The World’s Strangest Street Food | Travel + Leisure

Description

From stinky tofu to fried water beetles, find the soul of a destination through its sidewalk snacks.

From December 2007

By Sarah Gold

Wandering through the riotous, labyrinthine stalls of Bangkok’s Chatuchak Market has given you an appetite. For hours, you’ve been pressing between crowds of local women haggling over mangoes, melons, and rank-smelling durian fruit; karaoke-CD hawkers wailing into staticky microphones; and bamboo cages full of fighting cocks and fluffy barking puppies. Suddenly, the aroma of sizzling sesame oil overtakes you—and dead ahead, you see a vendor scooping hot, crispy-looking snacks into paper bags. Funny, those crunchy piles look like…they couldn’t be, could they? Fried…water bugs?

They are indeed. And people are lining up for them.

Wild, wonderful street food: It’s what sustains native snackers all around the world. And more and more these days, it’s also satisfying intrepid travelers—visitors for whom eating like a local is both a genuine adventure and the purest expression of cultural respect. For street-food enthusiasts, it’s not possible to "do" Singapore without visiting one of the city’s infamous hawker centers; and the most quintessential Rajasthani meal is a steaming panipuri from a roadside chaat stand.

It’s largely thanks to chefs and food writers like Anthony Bourdain, Marcus Samuelsson, and Anissa Helou that embracing street food has gone mainstream. As they’ve made clear in their books (and on TV shows, like Bourdain’s No Reservations ), the days of travelers "tasting" a destination only by dining at its best restaurants are on the wane. After all, they maintain, a place’s fine-dining venues tell only half its story.

Of course, since street food really and truly caters to local tastes, it can present some daunting challenges to our palates. Authenticity and adventure aside, fried water beetles—and other roadside delicacies—can wreak havoc on digestive systems that aren’t used ...

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