The vendors who create the food of India’s streets deserve our respect

If you have been reading this column for a while you will know that I can be a repetitive bore on the subject of street food.

Indian street food has long been one of my obsessions and I can bore you senseless by holding forth for hours on the differences between pani puri, golgappas and puchkas.

 

Fortunately many people seem to share my obsession. The dish that made Gaggan Anand famous is his Yoghurt Explosion, a spherical take on the flavours of street chaat. Manish Mehrotra created the greatest dessert in Indian restaurant cuisine by reworking Daulat Ki Chaat. Every single menu that Himanshu Saini introduces at Tresind Studio begins with a new version of Pani Puri.

 

   These great chefs have helped Indian street food dishes gain the respect they deserve. But it has been much harder to get people to respect the vendors and cooks who create the food of India’s streets.

 

   Despite the joy and happiness they bring people, our street food vendors are treated like dirt. They are pushed around by municipal officials. Cops routinely shake them down. And there is no safety net for street food sellers. If they can’t work for two or three days then their families go hungry. They live from day to day.

 

   A few years ago I met someone who felt the same way as I did. But unlike me, she did more than just write articles about the plight of these poor vendors. As part of the National Association of Street Vendors of India (NASVI) Sangeeta Singh fights for the rights of street food sellers every day, offering them help and hope at a time when most people take them for granted.

 

   Each year Sangeeta and NASVI organise a massive Street Food Festival in Delhi. Thousands of people attend and NASVI arranges for vendors from all over India to come and set up stalls.

 

   I wrote about the festival the first few times I attended but always felt I should do more. When Sameer Sain and I founded Culinary Culture I discovered to my delight that he felt the same way as I did.

 

   And so Culinary Culture became involved with the festival. I believed that India’s great chefs, who owed such a debt to the street food created by humble vendors, would be pleased to meet them and discuss food with them. Sameer and I also thought that it important that we recognised excellence in this sector. Culinary Culture honours great restaurant chefs with our Food Superstars list of India’s top chefs and award stars to restaurants but I often think that the awards that really matter to us are the ones we created for our street food superstars.

 

"To the credit of India’s great chefs not only did they freely give of their time but they gave the vendors something they rarely get: professional respect."

   While it’s hard enough to send people to judge restaurants in the cities where we award restaurant stars it is almost impossible to send judges to every Indian town which has a street food tradition (i.e.: every single city and town in India). So we decided to do the judging at the NASVI Street Food Festival. Because there are so many vendors from all over India we can select the best from a broad cross section of vendors; and NASVI already does some of the hard work by picking the top guys from each region for the festival.

 

   We decided to let India’s great chefs do the judging. Each year we would invite chefs from our Food Superstars Top 30 list and let them wander through the festival picking the best stalls.

 

   It has worked out better than I could have imagined. NASVI had already been fortunate to get the support of such big TV names as Sanjeev Kapoor, Ranvir Brar and Kunal Kapoor so Sangeeta was happy to have our Food Superstars chefs roam the festival looking for excellence.

 

   To the credit of India’s great chefs not only did they freely give of their time but they gave the vendors something they rarely get: professional respect.

 

   To take one instance. Manish Mehrotra’s signature Daulat Ki Chaat is patterned on the Delhi version of a UP dish which goes by many names including Malaiyo and Nimish. It’s a winter dish traditionally made early in the morning by a process that includes skimming the cream from milk that has been kept aside the night before. The final dessert is so delicate that it often melts and collapses as the day goes on and the temperature rises.

 

   At this year’s festival one of the vendors made an excellent Daulat Ki Chaat. Manish tried it, asked the vendor how exactly he made it and then explained to him how his own restaurant version used a similar technique but relied on technology to extend its shelf life. The vendor had not realised that this was even possible and as the two men swapped experiences it was fulfilling to see two great exponents of the same dish — one who has won every award for being India’s greatest chef and the other, who toils anonymously on the streets — trade stories and talk as equals.

 

   Each edition of the festival brings its own surprises. This year we had vendors from the East and North East introducing us to new dishes. There were some surprises from South India too. Who knew that the Araku valley in Andhra Pradesh had a great street food tradition or that inventive dishes cooked inside bamboo were so popular there? As a Gujarati I know that despite all the fuss made about Surat’s traditional street food (such as locho, a cousin of the dhokla) what locals really love are omelettes. But it came as a shock to many people when the judges decided that the best street food stall in the Western region (which includes Mumbai) was ‘GJ05 Omelette’ from Surat.

 

   Some results were more predictable. The best chaat in North India came from Lucknow. And the best biryani overall was won by a stall from Kolkata. (Okay; at least I thought that was predictable.)

 

   Even as the prizes were awarded and vendors were excited I felt a little sad. Because I knew this was an isolated moment. At the end of the festival the vendors would board trains to their homes. The following day they would set up their stalls on the streets. And they would once again be at the mercy of a society that has no respect for them or their talent.

 

   We really should do more for them.