Street Snack Vol 2: Small Plates
The second in my ongoing series of interviews and article on the intersection of food, drink, and planning.
There’s something about eating and drinking in a place that feels like someone’s living room that loosens the spirit. The overheard snippets of conversation, the smell of your neighbor’s dish, maybe even locking eyes with someone you’re jammed next to and striking up a conversation. One of my favorite places to drink is a room called “ye closet” at a pub in central London. If you didn’t know the people drinking in here before, chances are you will after you leave.
Speaking of tiny drinking areas, I’ve enjoyed re-reading parts of Emergent Tokyo a book edited by architects and urban designers Jorge Almazan, Naoki Saito, and Joe McReynolds. I’ve been interested in the chapter on yokocho - the dense, narrow alleys packed to the brim with bars, food counters, and other businesses - some only big enough for three or four customers.
Emergent Tokyo has some nice cross-sections of different Yochoko buildings, many of them multi-level.
Yochoko districts sprung up around train stations in post-war Japan. They began life as black markets, but in the 50’s the government enticed the vendors to move into hastily arranged wooden structures generally laid out in dense grids. Here is a picture of Golden Gai, maybe the most famous Yochoko. From above, it almost looks like a shanty town, especially since larger buildings have sprung up around it.
Despite the modesty of the buildings, the streetlife inside them is iconic to Tokyo. Chances are even if you’ve never been, and you hadn’t heard of a Yochoko before this post, you’ve seen images like this.
When you share space with a hundred competitors, you have to stand out, and so Yochokos are a riot of signs and eccentric decorations. Unsuprisngly many Yochoko bars and restaurants are staffed by their owners and become deeply personal spaces decorated to their tastes, both to differentiate themselves but also I imagine because it’s fun. For example several bars have collections of vinyl records for guests to play, others pay homage to 80’s kitcsh, there is even a hospital-themed bar. The writers of Emergent Tokyo point out that personalization and the close quarters mean many regulars become friends with the proprietors, keeping cups and bottles of liquor stashed behind the bar or trading books and records. The arrangement breeds a sort of intimacy and connection in what can be a very impersonal city.
In Tokyo and beyond, many of a city’s smallest entrepreneurs are food and drink-related. Three Egyptians and a hot dog cart on the corner of 53rd Street in Manhattan sparked a Halal food dynasty. Tamales sold out of a cooler in the parking lot, coffee kiosks, a man grilling jerk in his front yard for $10 a plate — there is a vibrant economy and thousands of livelihoods that depend on small F+B operators. I don’t think anyone is getting particularly rich off their Yochoko bar, but Golden Gai for example supports over 200 independent restaurant and bar owners and their small staffs. In many Yochokos proprietors are part of a collective that owns the land, or they belong to a cooperative that leases it for the explicit purpose of running Yochoko-style businesses on it. This insulates them from the real-estate pressures gobbling up swaths of Tokyo, a famously mid-rise and medium-density city that is increasingly putting up towers and apartment blocks. Many Yochokos that became owned by outside real estate groups have been demolished in favor of luxury development. Beyond the ownership structure, businesses share facilities like bathrooms and kitchens which further cuts down on the need for any one proprietor to take on too much overhead. It is a very good model for embracing the smallest of small businesses and creating a unique destination in the process. No real-estate developer could ever conciously design or curate this vibe. It’s the organic result of cramming hundreds of individual owners into one place.
How do other cities embrace (or reject) these types of entrepreneurs? Outside Japan, market buildings play a similar role in many countries. Similar to Yochoko, they allow a great diversity of businesses to share facilities and foot traffic. Unlike the Yochoko alleys, these are also places to get groceries and other goods (in fact they’re often primarily that, with restaurants and bars being secondary). Renting a stall at Santa Caterina in Barcelona or the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul is cheaper than opening your own restaurant.
US cities largely lack these types of spaces. Why, is a topic for another time (although as a quick aside, New York City has one. Similar to a Yochoko, Essex market was created in 1940 to house the black-market street vendors that historically crammed the Lower East Side). For a while, food trucks were America’s answer. In cities like New York and San Fransisco where start-up costs for a brick-and-mortar restaurant are astronomical, a truck became an accessible way for someone with a food concept to get into business. As their popularity exploded, cities upped their regulation of them to the point where you have to have almost as many permits in NYC to operate a truck as you do an actual restaurant. Still, despite being a bit of a hipster meme, great food trucks still exist. The predecessor of the truck is the food cart, as indelible a feature of city life as the pigeon. My old office by Zuccotti Park has a wonderful falafel cart which always generated a long line of low-level Wall Street types during lunch. What I love about this cart is that it’s a stone's throw from every corporate salad restaurant on Earth, Sweetgreen, Chopt, Dig, etc, and yet it survives.
The cart and food truck both introduce a fun wrinkle to our conversation — they’re small businesses that can move, which can give them a sort of transformative power. This Birria truck in Williamsburg parks on weekend nights by the intersection of Metropolitain and Lorimer Avenues. What is usually a forsaken square under the highway turns into an outdoor taco joint with people tucking in on benches that are empty most of the time.
Mobility also means trucks and carts can move to exploit opportunities, including serving areas that because of economics or neglect don’t have many other food options. A housing development I studied in outer London was somehow built without a single restaurant or cafe in walking distance to a large proportion of the homes. A single Halal food truck parked outside the school eventually swooped in to meet the need.
While trucks and carts are common, it’s a very hard hustle. Brick and morter restaurants tend to hate them for one. If you pay rent on a pizzeria and a truck pulls outside selling hot dogs you may have words. Business owners use their influence via chambers of commerce and Business Improvement Districts to banish vendors from their areas, not just in New York but across the country. But the real challenge is city government itself. City governments are locked in perpetual regulatory combat with all types of food businesses, whether they’re mobile or not. Often, this is for good reason. Health inspections maintain hygienic standards so people don’t get sick, liquor licenses permit certain hours of operation so excessive noise (and drunkenness) can’t bother neighbors, and fire safety inspections ensure ovens and fryers aren’t exploding all over the place. But, in NYC especially, it’s impossible not to see the regulatory deck as stacked against the little guy- especially our carts and trucks. Besides obtaining health and food handling licenses, in NYC a truck/cart must obtain a special mobile vendor license. In 1980 the city capped mobile food vending licenses at 4,000, the only city in America with such a cap. This number remained unchanged for decades despite an explosion in vending. It’s estimated that 20,000 New Yorkers work in food vending. Waiting lists for new permits are in the thousands, and those who do have licenses have started a black market of “renting” licenses to those who don’t. The license isn’t making anyone safer, or stopping illegal vending from happening, but it is making life precarious for vendors. Any vendor operating without a license, from a truck to a woman selling churros on the subway platform, can be fined, which has led to the theory held by many vending advocates that the slow processing of license applications is partially because the city collects millions of dollars in revenue from writing tickets and summonses to vendors every year.
There have been promises to increase the number of licenses, and Michael Bloomberg created the Green Cart program cutting the red tape for vegetable carts which tended to serve neighborhoods where no large grocery store would open. But it remains an incredibly challenging profession often done by immigrants with limited avenues into other types of employment.
For all our capitalist valorizing of the entrepreneur and the small business, many American cities are pretty unfriendly to them, especially when they serve food. Gabrielle Hamilton isn’t a food truck owner, but the chef’s Op-Ed in the New York Times captured the intense pleasure and struggle of trying to operate a small food business.
Prune is a cramped and lively bistro with a devoted following and a tight-knit crew. It has only 14 tables, which are jammed in so close together that not infrequently you put down your glass of wine to take a bite of your food and realize it’s on your neighbor’s table. Many friendships have started this way. Like most chefs who own these small restaurants… I’ve been driven by the sensory, the human, the poetic and the profane… But Prune at 20 is a different and reduced quantity, now that there are no more services to add and costs keep going up. It just barely banks about exactly what it needs each week to cover its expenses. I’ve joked for years that I’m in the nonprofit sector, but that has been more direly true for several years now.
I’ve written before about the increasing blandness of cities’ commercial spaces, developers tastes for building massive stores that no small businesses could ever own, and consolidation of commerical spaces into the hands of a few hedgefunds. Add the broken regulatory system, and all this helps create a system stacked against the little guy. Still, people find a way. A Jamacian chef takes over the tiny kitchen of my local coffee shop on weekend nights. COVID ushered in the pop-up restaurant as a major phenomenon as out-of-work cooks hit the road to cook deeply personal food in whatever kitchens they could find. In 2018, Inclusive Action, a non-profit in LA, aquired five commerical properties in Boyle Heights and East LA to be leased to local businesses at break-even rates. People are beginning to apply cooperative and collective ownership models to commerical space. New methods keep popping up because despite all the hurdles —and we haven’t even mentioned delivery, tipping, and all the ways we consumers made life hell—people will always want to tell stories through food, carts and trucks will continue to be a way for immigrants to make a living, and deep down many people still want a foodscape full of variety that feels personal to it’s proprietors. Every city should have it’s Goldan Gai, if not the literal arrangement than it’s spirit.
Next time on Street Snacks, we’ll be talking to a real chef on outdoor dinning, liquor licences, and the fine details of running a big-city restaurant.
I love this sentence: "What I love about this cart is that it’s a stone's throw from every corporate salad restaurant on Earth, Sweetgreen, Chopt, Dig, etc, and yet it survives." Because I dislike those corporate salad restaurants. Anyway, this is fascinating. And the Essex Market reminds of the Marheineke Market Hall in Berlin.