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Dining | World Street Food Congress 2017



The World Street Food Congress 2017 (WSFC 2017) held last May 30 till June 4 was a resounding success as per my opinion.  Although we came late afternoon, it was still sunny so understandably it was hot thus a handful of people were in the area.  The concert ground arena of the Mall of Asia was its venue and with a few people in it, expect people to crowd around the stall where the roof is located.  When the sun went down, people started filling in and all the open eating area was filled with food and people.

Entrance was Php150 per person and one is given stubs worth the same amount.  Initial press releases peg the food averaging at Php150 however it wasn't so when we were inside.  Street food isn't cheap when its international I guess hehehehe.  Since the choices were international, it wasn't easy to choose which to taste. A lot of things run in your mind, like which ingredients are in that dish, how does it taste, how is it done?  We had to tour all the kiosks one by one and still we can't decide.  We decided instead to try the bandwagon effect.  Where we see a long queue then we choose that kiosk.  The winner was Indonesia with their Martabak (8 slices) so we lined up as well.  The picture looks yummy and thought it would be the size of a large pizza.  For Php500 price, we thought it would satisfy three hungry individuals.  Then the Martabak came,  the size was in between a small and medium sized pizza.  You should see the look at my friends' faces when finally it was given to us.  They decided to order from the Philippines kiosk and ordered the bagnet pizza from Ilocos.  Now its a bit cheaper than the Indonesian dish and it was a lot larger in size.

Now taste wise,  my friends did not like the taste of the Martabak so I ended up eating the rest of it.  I more or less liked it since I came from abroad and I got used to eating indian sweets and it was near similar in taste.  Since Martabak was similar to our kakanin, eating more than half of it made me full already.  My friends took hold of the Bagnet Pizza and I only got to eat a slice of it.  It tasted like, well, pizza.  The Bagnet part or portions were so sparse that it wasn't enough to overwhelm me with bagnet flavour.  Don't get me wrong, I like Bagnet eventhough my doctors say I shouldn't be eating it.  But making it into a pizza, Its something I'm not looking to eating into the near future.  I hope they still improve on this dish,  for me it holds a lot of potential.

Now the prices for beverages was different and I forgot how much was for the rose flavoured juices my friends got for us.  Odd taste, but we liked the juice anyway.  It was really rose in taste and it's something new to our taste buds.  It wasn't bad, it wasn't great it was just right in the middle.

On a hindsight, I was expecting street food in the form of balut, kwek kwek, isaw, IUD, bbq, helmet, pisngi, but then I realized this was the luxurious form of street food. Imagine the Philippine kiosk selling pizza on a cart on your street corner hehehe.  Overall, it was an explosion of taste and sight as various countries were in attendance and we get a sample of it without bringing your passport.  We appreciated the efforts of the participants and we hope they bring in more dishes in the coming years.











The bagnet is sparsely distributed that its flavour was not almost present in every bite.