st at the British Street Food Awards in Suffolk.

Skewer love.

Shades of Pulp Fiction at Hardcore Prawn.

Rustling at the foothills of the Tate – the eat.st crew makes itself a part of the furniture.

Tarrying a while on Southwark Bridge I was made up to see Westonbirt – eat.st’s very own ice cream Airstream dream. This girl can whip that stuff into a shape that is bouncing. You have to try the shakes – GRrrr.

Reclaiming the city for one day only and in a most civilised way. Dining a-straddle the Thames is a major high-point of the Festival – Feast on the Bridge got it going on, straight-up.

And so to the Scoop where Bhangra Burger, Creperie Nicholas, Tongue ‘n Cheek and Yum Bun formed a clump. Yes, the word clump is the only way to describe this splinter group of the eat.st collective at large at Thames. A rambunctious clump of flavour upon the cool, pristine paving stones of More London.

Tongue ‘n Cheek diversifies his tongue offering for the uninitiated. Wrap it in a casing and stuff it in a bun.

Yum Bun’s Jake is  alighting expert. We love this about them. Their cart looked on fire and drew the punters close…

Back at Tate, Jamon Jamon keeps the pans bubbling.

Whilst over at the Korean Embassy, Kimchi Cult send a clear message on what they’re about. Cabbage will never be the same again on this watch.

Thank you to all those who made it down – we hope you enjoyed.