Best Street Food

No cutlery, no reservation, no table. Everything here is served from a cart, a window, or a grill set up on a pavement.

Street food operates under a design constraint restaurant food does not: it has to be eaten standing up, with one hand, by somebody who is going somewhere else. That single requirement shapes all of it. Tacos al pastor are carved off a vertical spit that Lebanese migrants brought to Mexico, which is why they look like shawarma and taste like neither. Takoyaki need a specialised pan and ninety seconds of constant attention from someone who has done it ten thousand times. Poutine is engineered so the cheese survives the gravy for roughly as long as it takes to walk home.

That comes to thirty-two dishes, drawn from a dozen countries that arrived at strikingly similar solutions independently of one another. The format quietly rewards food that travels well. Several entries are better than the thing that beats them and lose anyway, because they need a fork, a chair, or five minutes of sitting still.