Matt Basile - Street Food Diaries: Irresistible Recipes Inspired By The Street

FALL IN LOVE WITH FEEDING PEOPLE

INTRODUCTION

I remember being a little boy and watching my nonno cook. Sometimes putting a meal together was a two- or three-hour process. Tomato sauce was made every fall in his garage and stored in mason jars in the basement. Im talking a years worth of sauce. Bread was made from scratch every week. It was normal to see fresh pasta hung from every apparatus in the spare bedroom. I remember watching all of this thinking this was how you cooked food. This is how people eat all the time.

I remember certain times I wouldnt want to finish something on my plate. He would always say to me, Matteo, mangia thats the best part. Somehow the part I left was always the best part. Sometimes I just wouldnt eat things to see if that would be the new best part. But he was right. It was the best part. It was all the best part. All food handmade with love was and is the best part.

When I was growing up, I had no desire to go to culinary school and model my technique on things done by some French chef who lived in the 1500s and who I had never met before (not that theres anything wrong with that, but it wasnt for me). I wanted to create something from scratch, just like my nonno had taught me, and I wanted the meals that I created for other people to be the very thing that defined me, that made me who I was.

Street food is as much about roots and stories as it is about recipes and ingredients. The act of cooking isnt about technical skill, but about falling in love with feeding people.

The whole street food movement really does epitomize this. Its the perfect combination of home-cooked meals and homemade stories. It can be the hotdog empire that started off as a cart 90 years earlier. It can be a family moving to a new part of the world and bringing with them a piece of their past. It can be a little park where people meet by the hundreds around 8 a.m. and buy you out of every last ounce of BBQ you smoked. It can be a kid from Toronto (cough, cough) who quit his cubicle job to start a pop-up, a food truck, a restaurant a street food revolution.

Street food is my life. Its how I connect with food, and in turn connect with people through food. When I first came up with the idea for Fidel Gastros, my only aim was to open up a sandwich shop. That was my end goal. Open up one shop. It was my now business partner and girlfriend, Ky, who insisted I think bigger. Very quickly, though, thinking bigger ultimately became smaller in reality. I had a meeting with the bank, and once they discovered I had no experience and no money they very quickly told me I had no business. I was crushed. To the point where I didnt even want to hear the word sandwich. And then something happened. I stopped working toward something finite and just started cooking again.

I was at a party with some friends, and instead of ordering in food, a bunch of them asked me to cook. So I did. But I didnt just cook, I brought some energy and fun to it. To the point where cooking food at the party was a part of the party, just like music, shots of tequila and then boom! The next night I wrote on a piece of paper Dinner with Fidel Gastro. That was the idea. That was the business. Create an experience that people wanted. When I finally launched it, it materialized as a pop-up. At that point, a door with walls and washrooms was irrelevant. People had to want to experience Fidel Gastros and hear the story in addition to eating the food.

Fast-forward to three years later. Pop-up became food truck became restaurant became catering company became reality television became this cookbook and on and on and on and on. Ky was right, Fidel Gastros wasnt about opening up a sandwich place, it was about connecting with people through fun food and taking that principle as far as it can go.

Creating this cookbook has been a journey for both me and my partner, Kyla (Ky) Zanardi, who is also the books photographer. She would capture moments with street food vendors and restaurant chefs, even pit masters, while I would scribble notes down on a napkin the same one that had sauce on it. Together we chronicled food stories and the recipes they inspired. This is a book about the people we met, the stories we heard, and the food we ate across North Americas incredibly close street food community. Now, although some of the stories arent necessarily from street food vendors, their food still inspired us to create street food for this book. They all represent fun food like bacon and deep-fried things, but they also make telling a story through a meal that much easier. They are the core of street foods roots inspired by others and created to bring people together by sharing a meal.

I never wanted to just write a cookbook. Neither did Ky. So we didnt. We havent given you cookie-cutter recipes and fluffy over-exposed photos of staged, plastic food. This is a cookbook about street food. Its gritty and unapologetic. I hope you change things around and make each recipe your own. I want you to get creative with some of these recipes. Dont feel you have to follow my instructions to the letter, instead see them as a guide to street food creativity.

I hope this cookbook inspires you to travel across North America or the world or your own city, to eat amazing street food and be inspired by it as well. I hope you look at these recipes and say, Ya, I love that, but what if we did this I hope you embrace street food for what it is: an opportunity to tell someone a bit about yourself by the food you make.

This is a cookbook inspired by stories, smells, that perfect dish, something clever written on a chalkboard, a loved one, a desire to be more than just a food trucker or restaurateur. Ultimately, inspired by everything and anything.

VIVA LA STREET FOOD REVOLUCIN

MATT BASILE

THERES SOMETHING ABOUT PUTTING STUFF IN BUNS THAT JUST EPITOMIZES STREET FOOD FOR ME. ITS MOBILE, ITS FUN, AND ITS NOT REALLY SPECIFIC TO ONE TYPE OF CULTURE. IF YOU THINK ABOUT IT, SAYING YOU LIKE SANDWICHES OR BURGERS IS KIND OF LIKE SAYING YOU LIKE TV. I MEAN, THATS JUST SO BROAD. THERE ARE SO MANY GENRES AND SUB-GENRES OF FOODS THAT GO IN BUNS, MAKING IT IMPOSSIBLE TO JUST LABEL IT SO ARBITRARILY. I MEAN, YOU CAN HAVE VIETNAMESE SUBS, JAPANESE INTERPRETATIONS OF A 90-YEAR-OLD HOTDOG RECIPE, OR YOUR FAVORITE MEAL REMIXED TO FIT IN A BUN. THE OPTIONS REALLY ARE ENDLESS WHEN IT COMES TO PUTTING STUFF IN BUNS.