There is a common belief that the overall standard of street food has declined since the lockdown days. That the market has become saturated, and that the cost has now exceeded that of restaurant food, due to ingredients cost rising and the hefty percentage they pay to the event space. Speak to traders – and I do, regularly – and they’ll often tell you that there are two types of traders; those who do most of the work themselves, and those who shop at Costco and Wing Yip. And given they all have the same shiny vans and smiley set-ups, depicting the good from the bland is almost always trial and error.
I have a roster of about a dozen in Birmingham that I eat from regularly. I think I’ve nailed it. And as much as I have the ones I love, I have the ones I’ll never give a second chance to again. We could complicate it by talking about the big guns who drop in for singular weekends, or make it way more complex by dropping a bunch of new traders – mostly from Manchester – into the city’s newest, shiniest food hall, Alfred Works. It’s a big space. Ambitious in scale and with more traders than I care to research. Fifteen-ish, according to my wife, is apparently the correct-ish answer, though the restaurateur I went for a coffee with this morning seems to think it is seventeen.
It’s a big space and I like the way it bends and curves, with new rooms appearing and old ones disappearing. I like the big open plan bit in the middle and the quieter nooks, and yet I’m concerned that something of this scale in an area that has no footfall five days a week is ill thought out, especially in a city already saturated with street food venues. They are going to need a lot of people through the doors and outside of match days I’m not sure those people exist.
Those people would be a lot easier to find if the traders were high class but they are not. I tried three of the ones I’d not been to before and the quality veered from just-about-okay, to poor, to put-it-straight-in-the-bin-and-worry-about-the-eight-quid-afterwards. The average one is House of Habesha, an Ethiopian and Eritrean trader whose £15 vegan plate hardly screamed value given it consisted of four spoonfuls, a salad, and injera so thick Sophie unraveled it for an impromptu pilates session. Of those four spoonfuls the daal-like kik alecha was good if too watery compared to its far superior red lentil sibling. The gomen is a starchy green nothingness, and the braised white cabbage is devoid of any seasoning at all. It’s not a lot of food for £15, though at least my glutes and back have been stretched out.
In the same way it’s brilliant to have an Ethiopian/ Eritrean kitchen in Birmingham, it’s also equally great to have a Palestinian kitchen here, and I desperately want to like Baity but the food we had simply wasn’t good enough. Dry chicken shawarma on chips with a gloopy unidentifiable sauce. There is something really salty and abrasive that could be MSG or just too much salt. Little Penang is our last destination for chicken satay. It’s awful. My mate swears the chicken is from a frozen aisle of Wing Yip, whilst I swear I could recreate the sauce with coconut milk and a jar of peanut butter. The chicken is spongey and yet dry, and Sophie taps out after one bite in fear of getting poorly and ruining our weekend. We go home and pick a McDonalds up on the way back. I wish that last sentence was a joke.
There is better there. We could have eaten safely and well on Esmie’s and The Milkman, but what’s the point of that when there is so much new to try. I’m trying desperately to see the positives so I’ll go with this; it’s great that that they are trying to bring a flavour of the world to a bit of Brum that desperately needs the increased footfall during the week, but the food has to improve, especially when Herberts Yard and the one where you can get Soi 1268 and Zindiya exist.
5/10
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