Street Food Championships interviews

Entries to the Street Food Championships are about to close for this year! If you need any late entry inspiration, our three winners from last year tell us just how they did it...

Street Food Dish of the Year
Glenn Evans, Las Iguanas
Obviously the pandemic wasn’t a great thing, but it was good to see silly TikTok and Instagram videos about Mexican food. And the one dish that stood out for me was the birria taco. It didn’t look the healthiest, you know, beef tacos being dipped in fat and fried, but I was like, ‘I want a piece of that!’

Also, anything with cheese is better, right? Cheese makes things taste good, but actually it’s needed in this, because it added that bit of ‘glue’ to keep it all together. Yes, it tasted great, but it also helped with the melting, the warming.

It became my favourite dish to produce and develop over the past few years. It’s no lie that a lot of work went into it, so I was just glad it was being recognised.

Wings Round winner
Steve Chatfield, Rok Kitchen
Wings is a serious game, there are street food stalls solely dedicated to perfecting the consumption of poultry's flightless appendages. Our job as chefs: tenderise, marinade, fry them, bake them, grill them and coat them in a delicious sauce – make them fly out of the hatch.  

I've been working on my wings for years. The way I see it, the processes above are a standard practice for good wings. The wings challenge was all about incorporating Franks Hot Sauce into the dish. Spicy sauce, sharp and sour with vinegar, lends itself well to a variety of different flavour combinations. The challenge itself was to develop a dish that would bring something new to the sauce, without masking the original flavour.

My cooking philosophy is to have a balance of flavour, so I countered the sharpness of the vinegar with roasted sweet peppers, then simply amplified the original taste with a fresh chimmichurri. The wings were brined, then marinaded, grilled and tossed in the warmed-up sauce. Served with a strong cheddar potato salad, the result was an umami burst on the tongue, hot and salty, with hints of the sweet pepper and Franks Hot Sauce aftertaste.

Street Food Chef of The Year
Adel Salah, The Flag Burger
The winning dish was called The Tandoori. We were given a technical challenge to create a dish using Quorn vegan fillets. We wanted to make something that still resembles what we do at The Flag Burger, so we recreated our most popular burger, The Indian.

We played with some name ideas before deciding to call the dish The Quorndoori. This consisted of tandoori-marinated Quorn vegan fillets, onion bhaji, vegan raita, vegan lime pickle mayo, mint sauce and Indian salad, which was made up of coriander, onion, chilli, carrot, tomato and mango chutney sandwiched between a bretzel bun. It has all the flavours of an Indian takeaway but in a burger bun – it's not one to miss!

Enter now and win 1,000!
We are looking for the very best chefs from the out of home, fast-casual and restaurant sectors to compete on the day – but you’ll have to be quick! If you would like to enter, simply submit your signature street food dish to our panel of expert judges by 26th August 2022.

The Street Food Championships will be held in London on 4th October 2022. After decamping temporarily to Hertfordshire due to the pandemic, the cookery competition will be held at Islington Metal Works.

It will once again see 16 street food chefs battle it out for the chance to win £1,000. And, as well as the chance to win the Street Food Dish of the Year award, they will compete in other challenges.

The event, which will be jointly hosted by our sister publication Dine Out magazine, will be sponsored by Americana, Bewley’s, Britvic and Quorn. If you would like to enter, or require more information, go to www.streetfoodchampions.co.uk now!

You may also be interested in…