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“Bold Southeast Asian cuisine” awaits students in the Brick Light District across the street from UNM.
Earlier this month Street Food Market, a new version of Street Food Asia, opened at the intersection of Central Avenue and Harvard Drive across from UNM.
Tai Tok, owner of both Street Food Asia and Street Food Market, said his new restaurant’s menu focuses more on specific types of Asian cuisine.
“(In) the other place, we feature six different menus,” he said. “Here … we’re just going to try more of a really bold flavor. That’s (Vietnamese), Thai, and Malay.”
Beyond Asian food, Tok said Street Food Market will offer exotic drinks, including Thai tea and juices from South America. He said the restaurant will also offer different types of shaved ice.
“American shaved ice is the most boring shaved ice,” he said. “Ours is with condensed milk. We have coconut milk, we have boba, we have fruit — all kinds of different fruit and all different stuff.”
Tok said that at the moment the restaurant remains in the process of opening. He said it is using a temporary menu now which is set to be updated, and that later there will also be musical performances at the restaurant.
“Eventually we are going to have entertainment people — street performers,” he said.
Tok said growing up in Asia gave him inspiration for the restaurant. “I grew up in Malaysia,” he said. “And I’ve always wanted to do … street food.”
Tok said he opened the new location on Central for students. The restaurant will offer special deals and menu options for them, he said.
“We help the company do some loyalty program, or we do some special discount for students,” he said. “And then we will do, probably on the daily lunch time, a specialty fried rice and a specialty noodle.”
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Jeffrey Allen, kitchen manager at Street Food Market, said Tok’s restaurants are similar in that both locations stick with street food. Allen did not work at the previous location, but he said the new site intends to focus more on specific cuisines.
“We’ve chosen different places other than what Street Food Asia has,” he said. “We wanted to highlight some of the places from Asia and the street food from those places.”
Street Food Market’s staff is mostly new, Allen said. He said Tok and two wok cooks came from the Street Food Asia to found the new location, and Tok hired him because of his culinary background.
“Tok … hired me partly because of my fine dining background from L.A., and because I like good food,” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to serve here: good food.”
Allen said the restaurant offers fresh food at a low price.
“We make everything in-house,” he said. “We’re not opening it from a bag and pouring it into the wok.”
At Street Food Market, customers have the choice of putting together a noodle bowl, a rice bowl or a curry bowl.
Patrons can also customize their own bowls. They can choose from white or brown rice, three different sauces, spicy or non-spicy vegetables and an array of entrees including fried tofu, lemongrass chicken, “crying tiger” beef (so named because it’s hot enough to make a tiger cry, according to Tok), coconut chicken and chicken meatballs. Everything comes topped with a choice of relish.
“This is one of a kind in the country,” Tok said. “There’s no restaurant out there in the country that can do what we do.”
