168. Birmingham Street Food - Old Man Bites Pig.

   I regret that I find myself repelled by photographs of burgers, often huge mounds of calorific monstrousness with everything bar the kitchen sink shoved in between the upside and downside of a sliced brioche, and find it hard to look at a burger in real life let alone a virtual one and find it even more difficult to contemplate ordering one for myself to eat.

  The burger is really the centre point of Street Food which is so trendy now, particularly here in Birmingham where the now ageing Digbeth Dining Club reborn as the Hockley Social Club pioneered street food here in the West Midlands. Of course we’ve always had street food - when I was a child I recall the vendors of hot chestnuts and baked potatoes and hot dogs laden with sweet, mildly slimy slices of onion that could be found in the smoggy, damp streets of the centre of Birmingham. There was nothing like a finger-burning baked potato or a delicious juicy hot dog on a dreary late November day in the early 1960s to bring a little joy into your life when as a child you are being dragged around Lewis’ and Rackham’s and Grey’s department stores by my mother and her 2 sisters (the adult male members of the family wisely found other things to do).

  So street food, like the poor, has been with us always. But now we have arrived in an era where street food is almost a cult even if the consumption of street food now takes place indoors and is often shockingly over-priced. Like the concept of  Fine Dining, Street Food has been marketed brilliantly and aimed highly successfully at the well paid age group who are least likely to accept a COVID-19 vaccine - as my old Gran used to say, aptly I think, those who “have more money than sense”. The Digbeth Dining Club was designed just for them, those who see themselves as being cool or whatever the present term might be, the 20 to 35 year olds who live in the Jewellery Quarter, the Gas Street area, Harborne, Kings Heath, Moseley and latterly, the superannuated  Stirchley which throughout my lifetime has been grim and unappealing but is now judged to be vibrant because it now has some coffee shops and a bakery that is not Gregg’s.

  Here where I live in the south west of the city, where Lord Austin’s old motor factory was demolished and replaced by glass and concrete and, more pleasingly, some rewilding along the river Rea which is really just a brook in this particular area, the Digbeth Dining Club has been hosting regular pop ups of five or six traders which it has named the Longbridge Dining Club and, our peculiar microclimate (persistent wind, lower temperatures and pop up showers) allowing, is a source of entertainment for the population where not very much else happens apart from minor crime (most of the pubs have closed and no-one seems prepared to risk their money opening a decent restaurant in the area). Now a building is being erected in conjunction with the Digbeth Dining Club at Longbridge to provide a permanent home for Street trader-type businesses. Is Longbridge about to become cool? A centre of the Street Food industry in Birmingham? The latest Stirchley but with fresh air and a lot of greenness? More than likely I think.

The new home of the Longbridge Dining Club under construction

  With that in mind I took the dog along with me to a recent session of the Longbridge Dining Club. The showers were repetitive and insistent but in between there was blue sky and moderate sunshine and the wind was quite soothing. There were only 5 or 6 stands and not a burger in sight. There was a steak sandwich stall, a drinks stall, an Indian food stall, a dessert stall but I choose to give my custom to a stall selling bao and south east Asian curries. And very pleasant it was too.

The Longbridge Dining Club

  

  To start I chose a very good gua bao - a very tasty version of Tiger bites pig (hu yao shi). Not being at all knowledgable about the consumption of baos, I enjoyed the bun itself very much and the nicely cooked diced pork belly it was served with had a splendidly unctuous sauce. It proved to be a happy way to pass a minute or two, so much so that I returned to the stall to treat myself to ‘a second course’.

  This was a good helping of a beautifully cooked chicken in a coconut sauce. The chicken was over seasoned but the accompanying spices helped to moderate the flavour and the accompanying salad was very good - fresh with crunchy red cabbage - and the rice was very well cooked. My bias against street food was moderated as a result of this excellent little meal under the summer clouds in the fresh breeze.

Chicken coconut curry

  It is just possible that as the combined damaging effects of COVID-19 and the present appalling Birmingham City Council (BCC-19) on the general state of the city centre continue to unravel, Longbridge, or somewhere like it, may emerge as an alternative  to the city as the place for Brummies to travel to for rest and relaxation particularly to track down good food. Now, is there anyone out there who wants to have a go at opening a smart restaurant here?