Best meal + experience for under $10...

...and one of the things that make San Francisco tick! I usually don't blog about food on this blog, but I promise I will make this planning-related.

I'm talking about the SF Underground Market, a free, monthly marketplace organized by forageSF.com, whose mission it is -- partly -- to "reduce carbon miles" to transport food to the table. Last Friday April 2nd, fellow foodie Jen K. and I ventured to the Market held at SOMArts. We got there around 7 pm; long lines under the freeway had us doubtful if it's worth the wait. It's BYO. Jen headed over to Trader Joe's next door for some pale ale and apple cider. We got in by 7:30, which is a half-hour wait comparable to waiting for a table at many restaurants.

And hell yeah was it worth it. I was impressed with the creativity, which, infused with my own nostalgia, made for a unique experience. Part of the it was connecting with the vendors/makers, who proudly offered taster bites. Most of the food were prepared at the vendors' home kitchen or backyard, by "veterans, people who’ve been making their products for years, but only able to share them with friends. We thought we’d give them a venue to share with the whole SF food community." -- forageSF.com.

Most main dishes were $5 for a reasonable portion and $2 for cookies, snacks, and the like. A little pricey, but I was full at the end, with all the sampling. I ended up spending on dishes that reminded me of food I grew up eating, but with a twist: (I realize not all the terms used here will be understood by everyone out there. I include a mini inter-continental food glossary below but let me know and I can explain.)

1. Pork belly on Chinese man-tou sandwich with green onions, pickled cucumber, and hoisin sauce. Char-siew-looking slices were reheated on the spot on a portable frying pan, and stuffed in the folds of the fresh white bun. The cucumber pickles were oh-so-thinly sliced, and added just enough acidity and crunch. Reminds me of: Mei cai kou rou. The twist: a bunch of edible wild onion flowers gracefully sat atop the hoisin spread. A different version here to give you an idea by Kitchen Sidecar's Katie Kwan.

2. Strawberry lavender macaroons. At first I was doubtful; there weren't samplers, and I recently declared Sweet Adeline Bakery's cherry cream-filled chocolate macaroon the best out there. But it's lavender, so I fished $2 and it was totally worth it. Probably on par with Sweet Adeline's. I didn't grow up with a lot of macaroons, but they remind me of cream-filled wafer snacks, and the lavender was the twist.

3. Earl grey lavender swirl. Another lavender twist to my all-time favorite tea, served with milk.

4. Spicy peanut brittle. Much more "refined" than what I'd find in the snack-land I grew up in, but it effectively curbed my nostalgic cravings.

Notable samples:

1. Nasturtium pesto. Interesting.
2. Maple bacon butter. 'Nuff said.

Regrets:

I did not get the rice crackers with mildly spicy peanut sauce. A half-foot crispy disc of krupuk, speckled with black sesame and the peanut sauce had meatballs/ground pork in it!!

Not taking photos. I was so busy BEING there focused on the food and the people and the whole experience!

A mini inter-continental food glossary:
Hoisin sauce: a sweet-and-sour sweet potato paste
Macaroon: almond paste cream filling sandwiched between fluffy meringue-like cookies
Forageables: Nasturtium and wild onion flowers grow along many urban sidewalks in the US.
Warung: a casual, outdoor shack selling food cooked non-commercially, ubiquitous in Indonesia. May also sell everyday needs, such as sachets of shampoo, headache medicine, and packets of instant noodles.

And now for the planning-related part of this blog. Food is usually such a contextual experience that you share with someone and the memory of it is so closely linked to place. Where you had it, who you had it with, why you were there, how you were in a bad mood because you were starving, how long you had to wait, the heavenly smells, the greasy stove tops and vents, and how full you are at the end of the meal. My theory is, good food experiences are at the heart of a great city. I don't mean just great 5-star, Michelin-rated restaurants, but more like the everyday and almost-banal occurrences of feeding oneself in the middle of the workday or on the way home from happy hour with a group of friends.

Many of the food at the SF Underground Market could easily count as Street Food. I've been really excited about the up-and-coming street food movement. Trucks serving tacos, Korean BBQ, Belgian waffles, and crème brulée, all have found their way to the streets of East Oakland, the Mission, and beyond. Modern day street food vendors have even caught the Twitter bug,
"street-food vendors have flocked to it to relay info to customers. This is particularly helpful with vendors who switch up locations from day to day—or hour to hour. In retrospect, it almost seems like Twitter was made for this purpose. What better way for a roving kitchen to publish crucial intel, from the field?" from seriouseats.com which published a list of vendors on Twitter by region.

For the record, serving food out of a booth on the street doesn't automatically make Street Food! When I went to the SF Street Food Fest on in the Mission District last year, I was -- frankly -- disappointed. Maybe it was the cold, foggy and cloudy SF weather (blame it on the rain), but I was disappointed because it wasn't the street food I was expecting. Most of the vendors were selling at exorbitant prices, for me a disturbing reflection of gentrification in the neighborhood. Folsom Street between 25th and 26th was jam-packed with slow-moving lines, so long it was hard to distinguish which lines were for which vendors. Jen and I ended up having the best pupusas at a nearby El Savadoran restaurant. Oakland's Eat Real Fest at Jack London Square the following week was slightly more spread out and was a slightly more pleasant atmosphere, but I was disappointed not to find the plethora of taco trucks that have become a common sight in East Oakland neighborhoods like Fruitvale. The two festivals made me question "What is Street Food? And why did the festivals seem so wrong?"

For me, Street Food has always been part of growing up in cities. In ballooning urban districts in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, street food is an affordable option for many, not just the working class. One of the things I must have whenever I go back to Indonesia is wonton noodle soup from a cart on the street, that's been my dad's favorite since he was a child. The cart is still in the same alley in Surabaya's Chinatown where he grew up. Selling street food is also livelihood for the vendors, an accessible way to start a business without high overheads. In Indonesia, warungs are ubiquitous along residential and commercial streets, and sell a decent lunch of rice and a meat stew, like rawon or soto, and is also the where one might linger on to chain-smoke kreteks and chit chat over coffee. Ice cream, tou hua (soft tofu flowers), ice kacang (like Taiwanese shaved ice), terang bulan (cheese and chocolate crispy pancakes) and other desserts are also commonly sold by street vendors. I also remember the woman who walked from house to house in the morning, selling vegetables on a large flat woven tray balanced on her head.

In Singapore, some of the nation's favorite and traditional dishes grew up as Street Food, e.g. prawn noodle soup, char kway teow (fried rice noodles), Hokkien mee (fried egg noodles), chai tow kway (fried carrot cake), etc. Hong Kong's now-famous dim sum that can now be found all over the world, too had its humble beginnings as street food. Wheeled on a cart or carried on 2 baskets hanging on a wooden pole balanced on the vendor's shoulders, street food vendors shout out their wares ("kai chuk!" "lo mai kai!" "chee cheong fun!") or are recognized by their signature taps on their frying pan, or on a piece of bamboo. Interested customers would greet vendors, sometimes bringing their own bowl. Part of Singapore's post-war urban redevelopment scheme, the government created spaces for "hawkers" called hawkers' centers, now common in HDB public housing districts and markets. They are open air, roofed buildings housing 5-20 stalls, with a central seating area. Commercial buildings and shopping malls often host a food court floor, a more expensive version of hawkers' centers, but serving similar food, sharing plates, bowls and cutlery. Sort of like those you find in American malls, but not quite the same.

The story of street food in Singapore provides a hint on the line between formality and informality. From the government's perspective, street food vendors are hard to regulate. Hygiene is a real issue. From the vendors' perspective, regulations could create barriers that make it impossible to sell their wares. In Singapore, the move to gather street vendors into hawkers' centers was directly motivated by the need to improve and regulate hygienic standards. Now, each stall displays a score card (A, B, C and D), a hygiene certification by public health inspectors. "To sell at a farmers market, you need to produce your wares in a commercial kitchen. This is an impossible expense for many of us, so the underground farmers market is about helping to get some exposure for all of our fellow producers without the cash for a commercial kitchen." -- forageSF.com. La Cocina, an incubator program in SF that serves to address this economic barrier, also organized last year's SF Street Food Fest. But why is it their street food didn't look like street food to me?

While I'm speaking mostly from experience, and I haven't done much research on anything I wrote above, the transition from informality to formality is probably one of the biggest challenges of cultivating a street food environment everywhere.