Rapid gentrification in China megacities is calling time on many long-established, street-food joints.
Office workers waiting for breakfast crepes, or jianbing, during rush hour. Small groups huddled on plastic stools, eating skewers of barbecued meat, or shaokao, late at night. These are the familiar sights of Chinese street-food culture — which has changed dramatically in recent years. Streets known for curbside cuisine are succumbing to new zoning regulations, breakneck commercial development and increasingly restrictive food-safety measures.
“In just the last four years, we have seen a drastic change of the informal, local and traditional food places that we can show guests,” says Rose Martin, who runs Un-Tour, which provides local food experiences in Shanghai. “People that have been practicing their craft on the streets, sometimes for 40 years, like the man known as the God of Scallion Pancakes, have suddenly had to close down their one and only activity. Street food is often seen as backwards.”
This process of urban renewal is not uncommon in cities around the world. But it’s the scale of rapid urbanization and the pace of change that makes it so interesting in China. Entire streets of businesses are shut overnight, with walls quickly erected to prevent them operating. And this is happening in cities all over China. In some cases, apartments are built to replace former cafés and restaurants, creating more space for residents. In others, the restaurant may carry on behind closed doors and windows, with authorities turning a blind eye — at least for a while.
Imagine, for instance, a street-facing spot long popular for its soup dumplings, or xiaolongbao, but now walled in. Through a window, passersby can order directly from the kitchen where chefs prepare the famous local delicacy. To eat inside the restaurant, diners must ring the buzzer and enter through a nondescript door adjacent to the window. In other popular street-food eateries, owners get even more creative, using makeshift ladders made of bricks to allow diners to enter through a window, say, or rebuilding fake walls that are actually doors.
Moreover, many designers and architects are inspired by these hacks. Design H(ij)ack is a summer program in Beijing that explores ways to intervene in the context of fast-changing regulation of public spaces — or, as Lulu Li, one of the course’s mentors explains, to “[learn] from China’s informal design tactics to negotiate spaces facing policies”. In one of the projects, “Sometimes showing, Other times not”, the practice of disguising a restaurant as a home is made systematic. An entire café is designed to look like a Beijing home, or hutong, with window-side ordering, ladders to enter the café, and modular furniture for outdoor seating.
Street food has long appealed to both the palate and the wallet of the city dweller, so it is unclear how street-food culture in China will survive or evolve in its fast-changing cities. Ael Thery, a food anthropologist who has studied Chinese street-food culture for years, says that “people go in the street not only for budget considerations, but also for the lack of spaces at home or work, and often for a way to escape the homogeneity of food habits and options.”
This is a 12-part series on Food Megacity: how urbanization and technology are changing the way China eats. The full series can be found here.
