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Street food chef's stall becomes world's first to earn Michelin star

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Re: Street food chef's stall becomes world's first to earn Michelin star

#101

Post by puranjay »

3legcat wrote: post #52
hiou wrote: post #49

* > Incredibly, the 51-year-old, who works 17 hours a day* Could anyone comment on if this is an exaggeration? After commuting plus basic life tasks like bathing etc, this would allow him for a realistic maximum of 5 hours of sleep a day. And that is optimistic as likely this results in about 4 hours a day. It seems like the story of a person who has gone 35 years on 4 hours of sleep a day is possibly more interestin…

Based on my impression of the hawker trade in Singapore, this is pausible. I am guessing his 17 hours probably consists of the following: 2-3 hours of food preparation in the early morning. 12 hours of manning his stall. The remaining hours for commuting and other work things maybe. It is likely with the michelin star he can work fewer hours. He can choose to close his stall once he sells all his meat. It is a hard w…

The article already states that he has a line of up to 100 people to eat his food. I'm not sure finding customers is his problem.

He will likely be able to raise money now though

Re: Street food chef's stall becomes world's first to earn Michelin star

#102

Post by dempseye »

ali0sha wrote: post #90
drauh wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The English refer to London as a "town". E.g. Town and Country Magazine (est.1769). [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_and_Country_Magazine

Not quite. London is clearly a city and referred to as such, unless you're someone in high society, in which case it is just 'Town'.

> unless you're someone in high society, in which case it is just 'Town'

Please give us an example of this usage.

Re: Street food chef's stall becomes world's first to earn Michelin star

#103

Post by puranjay »

philovivero wrote: post #99
azernik wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason might be too attract a certain kind of clientele. I know AirBnB people who charge less than what the market will bear, because they know that at a higher price point customers will be much more demanding - both because of the psychological impact of paying more, but also because the kind of people who can afford $100/night are likely to be older and more picky. Similarly, by charging less and having a line…

My experience with AirBnB is opposite. The higher the price I charged, the nicer, cleaner, more-accomodating, courteous, and non-demanding the clientele. The lowest-price guests were rude, uneducated (scratching non-stick pans with forks, for example), noisy, ungracious, and otherwise a huge pain.

Likely because people paying higher price points have ample cash and aren't watching every penny they spend.

Re: Street food chef's stall becomes world's first to earn Michelin star

#104

Post by Loic »

nether wrote: post #61
bane wrote: post #21

Until recently, I thought Michelin stars were awarded everywhere if the food was good enough. As it turns out, only select cities are reviewed. Recently there's been a big push to get Michelin to review food in Seoul, South Korea (which was successful). I always just thought the lack of stars meant the food scene wasn't quite good enough. It turns out the lack of stars in, say, Washington D.C., just means they haven'…

Michelin critics are also trained to evaluate restaurants on specific Michelin criteria and to not just give their personal take on the food. So "good enough" is very specific here to what Michelin considers important.

This is true, you need a scale and criteria which can be used by all the reviewers. This is really what matters for the consistency of the grades.

Note that the Michelin is also reviewing hot-dog stands in the US and in Asia a couple of small Sushi shops have a star or I think even two.

Re: Street food chef's stall becomes world's first to earn Michelin star

#105

Post by avar »

theCodeStig wrote: post #75
avar wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not inside a mall, it's in a hawker center, a complex that doesn't have traditional shopping and is literally many levels of nothing but small one-man eateries. Saying that it's not "street food", I think, glosses over the context of what these things are in Singapore. There was a concerted effort by the government at some point to bring what were "street food" stalls in the western sense into regulated hawker c…

It sounds like you're Singaporean. Cheers! While some parts of Europe have street food, other parts of the west, such as the US do not. "There's no street food in the western sense" would more accurately be "There's no street food like there is in the rest of Southeast Asia". Contrast hawker centers with the street carts like you see in Bangkok (literally street food).

I'm not, I didn't mean to give the impression that I was. I've been to Singapore a few times though, and have eaten in the Chinatown hawker center discussed in the article several times so I thought I'd correct beachstartup's misconception of it.

It's certainly nothing like a "food court inside of a shopping mall" and the comment that it's "frequented by affluent professionals" is laughable. People from all walks of life eat in Singaporean hawker centers.

By "street food" in the western sense I assumed beachstartup was talking about mobile hot dog / kebab stands you can find in the US, or similar (but more often stationary) stands you can find on the street in many European cities.

I don't remember any of that in Singapore, although I wouldn't be surprised if it exists. Instead the demand for street food is satisfied by hawker centers.

Re: Street food chef's stall becomes world's first to earn Michelin star

#107

Post by contingencies »

saryant wrote: post #48
contingencies wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bangkok is much cheaper and has more variety than Singapore. It has real communities from different parts of the region and the world who maintain their culture, run their own schools, and speak their own languages... not some kind of silly-Singlish with cheapened versions of iconic dishes of everywhere, like this Michelin stared foodstall selling soy sauce meat. The ignorance of western culinary practitioners to mai…

Bangkok more diverse than Singapore? That doesn't really ring true. That and the fact that Singaporean students are required to study their mother language in addition to English. Also—aren't most Chinese-Singaporeans of Hokkien or Cantonese ancestry? Their forbears likely didn't speak Mandarin. For that matter, Hokkien was the dominant Chinese dialect in Singapore until relatively recently.

Bangkok more diverse than Singapore? That doesn't really ring true.

It does, when you consider that there are real communities of diverse groups, each of whom have restaurants. Just last visit (one week, about a week ago) I personally ate at authentic Tamil muslim, Sikh (temple), Karnataka, Burmese, Korean, Lebanese, Yemeni, Italian, French, Sichuan, Thai Muslim, Thai and Thai vegetarian restaurants.

That doesn't touch on Nepali, Yunnanese, Khmer, Vietnamese, Malay, Japanese, Indonesian, Philippino, African, or other Chinese or western cuisine. For sure there are many more Middle Eastern places too, Russian and eastern European, plenty of Australian, US and Canadian places, as well as South American, etc. I've eaten Iranian before there too.

Nor does it touch on the significant local cuisine of the city (some of which is Chinese-derived), or specific regional cuisine from other parts of Thailand, virtually all of which can be found in Bangkok and virtually none of which can be found intact in Singapore.

Re: Street food chef's stall becomes world's first to earn Michelin star

#108

Post by contingencies »

princeb wrote: post #46
contingencies wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bangkok is much cheaper and has more variety than Singapore. It has real communities from different parts of the region and the world who maintain their culture, run their own schools, and speak their own languages... not some kind of silly-Singlish with cheapened versions of iconic dishes of everywhere, like this Michelin stared foodstall selling soy sauce meat. The ignorance of western culinary practitioners to mai…

> considers-self-Chinese, can't-even-properly-speak-Mandarin i don't think true ethnic chinese speak mandarin. that language is something that was only recently (in the grand span of chinese history) imposed upon the rest of china by a bunch of mandarins in Peking. in fact if you look at the chinese diaspora in overseas chinatowns, the predominant language might be something like cantonese. these people have avoided…

Yes, what you say is true, which is the point: these people are multi-generational isolates. Therefore, from a mainland Chinese perspective, they are considered less Chinese, and their tastes (culinary or otherwise) unrepresentative.

It's like, if you had an Italian grandfather you never met, never having visited Italy and literally unable to speak any Italian, you visit Sicily once on holiday, pick up a few words, return to the US, and open a Sicilian food truck declaring it 'traditional' and yourself 'true ethnic Sicilian', serving only one type of pasta.

Re: Street food chef's stall becomes world's first to earn Michelin star

#109

Post by billskills »

markcerqueira wrote: post #98
beisner wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how tongue in cheek you're being, but for those for whom English isn't a first language, calling a large city like DC or NYC a 'town' is pretty common, and is a more colloquial way to describe a region rather than to indicate the size of the named region. Often it is used interchangeably with 'place', for instance: "I've lived in New York City all my life, I've got to get out of that town."

Must be a regional thing because I've never heard of cities like NYC or SF referred to as towns. I would also say "get out of town" is a saying that means "I need to get out of this specific place." Whether the place is a town, city, region is besides the point.

It's a wry/sarcastic idiom, like calling the Atlantic Ocean "the pond". Nobody actually thinks the Atlantic Ocean is a pond.

Re: Street food chef's stall becomes world's first to earn Michelin star

#110

Post by billskills »

philovivero wrote: post #97
igravious wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not an expert but I don't think this is true. I think that would make for a very narrow definition of power, and by extension superpower. Intuitively power stems from all sorts of leverage. Could be knowledge based, economic, any number of factors. One term that is often bandied about is so-called soft power, cultural factors and what have you. I say thank goodness military might is not the only measure of power…

He's not right. If you discount China as a superpower, then you discount a country that could single-handedly throw the entire world into a state of political, economic, and military chaos overnight. Defining power as military-only is as naîve as defining it as male-only or violence-only or sword-only. You are right. One should take care defining a word so narrowly that it can only apply to one thing. If "superpower"…

Look, you eggheads can whine about China's economy all you want, fact is, "power projection"/"force projection" is a _military term_ for the ability to assert military force in a given part of the world in a short period of time. You can argue about _that_ being US-centric if you want, and maybe you should, because most accountings of that metric have the US far ahead of the rest of the world.
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