My friend Miguel recently loaned me his copy of Anthony Bourdain’s new book Medium Raw. It was a bit of a rambler, jumping from his sordid past to his comparatively shining presence, but one passage stuck with me, ringing as it does very applicably to Vancouver in the wake of City Hall’s recent baby steps toward bringing street food to local curbs (led by Councillor Heather Deal). Let me preface it by saying that I’ve been pretty hard on them in recent months – perhaps even hysterically so in some recent media interviews, saying among a great many other unkind things that our municipal government’s “.22 caliber imaginations were insufficient for our .357 Magnum city”. What I haven’t been is very constructive, and I regret that. So I offer this Bourdain snippet in the hope that it might prove useful to them if they really do want to cement Vancouver’s reputation as one of the world’s most exciting food cities. In the middle of discussing the impact of the recession on restaurants in New York, Bourdain writes,

If any good comes out of all the pain and insecurity, I can only hope that the Asian-style food court/hawker center is one of them. This institution is way overdue for an appearance (on a large scale) in America. Scores of inexpensive one-chef/one-specialty business (basically, food stalls) clustered around a “court” of shared tables. When will some shrewd and civic minded investors (perhaps in tandem with their city governments) put aside some parking lot-size spaces (near commercial districts) where operators from many lands can sell their wares? Sharing tables, as in classic fast-food food courts? Why, with our enormous Asian and Latino populations, can’t we have dai pai dong – literally, “big sign street”, the Chinese version of the indigenous food court, like they do in Hong Kong – or hawker centers, like in Singapore or Kuala Lumpur? Or “food streets,” like Hanoi and Saigon? The open-to-the-air “wet” taco vendors and quesadilla-makers of Mexico City?

Food preparation areas could be enclosed, as they are in Singapore, so food handling and sanitation issues can hardly be an unsolvable impediment: Singapore is the most rigorously nanny of the nanny states – with the most vibrant hawker culture. The hawker center could be an answered prayer for every hard-pressed office worker in a hurry, every blue collar worker on a budget, every cop on a lunch hour, as well as obsessive foodies at every income level. “Authenticity”; artisanship; freshness; incredible, unheard of variety – and for cheap? All under one roof? This, let us hope, is at least part of our future – whatever happens.

I usually won’t reference Singapore as a positive (not least because one small narcotics offense comes with a mandatory death sentence), but if they can do it, we most certainly could, too. Indeed, why stop at mobile food trucks?