Eating ABQ: Lunch at Street Food Market

It was a gorgeous day today in Albuquerque, one of those perfect blue-sky-and-sunshine fall days where you just have to get outside. It was so warm that no jacket was necessary, especially if you strolled with a warm cup of coffee in hand. (I chose a Mike’s Mocha from Michael Thomas Coffee.)

After we wandered around the UNM campus and stopped in at the art museum at Popejoy, it was time for lunch. Since we were so close by, we picked Street Food Market. It’s crazy that we’ve never actually eaten here before. We were super-excited about it before it opened, but then somehow never bothered to go, even after their sister restaurant – and a staple in our restaurant rotation – Street Food Asia closed due to a fire. (Street Food Asia’s Twitter feed reported that they hoped to reopen in June, then in July, and has since been uncomfortably silent on the matter.)

We did stop in for take-out pho before my surgery; I was on a liquid diet, so I drank the broth and Arne ate the noodles. Not exactly a representative way to sample the food.

The tiny restaurant was pretty well packed at a little after 1:00, with most of the inside tables full and a huge party at one of the long tables outside. Arne chose the Chinese broccoli (gailan) in Kuala Lumpur sauce – the Malaysian flavors were always our favorite at Street Food Asia, and we loved their selection of delicious vegetable-only stir-fries, especially on Vegetarian Weeks (which we are now doing every third week. This is not a vegetarian week, so I picked kalbi (Korean-style short rib) bao.

Streams of incredible-looking banh mi flowed past us to the table outside as we watched, suddenly aware that we were quite hungry. I was afraid that our food would come slowly as the kitchen dealt with the big group, but in fact our gailan showed up surprisingly quickly, considering. Jade-green stalks mingled with slices of white onion, mushrooms, and those styrofoamy crispy noodles that so beautifully soak up sauce. The whole thing was crowned with a little cilantro. It was delicious; the gailan was crunchy, the sauce spicy and sweet-sour, with lots of ginger, lemongrass, tamarind, and chile.

The bao followed soon after, and they were gorgeous. I think we’d both expected the classic fully enclosed bao, but these were the flat kind, folded around generous quantities of luscious kalbi and kimchi. The kalbi was exemplary, tender and rich, and I couldn’t help but wonder why I’d never seen kalbi bao before. So good. They weren’t super-cheap, at $10 for a plate of four, but they were worth it.

There was some confusion at the end of our meal, as each member of the huge group outside went to the register and paid individually. We were pretty much done, but just hung out and waited, soaking up the last of our Kuala Lumpur sauce with the side of steamed rice, until they finally cleared. There was some kind of fracas in the kitchen, too. But a little bit of chaos was always a hallmark of Street Food Asia as well, and though it would bug me anywhere else, here it just seems to resonate with the theme. Why shouldn’t street food come with a side of minor chaos?

We left just full enough, and determined that we would make up for lost time and come back soon to sample more small plates – and those sumptuously stuffed banh mi.

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