> Icono Clast wrote:
> > Me, too. I'm a great advocate of street food. It's delicious,
> > healthful, and usually healthier than fancy restaurant food. During
> > nine weeks in South America, for example, I got three doses of food
> > poisoning: Each one was after eating in a first-class joint. The
> > street food never bothered me.
"Maggie White" wrote:
> Fancy restaurants usually have access to purified water with which to
> wash and prepare food, and refrigeration with which to store it while
> they "wait for your arrival." Street vendors have neither, and the oil
> can be rancid--overused to save money--the food exposed to dirty hands,
> utensils, and flies, and the food not thoroughly cooked or heated
> through for lack of enough fuel.
What I've found in my travels is that neither street vendors nor five-star
restaurants produce inherently wonderful or poisonous food. The trick when
traveling isn't to avoid one or the other but to eat where all the locals
are eating. If a place is empty while something half a block down the street
is mobbed, there's a reason for it.
Same applies to finding good ethnic cuisine wherever you are right now.
There are two Vietnamese restaurants near my home. Around dinner time one is
always jam packed with Vietnamese people, while the other has two or three
groups of people who are... well... not Vietnamese by any stretch of the
imagination. Which one do you think serves better Vietnamese food?
Richard
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