Street Food Success

By Vincent Gabriel

There are so many views on street food with regard to its future. Some fear that soon street food will be replaced by other types of eateries. They want to preserve street food, like old buildings, as something quaint for the tourists.

Others want street food to become Modern Singapore Cuisine with great tastes based on great ingredients.

Others want street food to be affordable enough for the elderly poor, living on welfare.

Still others want street food to represent the heritage of the country, like the museums, nice to have but seldom visited.

Whatever the reason,

You have for keeping street food, the objectives of this book is to get you started on street food as one of the most interesting ways to start and to stay in a business that is viable.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456625962

Book preview

UNIT 1

What Is The Secret?

At the end of this unit you will be able to make up your mind on what are the secrets that keep street food succeeding as a business.

Food Note: Curry Puff

Introduction

Today, in 2013, street food is accepted by ALL, only that it means different things to different sections of the community. To those who live on wages below $1,500 a month, the word is food that is cheap, nutritious and pleasant. To the elderly, some living on their own it is simply hawker food. In their lifetime they remember wandering hawkers selling food. They bought the food that was related to their dialect group. If you were Teochew you had the rice porridge, if you were Heng Hua, you have the fine noodles with some vegetables.

The Malays had their rice, with a mix of vegetables and the Indians had a flat bread or prata, or thosai that was eaten with a light curry.

There were many hawkers and they served every one of us.

Is Price the Secret?

Hawker food was very cheap and the servings were large because the ordinary man in the street needed energy. The hawker compromised on hygiene. The hawker compromised on quality. The hawker paid no rent. The hawker had no thought of responsibility. They left behind their litter in the drains or on the road.

When the Ministry of the Environment put all the hawkers in centres, hygiene improved and there was less food litter in the drains and on the streets. Hawker food became available to those who lived in the HDB blocks nearby.

In a way, the scheme by the Ministry gave hawker food the opportunity to go beyond its restrictive dialect food prison to reach out to the other Chinese and eventually to all the racial groups in Singapore.

Hygiene and accessibility were the given, so PRICE became the longevity factor.

Is quality the secret?

Competition in the hawker centres was cut throat. In the old days it was quite common to see hawkers fighting over customers, touting for orders and even tricking some silly customers by forcing them to buy because they sat in a particular part of the dining area, a place built on public funds and administered by the Ministry of the Environment.

Some hawkers took drastic steps to improve the quality of their offering by:

•    producing everything themselves and keeping a strict quality control.

•    some even restricting the number of plates sold. If they produced enough ingredients for 100 plates, then they stopped selling when they reached the century. Customers caught on to the idea of limited but quality food.

•    using only fresh ingredients. Hawkers bought the fish, the pork, the vegetables from the market. If on that day, for example, there was no fish of suitable quality fish to make fish balls then they did not SELL. Rather than use inferior ingredients they were prepared to forgo quantity for quality.

•    taking extreme pains to get the stock right. Those who sold the white soup for the fish noodles boiled a lot of fish bones for as long as 20 hours. Today, many dishonest sellers use milk and one or two even more dishonest sellers use coffee sweeteners (which is made from palm oil and that is why you get the strange sweet taste).

With the best quality in that centre, a particular seller was able to destroy the competitor. The lazy, the sloppy and the plain dishonest competitors went into other jobs.

Quality will always sell.

Is it a happy memory?

Surveys done on Singaporeans, who have gone to live overseas, always say that they miss the food. Though they live in a new environment, they have not got quite used to the new food and long for what they had when they were in Singapore.

Today many enterprising professionals want to go into the food business to bring back the happy memories of food that was good.

The sellers of today focus on the sale of the product, not the process of preparing.

We all have happy memories of going to the hawker centre after school to have a lunch of a bowl of noodles or a plate of chicken rice.

We all have memories of drinking coffee or tea after a game, or after work or during short meetings at a coffee shop.

The street food is associated with our happy days.

Is it the variety?

I have been lucky to be able to consume all kinds of food, without any health or belief or religious restrictions.

The sheer variety of Chinese, Malay, Indian, Eurasian food has been augmented by new players introducing western food from the provinces of China, Thai food, Japanese food and Italian food.

You can arrange your meals in such a way that every day of the week brings a different meal item.

Case Study 1.1

The comments of a number of consumers are listed here.

It is the lard

Much of street food sold has lost the original taste that I remember from my youth. For example, fried kway teow, Hokkien prawn noodle, wanton noodle, carrot cake require pork lard. In keeping with customers’ demand for healthier choices, vegetable oil is used.

Though healthier the food has lost its fragrance.

Curry and laksa require freshly squeezed coconut milk. Vendors use low fat cream and low fat yoghurt.

The unique creamy taste is gone.

It is the way

In the past street food vendors blended and fried their own unique chillie paste, boiled their own stock using ikan bilis (anchovies), pork and chicken bones, stuffed their own sausages. (see Unit 7)

Today soup enhancers, bottled chillie paste, pre-mixed food preparations, factory produced fish cake, sausages and noodles have replaced carefully, hand-made ingredients.These factories produced items that are cheaper and are of consistent quality.

It starts from the home

The parents set the tone. They insisted that the children should learn to cook, using the recipes handed down by grandparents and parents.

Instead cooking is delegated to the maid. Cooking is reduced to a CHORE. It is to be expected that as the legends (of food) retire the younger generation unable to cook lose the trade. (see Unit 7)

It is the atmosphere

The old Bugis Street (see Unit 6) was a wild place at most times, but people liked that as long as they did not get hurt.

The Glutton’s Square (where now a mall stands) used to be known as a very dirty place. After the hawkers have pushed their carts away, and the car park was available the place was littered and sometimes broken plates, stools and glass were to be found. However customers loved to come and they loved the anti-social behaviour.

You decide if any of these or if all of these create the authentic hawker food.

Case Study 1.2

Singapore Street Does the Better Job

In September 2013, K C Foo reputed to be one of Hong Kong’s most influential food blogger said that Singapore had done a better job of preserving the street food traditions.

He had spent 10 days testing 85 stalls and in the end his food guide is aimed at the half million Hong Kong visitors to Singapore. Most of whom state that they spend 50% of their travel budget on street food.

To him the plus points of Singapore street food are:

•    consistency of the quality of street food

•    the variety of food that includes the contributions from the three main ethnic groups and in addition contributions from that the groups that have recently come to work and live in Singapore

To him the minus points between Singapore and Hong Kong street food are:

•    the difference in emphasis. While in Singapore there is an emphasis on the chilli sauce in nasi lemak or