Fast-food race favours the brave
DOUG SAUNDERS
Globe and Mail
DHAKA, BANGLADESH — The second-best thing I ever ate was in the barrio of East Los Angeles, Calif., in a little fluorescent-lit booth across the road from some first-communion-dress shops.
The thing they give you at Tacos Baja Ensenada is far more than the sum of its parts – an exquisitely fried piece of fish, warmly couched in white Mexican crema and something red and smoky, brightened with tomatoes and surrounded with airy tortillas.
You have three of them, at 79 cents each, and then get back in your car. It does something in your mouth that I cannot even describe.
That memory came back as I arrived in Dhaka this week. It's my first visit to the Bangladeshi capital, but I immediately saw a set of factors – sprawling slums, a rickshaw-driven transportation system, a vast urban underclass, a completely unregulated and chaotic system of urban governance – that usually add up to excellent fast food.
It's a formula we could learn from.
Diving into the grubby huts, stalls and booths beside the traffic-clotted streets, my suspicions were confirmed. There's something called jhal muri that I could eat all day.
It's a colourful sculpture of puffed rice soaked in mustard oil, layered with chopped onion, cucumber, tomato and a slap of hot, green chili peppers, topped with a savoury herb-and-crunch mixture. You consume it in all of three seconds and then you eat nine more and give the man 30 cents.
The guy two huts over, working with his young son, has something called fuchka, a crispy lava rock whose chewy interior is a fiery, salty, potato-and-spice mixture that yields to a soulful jet of tamarind. How they accomplish this, I have no idea, but a plate of eight is what I want right now.
And I won't even get into such exciting roadside offerings as halim, bhajapora or tehari, any one of which can make your day.
The level of cooking emerging from the slums here is more subtle and elevated than it is in many restaurants where I've settled bills in the high three figures. None of these things approach a buck, even by the dozen. The infrastructure is often just a piece of wood.
Returning from that feast, I saw well-heeled Bangladeshis getting ready to mark the holiday of Eid al-Adha by lining up around the block, in their best clothes, to get into the local KFC. My first reaction was predictable lament: With such culinary riches, they're being seduced by our Western convenience! That was followed by self-ridicule: Well, wasn't I just doing exactly the same thing, experimenting with foreign quick-bite novelties?
And then a different lament: Don't we have something better to show them than this? Can't they experience the true joys of North American fast food?
It's popular these days to pine for a return to the days of “slow†food. There are books, magazines and entire movements devoted to the worship of all things slow, authentic, non-convenient, painstaking.
This has given rise to some very refined cooking. But I do have to protest: I can name half-a-dozen places near my house that make a nice slow-roasted leg of lamb for $40 a plate. But I can't think of very many places that will give me something delicious and surprising for $2.
Fast food may well be the highest plateau of civilization – the expression, in as concise a package as possible, of all that ought to be said by food, ending with an exclamation mark.
We once had the leaders in this gastronomic haiku: the Germanophile Americans who, in the 19th century, engineered the hamburger and hot dog as penny distractions for the crowds at World's Fairs, and then perfected them into elegant glories at all-but-forgotten chains like the Apple Pan; or the Mexican immigrants who, in 1971 in San Diego, invented the burrito, and then perfected it a decade later in San Francisco's Mission District.
Alas, most of those joys are lost. We North Americans have forgotten how to make truly great fast food, surrendered those skills, like many others, to the developing world. We've lost the formula.
We haven't developed anything lately that can match the smoky, operatic beef noodles of Chongqing's back alleys, the endlessly variegated tacos of Mexico City's street kitchens or the mouth explosion that is Mumbai's beachside pani puri – which is the very best thing I've ever eaten, intestinal parasites and all.
Something has killed that sense of innovation and streetside novelty. Maybe it's excessively restrictive hygiene laws. But more likely it's equality: In the West, we think of ourselves today as consumers of fast food, not inventors of it.
Great fast food requires a class of people, usually immigrants from rural areas or foreign lands, who will concoct all night and sell all day in order to capture your eye and your tongue. When we started importing only PhDs from abroad, we lost the soul of our fast-food culture.
Or maybe we haven't completely. My friend James, an English artist, spent this autumn in Canada, and he surprised me with a blog post rhapsodizing the street-corner hot dogs in Toronto – the wonderful all-beef sausages, caramelized on the grill and served in luscious egg-bread buns with a profound array of toppings that includes such surprises as chopped green olives. Maybe there was something there.
Then there was the time he “went into a tiny Latin American grocery store in Kensington Market and there was a temporary kitchen at the back where we had pupusas and hot tamales and ate them on plastic chairs.â€
I used to live next to that store, and its pupusas are indeed the best.
And, come to think of it, the Canadian scene that warms my heart the most is the rows of mahogany-coloured duck corpses hanging in the windows of Vancouver and Toronto Chinese eateries. For $5, you can get slices of that duck, often accompanied by some excellent pork, on a bed of rice with savoury sauce.
So, with some vision, we could be as exciting as Dhaka. We just need to have some courage, loosen our laws and let a thousand jhal muris bloom.
