Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Street Food’ On Netflix, A Docuseries From The Producers Of ‘Chef’s Table’

One of the major issues we’ve had with chef-focused shows in the post-Bourdain era is that there’s a lot of concentration on the food but not as much on the people who make it, especially in less-affluent areas. Street Food, by the creators of Chef’s Table, wants to change that. Read on to find out more about this delicious show…

STREET FOOD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: The turquoise gate and doors of a food stand in Bangkok.

The Gist: Street Food, created by David Gelb and Brian McGinn of Chef’s Table, is a loving tribute to the people making fantastic food from various street-side booths, carts, and holes-in-the-wall. The first season explores eight different cities around Asia, a continent with some of the best street food on the planet.

The structure in each episode is that we see the day of a particularly exceptional street food chef, and we hear his or her story about the challenges and hardships that he or she have endured in order to get to this level of success, however they define it. Interspersed into this narrative are the observations of one or two food writers or chefs that give the big picture of how influential street food is on their native country. Also interspersed are quicker portraits of a few other stands or restaurants who serve one of the best versions of a particular street food staple.

In the first episode, we see Chow Naulkhair, a Thai-American food blogger now living in Bangkok, talk about how vibrant the city’s street food culture is and how the government has tried to shut it down, despite the vendors’ popularity with the city’s population. An example is Jay Fai, who started her stand, Raan Jay Fai, after her home burned down during her years as a seamstress, and who struggled to make ends meet until she decided to borrow money and upgrade her ingredients. She would buy the finest tiger prawns and include them in her Tom Yum noodle soup, earning her praise and, eventually, a Michelin star. We also see her make another signature dish, a massive crab omelet that we want to fly to Thailand and eat right now.

Our Take: Gelb and McGinn have honed their style over six seasons of Chef’s Table, mixing b-roll of a city or town and food porn shots that are some of the best in the game with profiles of chefs who are trying to elevate their food to new levels. In Street Food, they gave themselves a pretty good challenge by filming their first season around Asia: How do you cover a street food culture that is so distinct from country to country but is also so extensive, and do it in a way that folks like the late Anthony Bourdain haven’t already done? By finding some of the more distinctive street cooks and essentially asking them to give them their life stories. And that format sucks you in just as much as the food.

We watched the Bangkok episode as well as the one on Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam (most people know it as Saigon), and the stories of the people who struggled to get to the point where they’re revered street food purveyors were both fascinating, because it showed these people’s devotion to their craft and to make it work, whether loan sharks are breathing down their necks, competition moves in, or anything else. In Vietnam, “Truoc” Phuong put her son through college on the sales of her father’s snail recipe, which she makes along with other dishes on a table in an alley near her home. It’s not an easy life, going to the market in the wee hours to get the best snails and seafood, then cooking until late at night. But she’s proud of her self-made success, and that’s all that matters.

Oh, and the Vietnam episode made us want to run out and get a banh mi or bowl of pho right now. (We live in a part of the country where we can do that, but we bet it’s a lot better in Saigon.)

Sex and Skin: Well, there’s lots of food porn, if that counts.

Parting Shot: Jay Mai, who’s 71 but is determined to keep working, says, “So, if I still have the strength, I’ll keep cooking.” Then she gestures towards herself and says stoically, “This is me.”

Sleeper Star: We’re still thinking about that crab omelet that Jay Mai cooks.

Most Pilot-y Line: From episode to episode, the “experts” can be straightforward, like Nikky Tran (whom you may have seen in Netflix’s Ugly Delicious) or over-the-top flowery, like Naulkhair is in the Bangkok episode.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Street Food will all but transport you to the cities it profiles, and if you’re the type who wants to eat the best street food a city has to offer, this show will be heaven to you.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Street Food on Netflix