Our street food spotlight this month comes from Street Feast marketing man and professional eater, Adam Layton. This month, he’s taking our tastebuds on a trip from Texas to Tower Hamlets for a slice of US barbecue in the heart of the East End.
There are many reasons to get into street food: to bring something new and delicious to the marketplace, to ditch the drudgery of corporate life and find independence on the streets or to road test/launch a new brand and get started on an empire of restaurants, distribution centres and hamburger universities.
Lately, more and more of the top-flight traders pitching up in London have been in the last camp. With the right product, guidance and capital, there’s dough to be made from bringing street grub indoors (see MEATliquor and Honest Burgers). Those looking to use street food as a launchpad for a restaurant business could take a masterclass from US-inspired barbecue outfit HotBox, which opened its first restaurant in Spitalfields in December 2014 after just 11 months on the street.
HotBox owners, husband and wife team Basit Nasim and Preeya Khagram-Nasim, left well-paid City jobs to open their first place – a burger joint called Chuck – in their hometown, Hatch End. Chuck has helped Basit and Preeya learn the ins and outs of the business without the pressures of high rates and increased competition found in town. After a short investment drive, they set their sights on a barbecue restaurant in the Big Smoke, a riskier move on a larger scale that required a sophisticated marketing plan. Or did it?
Their first steps were to hire a chef who knew how to cook with wood and to embark on a two-week trip to Texas for some intensive barbecue research across the state’s diners, drive-ins and dives. Lewis Spencer was the man for the job – he’d already learned the basics of smoking in his pop-up kitchen at the Duchess pub in Battersea and had long-harboured desires to meet slow-and-low superhero Aaron Franklin at his Austin smokehouse. “Texas barbecue rigs have this culture of ‘park up, get it while it’s fresh and when it’s gone, it’s gone’,” says Spencer, “it’s pure street food.” On the way back – waiting to take off – Basit made a phone call to us at Street Feast – they were ready to bring home the brisket. In January 2014, we gave HotBox its first pitch at our indoor venue Hawker House, just a mile and a half from where they would eventually open their bricks and mortar premises. It took a couple of weeks to find their rhythm but they quickly gained momentum, going on to serve some of the best slow-smoked meats we’ve tasted. HotBox created a fantastic brand built around the imagery of a red -hot grill element, which was emblazoned above its rig in bright neon and hand-stamped on to cardboard tags supplied with every meal.
The team was soon serving up to 1,000 customers every weekend.
Within months, HotBox had piggybacked on the PR and marketing exposure of the bigger Street Feast brand and capitalised on a huge footfall of customers to launch its restaurant with a flying start. “There was no better way we knew to build a new food brand with such influence and traction than working with Street Feast,” says Nasim.
Since opening, the restaurant HoxBox has taken a hiatus from street food but promises to return for a couple of one-offs in the summer for Big Eater events National Burger Day and Pork Life. “We’ll never leave the street food world entirely,” Spencer grins, “that face-to-face contact with a happy punter – that’s what keeps you on your feet for 16 hours a day.”
