`There was this newness, and an energy and

Take one club promoter and place in an industrial space. Add DJs,
communal trestle tables, twinkling bare bulbs. Sprinkle liberally
with assorted street foods – pizza, tacos, ribs, to taste. Drizzle with
the flavour of foreign night markets, add a generous helping of rave
– and you have a food-meets-music phenomenon that’s sweeping
across the capital. By Kate Spicer. Illustrations by Santiago Vargues
getty images
O
78 summer 2014
n New Year’s Day, 2011, the London club promoter Dominic
Cools-Lartigue had an epiphany. As he stood in the DJ booth
at his latest sold-out party in East London, watching 1,000
people go wild, he thought, “I don’t want to do this any more.”
Cools-Lartigue was approaching 40, but his credibility and
income were just fine. However, that night, “I looked out at these sweaty, happy
people, from behind the decks, and it felt like I was sitting at my desk in a dingy
office staring at a dying pot plant and boring Nigel from accounts. I hated the view.”
Not long after, he stopped throwing parties altogether. But his 20 years as a
club promoter proved the perfect training for what came next. His understanding
of out-of-sight, “underground” trends, as yet untranslated into media hype, alerted
him to a small revolution happening across London based on quality street food.
Single vendors, some of them amateurs, were thriving and, like small bands,
attracting crowds of people to streets and car parks outside pubs. “There was this
newness, and an energy and camaraderie among traders, that felt very familiar to
me,” Cools-Lartigue says. “I hadn’t felt it in dance music since the Nineties.”
Cools-Lartigue had experienced night markets in Zanzibar and Barbados
and loved them; he wondered why something similar wasn’t happening in
London. What he didn’t know was that night markets were becoming a big story
in the hipper capitals of the US. He figured that gathering all the street-food
vendors in one place would surely draw greater crowds, and besides, lots of people
in one place enjoying themselves was what he did best. He listed all the popular
street-food vendors on his flyers just as he’d once done with DJ line-ups at raves.
He put on his first night market in the car park of the venue he had
previously thrown raves at. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” he confesses. “I felt
like an outsider crashing someone else’s party. I realised I had to immerse myself
properly in this street-food scene. I’d take my son, Remy, who was three at the
time, and say, ‘One day, when we’ve done our homework, we’re going to have our
own market,’ and he absolutely loved it.”
Street Feast began in East London on a Friday night in May 2012 as “a
weekly home for London’s nomadic street-food circus”, featuring the most
followed stars of the scene at that time: the Ribman, Big Apple Hot Dogs, Mama’s
Jerk Station, the Bowler, Yum Bun, Hardcore Prawn… His first eight events
had no music at all until he recruited a former rave DJ, Chris Energy, who “set up
his record stall and played the best funk, hip-hop, jungle, disco. I remember looking
at all these people and feeling all the positive energy…” The passionate food vendors
were brought together on an unprecedented scale at something akin to a food rave;
people came to be together, to eat and to tell their friends all about it afterwards. After Cools-Lartigue joined forces with the Manchester-born bar owner
Jonathan Downey, who shared his passion for street food and parties and also
brought good drinks to the table, Street Feast expanded rapidly. Last year it set
up in a builder’s yard, and regularly fed up to 5,000 people every weekend,
sometimes 7,000. Cools-Lartigue became the public face of a scene that
everyone wanted in on: Soho House has its Dirty Burger; Angela Hartnett went
“street” for an event in 2012 called Chilli Stand Off; even Heston Blumenthal’s
then sidekick, James “Jocky” Petrie, showed at 2011’s Ribstock. Cools-Lartigue
was on the Evening Standard’s 2013 Power 1000 list alongside the likes of Fergus
‘There was this newness,
and an energy and
camaraderie among traders,
that felt very familiar to me.
I hadn’t felt it in dance
music since the Nineties’
town issue 7
79
‘We need a form of fun that
takes us out of dodgy pubs
and stuffy restaurants, and
away from being stuck at
home in front of the telly’
Henderson, Ruth Rogers, Jamie Oliver, Fay Maschler and Gizzi Erskine (now a
frequent special host, DJ and chef at his events).
Beneath strings of twinkling bare bulbs, with a DJ raising the good vibes,
hungry revellers sit at long trestle tables, sharing wine and eating from paper plates:
pulled pork, tacos, steamed Chinese buns, burgers, ribs, a kaleidoscope of meringues,
margarita lollipops. The comparing and contrasting that goes on is very music
festival: “Man, those lobster rolls are amazing.” “No, you’ve got to try the pizza.”
At their spin-off event, Truck Stop, which landed at Canary Wharf last
summer, 10,000 people turned up over four days. Last November, CoolsLartigue and Downey moved Street Feast to a former textile factory in Bethnal
Green which they nicknamed, with a nod to Singapore’s hawker markets,
Hawker House. Downey painted the old warehouse in the same industrial style
as the legendary Manchester nightclub the Hacienda. Theirs is not the only food-fest to be influenced by nightlife: techno DJ Seth
Troxler and house DJ Jon Carter have also crossed over from beats to eats. Troxler’s
Smokey Tails is a riverside barbeque joint in Hackney Wick, with world-class
underground DJs on the decks. Carter, once renowned for his ability to stay up
well after bedtime, now co-owns a sizeable company, 580 Limited, which includes
under its umbrella the restaurants John Salt in Islington and the Shoreditch
gastroboozer, The Owl & Pussycat. “We know something about pleasing the
people – we’ve been doing that all our lives,” says Carter. “It’s about having that
faith. When I started changing over it was with music-led pubs – all the big
nightclubs were dying and it seemed a natural transition. There started to be more
of a crossover between a pub and a club, whereas they used to be very different.”
The scene is growing apace, and Dominic Cools-Lartigue is expanding his
vision further still. His latest venture, Fairground, is ranged over three floors and
9,000 sq ft of office space in Hackney’s Kingsland Road. Fairground further tests
how music and food can syncopate. There is live music, DJs, three bars, street
food; a series of “progressive, disruptive and controversial” talks, pitched
somewhere between a rowdy American chat show and TED lectures, curated by
the Grandaad network (a LinkedIn for creatives); and a large pop-up restaurant,
hosted each week by names “you wouldn’t expect in East London”.
“What I know is that people want places to socialise,” says Cools-Lartigue.
“A lot of the people who come to Street Feast don’t want to go out out, but they do
want to be among people. We need a form of fun that takes us out of dodgy pubs
and stuffy restaurants, and away from being stuck at home in front of the telly.”
Other street-food events include The StockMKT, The Long Table, KERB…
But true to rave’s original all-for-one ethos, Cools-Lartigue enthuses about the
competition. “Everyone involved in street food is a small business that needs
encouraging,” he points out.
Despite this, few London councils have got behind them, with Hackney a
notable exception. “I think it’s culture shock,” Cools-Lartigue continues. “They
hear about 1,000 people gathering in a warehouse in East London and think:
rave, noise, crime, disorder. But when they finally come down they find a well-run
operation full of all sorts of people enjoying themselves in a safe environment.”
When DJs come down to the Hawker House event the first thing they say
to Cools-Lartigue is, “This’d be a great place to put on a rave.” Indeed, it’s what he
used to fix upon, too. “Now I say, ‘This’d be a great place to put on a Street Feast,’ ”
he observes. “But my first thought is still, ‘Where are we going to put the decks?’ ”
Fairground is at 260-264 Kingsland Road, E8
THE new FOODIE truckers
Around the capital a new breed of hip food entrepreneur is taking
inspiration from around the world, reinventing fast food for hungry
Londoners with style, imagination and fun
SORBITIUM ICES
1976 Citroen HY van
Inventive ice creams, sorbets, granitas and
sherberts made from the finest seasonal fruit
and organic ingredients
RAINBO
1948 Ford pickup truck
Fresh gyoza (Japanese dumplings), sold in
aid of a good cause – 20p from each meal
goes towards ending child labour
THE BOWLER
VW LT35 van
Hearty meatballs, made by hand in front
of you, with or without pasta – perfect
for big appetites
LUARDOS
1969 Citroën H amphibious van
Mexican burritos – vegetarian, chicken breast,
slow-cooked pork or beef cooked in spicy
chipotle – stuffed with all the trimmings
•
The Sun Also Rises by Nev Cotee
New Frontier by Donald Fagen
Telescope (Young Marco edit)
by Pino Donaggio
Isn’t It About Time Manassas
Oba, Lá Vem Ela by Junip
Evolution by Giorgio Moroder
80 summer 2014
Confirmation Bias (Telephones
rework) by Skatebord
Fantastic Man by Wiliam Onyeabor
Free (Ray Mang instrumental)
by Mari
Jo Lolo by Peter King
thomas bowles
Street Feast Top Ten, by dj Michael cook
SHAWARMA SHACK
Citroën H van
Lebanese food to go including shawarmas
– marinated chicken or spring lamb, served
with hot flatbread, salad and sauces
ORIGINAL FRY-UP MATERIAL
Former St John Ambulance
The greasy spoon goes mobile. Think
sausage, eggs, bacon, muffins, hash browns,
pancakes...and so on