Fried Food

A large number of restaurants in a close proximity is a great thing. Restaurants are so much more useful than bars. You can get drunk in a restaurant too, but you can’t go to a bar for their degustation. That’s a long time, and a lot of food. You can go to a bar for a short time, and for a little food, but it will be what it will be. Maybe the bar has someone who makes their food? Someone who actually cares. Maybe they get food from the place next door. Sweeping it through the connecting door that separates the dive bar from the Thai place. Maybe they go to Costco once a month to pick up enough frozen samosas to get through Memorial Day. The point is; bar food is statistically less likely to be good than restaurant food. Of course this entirely depends on the bar. And the restaurant.

In this glorious city you don’t just get food at restaurants or bars or cafes. You can buy it on the street. This is a simple concept to anyone who was born in a highly populated nation. If your home country has, say, over 100 million people, then street food is likely plentiful and delicious. If your home country has under 100 million people, you probably grew up hearing about food safety laws and inspections. Any go-getter tenacious enough to set up their stall found themselves as the center of local attention for days or maybe even hours before they were raided and shut down by the relevant authorities. This is not a rule. Not much in this world is a rule. But it’s certainly been my experience.

One thing that full-service restaurants and pop-up street food operations have in common is their smells of good food. Predominantly, fried food. In America “fried” usually denotes something that was cooked by way of immersion in hot oil. I have arrived at the personal opinion that one can also fry something on a flat-top grill. That is to say, by adding enough oil to the flat top, whatever is being grilled is essentially being immersed in oil. Maybe not all at the same time, but with enough cajoling between two metal implements from the restaurant supply store, you end up with a product that is as good as fried to me. I would like to thank Mexican people for teaching me this.

The biggest problem with fried food for me is how attractive it is. Fried food can be any number of different things each ranging on a scale of tasty to sickly. The end result is variable.  But in the preparation of fried food, it is all equally sexy. Whether it’s being dunked like a person who definitely was not a witch, or fry-grilled like a surfer at Pipeline being tossed around in waves of oil, both methods succeed in emitting that smell. That smell…

Those who have worked in the fast food industry tend to dislike that smell. Or so I have heard. I have never worked in fast food. The restaurant I worked in when I was 18 took 30 minutes to get out a lunch order when we were busy. I haven’t been exposed to the smell for long enough to learn to hate it. Instead, when walking down the street, past the latest restaurants, by the street food stands, it hits me like a wall of pleasure that envelops me for a moment as a warm blanket would. I’m reminded of youth. Of county fairs. Of playing Street Fighter in the local takeaway shop back home. My mother always knew where I was and would call the shop and ask them to tell them to send me home for dinner.

The fleeting smell of fried food is there when I’m walking by to let me inhale and to remind me of something happy. And as fast as it was there, it is now gone. Replaced by a musk from the boxing gym next door - doors flung open to the street to allow cooling and ogling. It smells like sweat and cheap essential oils in a diffuser. That’s OK. I’m trying to eat healthy anyway.