Don’t
go hungry.
I
thought that after last year, this, at least, would have been obvious. Looking
back, I had no reason to try again. It was hell; how Armageddon would look if
it started in the Westergasfabriek. Smoke, chaos and writhing bodies surrounded by
debris. It could only be worse this time, I thought. I could write about how
bad it all was, I thought. I went —
— hungry —
— the
state in which you’d think would be appropriate, freshly arrived at a food festival, ready to try
all the things you ordinarily wouldn’t because they’re not ordinarily available
to you; and here they all are, cheap, interesting and tasty. There you’d go,
weaving in and out of all the nicely spaced trucks, couple euros here, a bite
there. Just like in winter time when you wonder where all the couples who run
the oliebollen (a type of Dutch doughnut) stalls go
the rest of the year, you’d wonder where all these people – the people that run
the food trucks – go. Maybe they’re the ones that run the Christmas markets. You’d
wonder because you only ever see them at festivals, and each time in different
combinations. And you just wished one of them
would have the peace of soul to open up in bricks and mortar, maybe in noord
somewhere, somewhere offbeat. It would just be a small place, somewhere they
could keep experimenting with interesting dishes. Because they’d always be
cooking different stuff, they’d always be attracting different people. The mix
would mean our restaurant friends wouldn’t miss the road too much, they’d have
the variety they crave right at home. In a way though, you’d understand if they
chose a truck over their own place: it means less infrastructure, more freedom to
try what you like, to tweak and change. You only have to buy as much stock as
you can fit in your truck so you can try different things until you get it
right. And you’ve only got the counter standing in front of you and your
customer so, with their feedback, you’d get it right pretty soon. And if you
don’t, you can change. No stock, see?
Still
hungry.
I’d
been at De Rollende Keukens Food Festival
(Rolling Kitchens) for about half an hour without a crumb having passed my
lips. Not for lack of trying though. I’d find myself waiting in one line for 15
minutes, see I’d moved nowhere, and moved off to the next. Like with Sat Nav:
you have to commit. You trust the lady in your TomTom telling you what to do
blindly or you turn her off. If you try to do a bit of what she says and a bit
of what you think is right, you’re lost. In this case, no commitment = no food.
Starving.
And
still no food. But a loophole. I’d found a truck at which, if you managed to
get a coin, you could walk straight up to the counter. In the general confusion
people were lining up to the left and right, but there were only a few people
right up front in the middle. I dived. Swallowed. I wolfed the thing down right
there, amongst the electricity cables, gas canisters and discarded napkins. I
was on my own, back up against a tent and I thought how sad: that this was my
food festival experience.
Then
the food kicked in.
Actually,
after last year, I was semi-determined not to go. Or at least, if I went, to go on a
Sunday once everyone and their 5 uncles had already been the last 4 days of the
week. This is because, De Rollende
Keukens, I’m afraid, is exactly the opposite to what you’d like a food
festival to be about. It is not anything like what I described above. It is
crowded to the point you cannot tell if you’re standing in a line or just
stuck, the food is expensive, not
experimental (unless you count 6 different types of burgers as ‘experimental’),
the trucks familiar (like always-all-at-every-festival-in-Amsterdam-familiar) and about ¾ of the trucks have restaurants. Year round. In
Amsterdam, not even a mile away. Which are open during the festival…
But
I did and I’ve already told you why. And it was
hell. And I didn’t go on a Sunday
but on a Thursday, a public holiday, at dinnertime. And of course everyone was drunk and in the way and the lines were
literally an hour long for some places. And of course I was on my own so that even if I could find the end of a line to stand at, I had no one to do alternate
beer runs with. But once the food started working, and I was no longer hot
around my collar for not having eaten, I was ok. I could bear it. I continued
and ate some really good stuff.
And I wrote it down.
First
stop: the vegetarian Vleesch noch fisch
I’ve
eaten at these guys three times before and each time it’s been the same.
Exactly the same. Exactly as excellent as before. They serve gyros in a pita
and you could swear it’s real meat. It’s not. The pitas are excellent: big
flatbreads, fried, still soft inside and which, each time I eat one, I swear
I’ll ask for the recipe. So is the tzatziki: I could eat it with a spoon. My
only comment would be they’re a bit heavy on the oregano; but then again, I
understand that the magic non-meat thing is pulled off so well because the non-meat stuff has been
marinated in herbs we think belong on meat. Maybe a bit expensive at 7 euro but
then again, if they’re doing good things for our sad environment,
understandable. This is one truck (that doesn’t already have a restaurant) that
I’m happy will open up in brick and
mortar.
Next
stop: Worst
To balance
the vegetarian thing. Also excellent. I chose the pied de cochon, which came on thick sourdough bread atop
sauerkraut that tasted like it’s been cooking all its life (a good thing), and
almost my weight in pork scratchings. Can’t be faulted. A week later and I went
to the restaurant and ordered the pied de
cochon again.
Balancing
out the meat with fish: Vergeten vispaleis
As
much a truck as the others but I assume the ‘palace’ part refers to Scheveningen,
a town with a name so Dutch that it was used as a shibboleth during the war to
identify German spies. Also the town where the first herring catch of the year
is celebrated.
The
‘forgotten’ is a play on ‘forgotten vegetables’ – these guys serve up fish that
are caught in the net but otherwise thrown out. Last year I recall they were
serving Schar (a ‘dab’ in English?), typically something the fishermen
would keep for themselves, hang to dry, suck and chew on all day.
No longer so forgotten I guess, as this year the star of the show was the Zwarte Poon (a Gurnard fish in English,
apparently),
smoked on birch wood – and not wood pellets, either. This was very fresh fish as I could see from
their eyes looking almost still alive and their red gills. Served with a beet
salsa and in a fatty skin that was satisfying to suck on. You could spend at
least an hour on this fish - prying out the flesh from between all its bones –
if there wasn’t more to try, and if I didn’t feel so antisocial standing in
line sucking a dead fish…
Headed
South for sate kambing
Sate kambing is an Indonesian dish made
from young, buck goat, marinated in kecap
manis (think soy sauce but thick and sweet) for what tasted like the proper
amount of time, and flamed. Came with steamed rice, sambal (hot sauce) and emping
(an Indonesian chip/cracker made of deep-fried ground nut), and topped with peanut
shavings, chopped spring onion and chilli pepper. Very distinct tastes that kept
the Indonesian people coming back, probably amazed that here they were eating
something from childhood amongst all the carnage. The people running this truck
use meat that is otherwise destroyed for the lack of demand in goat meat
despite a demand in goat’s milk. Goats gotta go somewhere.
Sailing
through the Caribbean: Jamaican chicken
The pièce de résistance if only for the amount of time
spent in line. Total: 1 hour. There were rumours goin’ ‘round about this place;
people were talking. But that’s not the only reason there was a line. It was
obvious the people behind the counter weren’t doing it for the money. There was
no rush. We were at a wedding. We were at a cook-out. It was a birthday. We
were relaxed. We were eating excellently roasted
chicken - the prime pieces you’d save for yourself – and trying to avoid the
too-sweet, generic BBQ sauce on our plates.
On
my way home I passed…
…the
truck of Rainarai and stopped, trying to figure out what was going on. Here we
had a wonderful Bedouin tent with men chopping peppers with…sabres… and a black-as-night
DJ… sat atop a desert-cruising Defender spinning 80s hits…. What had caught my
attention though, were the people looping back from the line, plates in hands. Plates
full of… chopped peppers and other raw, apparently sabre-chopped vegetables.
This closed a circle for me. Earlier in the evening (at Worst, precisely), as
I’d looked up from my own food, I saw a guy eating an artichoke. Just an
artichoke. Steamed, with nothing on it.
I watched this guy for a bit wondering who the hell it was that came to
a food festival to eat an artichoke. PLAIN. I still don’t know but I know what
truck he got it from.
Cool
thing about our desert DJ truck is that they call themselves halal, organic and
‘Algerian nomads’. True desert dwellers.
