Another popular traditional favorite is the steak with prahok sauce. Here, slices of grilled steak are served with prahok sauce, made of lime, baby eggplant, fermented fish, and red radish to create what Bun describes as a sour taste. The proper way to eat it, according to Bun, is to wrap the steak in lettuce leaves along with slices of cucumber, then dip the wrap into the prahok sauce. There are even some traditional snacks. One enticing option is the pickled fruit. Here, pickled baby grapes, guavas, and mangoes are served with a dip of sea salt and Thai chili peppers.
Cambodian Street Food
2045 Foothill Blvd., Suite B.
Hours are 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Wed.-Mon.
currently accepts cash only
I don’t think you’ll find too many arguments on that. Not just the great selection of beans & roasting/coffee accessories, but the educational material (articles, podcasts, videos, etc) they share openly really adds some needed ‘lift’ to the hobbyists and even just the curious…
Kitchen Aides: How the Next Generation of Collaborative Spaces May Save Food Culture
Whether the Alice Collective, BiteUnite, or Forage Kitchen call themselves ‘incubators’ or not, they’re making a once-opaque domain hospitable to newcomers.
THE ALICE COLLECTIVE | 272 14TH ST, OAKLAND, CA 94612
But as the underlying economics of dining push almost everything into two categories — fast-casual or ultra-luxe — some entrepreneurs have taken to reinventing the kitchen altogether. Rather than places of ostentatious aggression and an almost performative manliness, they’re egalitarian sites of collaboration where diners may even be invited in. Ten years after the Great Recession drove tens of thousands of newly unemployed Americans to go into business for themselves, the tug of self-employment remains strong. But even culinary geniuses with brilliant ideas need assistance with the basics: invoices, purveyors, recipe feedback, the dreaded task of scrubbing pots and pans. As the costs of opening a restaurant grow exponentially, a new breed of incubator spaces has emerged to keep things dynamic, making it possible for people to turn daydreams into day-jobs.
Oakland North: Shrimp Falafel Mix: how one family-run food truck thrives in Oakland
At 11:30 pm on a Saturday, Sayed El Hamaki and his brother-in-law Mamdouh Hassan prepare for their second rush of the night. As Hamaki grills the chicken shawarma, the aroma of cumin, turmeric, paprika and Egyptian spices disperses along Telegraph Avenue, luring passersby to the food truck. A speaker with a neon light border is propped against the side of the food truck. “Habibi, habibi, habibi,”—the chorus from a popular electro shaabi song blares from the speaker as the neon lights spin.
“The theater will let out any minute,” says Hassan, referring to the Fox Theater at the corner of Telegraph and 19th Street. And he’s right, by midnight, a crowd of 50 people are in line at Shrimp Falafel Mix, with no sign of slowing down. By the time they close at 3:00 am, Shrimp Falafel will have served over 500 more people.
It’s no wonder that the brothers-in-law, who separately immigrated to the Bay Area from Egypt in the 1990’s, operate a food truck. Food trucks often serve as a low-cost and low-barrier way for immigrant business owners to maintain a bond with their culture through food, while also making a living. For Hamaki and Hassan, that means selling Egyptian and Mediterranean food, with their own twist on traditional family recipes and street food. Their namesake shrimp falafel is a take on a shrimp and rice dish Hamaki’s mother used to make when they lived in Mansoura, along the Nile’s delta region. He’s redesigned it to combine falafel, which is made of fava beans, and shrimp by grilling the two together after cooking. Some of their best-selling dishes are different versions of this: plates that combine rice with chicken, beef, lamb, shrimp, shish kebab, gyro, or all of the above, with their signature white tzatziki sauce, into what looks like a mixed bowl.
Oakland North is a news project of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.
