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Street Food Home Introduction Louisville, KY Cedar Rapids Chicago Denmark Plano/Dallas/Fort Worth Richmond, VA Singapore Trenton, NJ San Antonio, TX India New York City Nashville, TN Olympia, WA	Denmark We spent three weeks in Denmark as the guest of a friend we knew through the Earthdawn tabletop roleplaying game community. In turn, we hosted him when he came to Chicago, and then went on to Gencon. We slept on a folding bed in the middle room, bought pickled herring and black bread at local markets for breakfast, and got to see Kobnhavn and Roskilde less like tourists and more like Danes. French dogs were the first street food item we ran into, in Taastrup, by the rail station where we took the train into Kobnhavn. These are hot dogs, more or less, but the bun is closed at one end, with a long hollow. When you order a French dog, the seller puts a squirt of ketchup and one of mustard into the roll, then drops the long sausage into it vertically, to drive the condiments down. A bit inevitably spooges out around the hot dog, which sticks out the end of the bun a few centimeters. It’s all very phallic, and the Danes think it’s funny, and I’m not gonna judge. I will say I ate a few of them, and enjoyed them, and had no ill effects from my food sensitivities as they were proper sausages done up from animals that hadn’t been packed off to a feed lot like they do in the USA. The lángos truck got much more of our business once we tried it. Their version of a lángos, which is generally a deep fried flatbread, was a potato dough, rolled out seriously thin, and laid carefully atop the hot oil in a deep fryer, so that it floated. Once browned, the bread was taken out of the fryer, quickly mopped on a paper towel, then plopped into a paper lined basket and formed into something like the shell Americans use for taco salads. From there, you could get cheese, or a ragout style meat filling, and the whole thing was topped with the obligatory dollop of sour cream. The truck wasn’t doing nearly the business of the French dog carts. We tried to fix that as best we could. The spicy ragout with the cool sour cream atop, on a crispy hot potato bread, was just amazing. Now, with both of these, there were health certificates displayed, like you’d see in the USA. The truck was spotlessly clean, and the French dog sellers did their wipedown at the first opportunity. These are things to look for in street food. Is the preparation area kept clean? How aggressive are they about it? Is there a health inspection certificate on display, and if so, what’s the grade and when was the last update? Make sure you know what grade to expect. In Singapore, the hawker centres are regularly inspected, but they can never get better than a B because the dining and food preparation area is not fully enclosed. But I get ahead of myself.

Street Food Home

Introduction
Louisville, KY
Cedar Rapids
Chicago
Denmark
Plano/Dallas/Fort Worth
Richmond, VA
Singapore
Trenton, NJ
San Antonio, TX
India
New York City
Nashville, TN
Olympia, WA

Denmark

We spent three weeks in Denmark as the guest of a friend we knew through the Earthdawn tabletop roleplaying game community. In turn, we hosted him when he came to Chicago, and then went on to Gencon. We slept on a folding bed in the middle room, bought pickled herring and black bread at local markets for breakfast, and got to see Kobnhavn and Roskilde less like tourists and more like Danes.

French dogs were the first street food item we ran into, in Taastrup, by the rail station where we took the train into Kobnhavn. These are hot dogs, more or less, but the bun is closed at one end, with a long hollow. When you order a French dog, the seller puts a squirt of ketchup and one of mustard into the roll, then drops the long sausage into it vertically, to drive the condiments down. A bit inevitably spooges out around the hot dog, which sticks out the end of the bun a few centimeters. It’s all very phallic, and the Danes think it’s funny, and I’m not gonna judge. I will say I ate a few of them, and enjoyed them, and had no ill effects from my food sensitivities as they were proper sausages done up from animals that hadn’t been packed off to a feed lot like they do in the USA.

The lángos truck got much more of our business once we tried it. Their version of a lángos, which is generally a deep fried flatbread, was a potato dough, rolled out seriously thin, and laid carefully atop the hot oil in a deep fryer, so that it floated. Once browned, the bread was taken out of the fryer, quickly mopped on a paper towel, then plopped into a paper lined basket and formed into something like the shell Americans use for taco salads. From there, you could get cheese, or a ragout style meat filling, and the whole thing was topped with the obligatory dollop of sour cream. The truck wasn’t doing nearly the business of the French dog carts. We tried to fix that as best we could. The spicy ragout with the cool sour cream atop, on a crispy hot potato bread, was just amazing.

Now, with both of these, there were health certificates displayed, like you’d see in the USA. The truck was spotlessly clean, and the French dog sellers did their wipedown at the first opportunity. These are things to look for in street food. Is the preparation area kept clean? How aggressive are they about it? Is there a health inspection certificate on display, and if so, what’s the grade and when was the last update? Make sure you know what grade to expect. In Singapore, the hawker centres are regularly inspected, but they can never get better than a B because the dining and food preparation area is not fully enclosed. But I get ahead of myself.