# How Tourism, Gentrification and the Pandemic Reshaped Asia's Street Food > We look at how tourism, gentrification and the pandemic are transforming Asia's legendary street food scene, and what it all means for travelers today. - URL: https://langandtrip.com.ua/en/article/vulychna-izha-v-azii-zminiuietsia-pid-vplyvom-hlobalizatsii-ta-rehuliuvannia-vlady/ - Language: en - Published: 2024-02-19 - Categories: Culture, Leisure, Restaurants, Tours, Taiwan, Food & Drinks --- A decade ago, Shilin Night Market was one of the busiest night markets in Taipei, packed wall to wall with vendors hawking hot bites of stinky tofu, fried squid and every kind of grilled meat on a skewer. Jason Cheung, a writer on Taipei culture who carefully documents the night market's history on his blog, is convinced those days are long gone. "It used to be so crowded here that you could barely move your arms," he says, walking down an alley flanked on both sides by food vendors, throwing his arms out wide. Today, on a Friday night, the market is less than half as full as it usually would be. Even though Taiwan had passed the 250-day mark without a single locally transmitted case of Covid-19, the trouble is that markets like Shilin had leaned too heavily on foreign tourists. "Shilin used to be so diverse," he says of the food on offer. "Now this market is completely geared toward tourism. Everyone sells the same thing. It's boring." ![](/storage/image/prev/july-article-image-41-1-2024.jpg) Taiwan is practically synonymous with night markets, informal gatherings of vendors that once relied on the pull of temples. It's a tradition carried over from dynastic China, where people would regularly gather at temples. Enterprising vendors flocked in from all directions to sell their wares from shoulder poles or simple carts. This is where the image of the night market got frozen in time: dense, vibrant lanes teeming with people, where vendors specialize in a single dish, perfecting the very same food across generations. 40 of Taiwan's best dishes and drinks In the latter part of the 20th century, a stretch of economic prosperity often called the Taiwan Miracle sparked a boom for businesses across the island. "From a business standpoint, the night markets were at their most prosperous in the '80s and up to the mid-'90s," says Dr. Shuenn-Der Yu, a research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology at Academia Sinica, whose doctoral dissertation focused on Taiwan's night markets. Hygiene and building standards, however, weren't always up to scratch, and the spread of diseases such as malaria, along with fire safety concerns, forced the authorities to relocate and rebuild the night markets repeatedly throughout their history. ![](/storage/image/prev/july-article-image-41-2-2024.jpg) At Shilin Night Market, for instance, a brightly lit underground section was added in 2011 in an attempt to house many of the food vendors and tidy up the street. The project flopped. Today, while there's still a healthy number of aboveground vendors doing well, the underground section is the least visited part of the night market, despite plenty of lighting and air conditioning. "A lot of people grew up here, so when the market moved underground, many of them couldn't accept it. It feels like the basement level of a shopping mall," says Cheung, noting that all the menus are almost identical in style and content. ## "Carnivals controlled by the establishment" Shilin Night Market is just a microcosm of many night markets across the island, where attempts at micromanagement have largely backfired. "In 1998, the government also proposed a five-year project to gentrify morning and night markets across the island," Yu wrote in a 2004 book on Taiwanese culture. These initiatives introduced elements such as uniforms, performances and trade shows. "\[Many\] night markets could become carnivals controlled by the establishment for the people," he suggested. "If this trend continues, the days of the truly hot and rowdy night market may soon become a thing of the past." Katy Chen, a culture writer and communications consultant in Taipei, agrees. "Night markets on the whole are stagnant," she says. "The famous stalls are still great, but they're maintaining a standard and carrying on a legacy. It doesn't feel like the people at the government level are really thinking about how to protect, preserve and grow them for the future." Of course, not every night market in Taipei has met the same fate as Shilin. The rise of bubble tea, one of Taiwan's most beloved drinks Ningxia Night Market, Chen points out, is one of the few markets in Taipei that has held on to its charm. "The classic kinds of Taiwanese food are still there: oyster omelets, charcoal-grilled sausages, fried chicken, pork blood cake, stinky tofu, and the look and feel of how the night markets work is more or less the same," she says. In one form or another, traditional street food will always be around, but the problem, locals say, is that the markets are becoming more homogeneous. "I think the quality is roughly the same. But the variety of food options has shrunk," says Cheung. "When you walk down Taiwan's old streets, you'll see the food repeating itself. They're copies of one another." According to Yu, successful night market businesses that specialize in a single dish, salt-and-pepper chicken or braised duck head, for example, began franchising their operations starting in the 1990s. The food could be prepared in a central kitchen and then distributed to stall owners to reheat on site. "Some people want to get into the night market but don't know how to cook," says Yu. "So they sign up for a franchise, and all they have to do is fry the chicken." "Now a lot of what's sold is the same," he adds. "It's a worrying trend." ![](/storage/image/prev/july-article-image-41-3-2024.jpg) ## Preserving the culture, and the chaos, of street food The erosion of street food culture isn't unique to Taipei; it's playing out across Asia. The very definition of street food is food sold on the streets, and for centuries it has been the pinnacle of economic activity in cities and a way for low-income street vendors to offer goods at low prices. But with development came higher standards of hygiene and order, forces at odds with the spontaneous nature of night markets. Meanwhile, globalization brought in dishes from all over the world and competition from multinational restaurant chains. In recent decades, cities across Asia have wrestled with how to preserve the cultural significance of street food while reining in its inherent chaos. In Beijing, that clampdown has led to the near-total elimination of spontaneous street food stalls and markets. Wangfujing shopping street, once home to a lively night market, is now a wide pedestrian boulevard lined with large department stores. From roadside stall to big-city darling: How one Taiwanese turkey rice vendor made it big In Tokyo, chain stores are creeping into the street food alleys. "The media often portrays Tokyo street food as those yakitori stands under the train tracks in central Tokyo," says Japan-based food writer Melinda Joe. "Those spots have been undergoing redevelopment over the past couple of years. It's both good and bad. A lot of those yakitori restaurants really weren't very good. But those spaces are also slowly being replaced by all these chain establishments. There's a huge Starbucks there." ![](/storage/image/prev/july-article-image-41-4-2024.jpg) In Hong Kong, street food has a de facto expiration date. Only 25 licensed street vendors remain, known as dai pai dongs, and the government isn't issuing any new licenses. "The license follows the business owner, not the business," explains Hong Kong food writer Janice Leung Hayes. "If the business owner dies or decides to retire, they can't hand the business over to anyone else. When their license expires, their stall has to close." Over the past decade, authorities in South Korea have begun cracking down on unlicensed vendors. According to the Korea Times, in 2017 there were 7,300 people running street stalls in Seoul, but only 1,000 of them had a permit from the city. "Street food has always been a kind of legal gray area, as far as I understand, but they've really started cracking down," says Robert Joe, a Korean American filmmaker based in Seoul. Bubble waffles: the uniquely Hong Kong snack popping up all over the world There are now government-sponsored markets, such as the Seoul Bamdokkaebi Night Market, but Joe says it just doesn't have the same appeal. "Nothing seems to stick around or generate enough buzz for me to ever think, 'I want to go to this official government-run night market to try this guy's burger from his truck,'" he says. Thailand's military government waged one of the region's most extreme campaigns against street food. In 2017, there was a sweeping purge of street food stalls from the main streets of Bangkok. "The government was pretty zealous about clearing the sidewalks and giving them back to the average citizen, trying to paint street food vendors as somehow not part of the city," says Chawadee Nualkhair, a Bangkok-based food writer. "They're basically throwing these vendors off the street. It's kind of heartless." Although relocation efforts were made, many of those attempts failed. "The problem is that they put the night markets in places where nobody needs the land," says Nualkhair. "These are spots that aren't so easy to get to, and the night market inevitably fails. It doesn't work. What they're doing really isn't helping anymore." ![](/storage/image/prev/july-article-image-41-5-2024.jpg) When street food is taken out of context, dropped into an underground mall or an abandoned parking lot, for instance, it loses its appeal. "They're trying to attract what they think tourists want," says Nualkhair. "But they don't understand that tourists want what they can't get in their own country. They don't want shopping malls." Take a tour of the street food at Taiwan's night markets But not everyone believes street food has to exist on the streets. KF Seetoh, a Singapore street food expert, says controlled spaces like Singapore's hawker centers have their advantages. "Yes, call it sterile if you want. Who likes getting poisoned by dodgy street food vendors?" he says. "Hawker centers in Singapore are essentially a gathering of former illegal street food vendors. They were all relocated. Every stall is supplied with water, power outlets, gas, electricity, grease traps and ventilation. There's no difference between running a hawker stall and running a restaurant." The biggest threat to Singapore's hawker stalls, and a recurring theme across Asia, is the lack of succession. "Singapore is losing this craft," says Seetoh. "It's very hard to keep pace with the old masters. It's not the kind of work college graduates are trained for, and it's also very competitive," he says. ## Fading culinary traditions While there's a certain romance to the single-dish vendor and a dish handed down and refined over centuries, for many families it's simply unrealistic. "In the '80s and '90s, night market stalls made a lot of money," Yu says of Taipei. "As a result, their children got a good education. Many of them don't want to take over the family business." According to Yu's research, at Shilin Night Market in the 1990s a successful vendor could sell their stall for US$175,002, and some went for $525,007. "That's a high price, so a lot of vendors had an incentive to just sell," he says, noting that a new buyer could keep the brand and sell it as the exact same restaurant. The science behind "wok hei," the essential ingredient in the perfect bowl of fried rice But while an aging vendor population, gentrification and government crackdowns are all threats to street food stalls across Asia, this year it seems the coronavirus pandemic could be the final death blow for many vendors. "There are no more people. In the past, you wouldn't even have been able to sit down and interview me. Business was excellent," says a Shilin Night Market vendor known as Mr. Li. The Li family has been making and selling Taiwanese spring rolls for 47 years, and out of all the changes at Shilin Night Market, he says the global pandemic has been the worst because of their reliance on international tourists. The stream of visitors has been dishearteningly low, and at 7 p.m. Li says he's already thinking about packing up and calling it a day. ![](/storage/image/prev/july-article-image-41-6-2024.jpg) "We don't have any tourists anymore," he says. "Places like Ningxia Night Market are doing fine because they cater to locals. Shilin isn't like that. And the rent is too expensive." ## Positive steps While the street stalls of past generations may soon cease to exist, many people don't see that as necessarily a bad thing, and believe the best is yet to come. In Singapore, Seetoh is lobbying for the creation of an international street food academy to raise the craft and preserve it for future generations. "There should be an institution to teach the ways of cooking comforting, heritage street food," he says. "They need to do it before these old masters leave this world." In Indonesia, food writer Kevindra Soemantri says the government is moving street food in a positive direction by bringing in food writers as consultants. "They're ramping up hygiene training and only just starting to build a big central kitchen to help train small businesses," he says. He's also seen second-generation kids taking their parents' food and repackaging it in a fresh, modern light, without watering the food down. How "durian soup" became China's trendiest dish He points to the example of a congee specialist, Bubur Cap Tiger. "They worked with a brand designer and an interior designer to create the atmosphere. It's not too gimmicky. The food is just stunning," he says, noting that the older-generation cooks are still very much helping out behind the scenes. In Taipei, Ningxia Night Market stands out for adopting mobile payments and delivery apps. By letting people pay or order through their phones, it speeds up turnaround for those waiting in line, and vendors can stay connected with their customers through online promotions. "The difference is that they think about local customers, not just tourists," Cheung explains. And so, while street food may be transforming, it's unlikely to disappear anytime soon. Yu, who has closely tracked the ebb and flow of Taiwan's night markets for nearly three decades, points out that what counts as traditional really depends on the observer's point of view. "Night markets are always changing," he says. Additional reporting by Joanne Guo.