Southwark
Get an atlas, stick a pin in it and chances are the cuisine of whichever country you end up stabbing will be available for you to gorge on somewhere in London. India, China, Italy, Japan, Vietnam, the US, Mexico: we take these nations for granted, their food barely registering any more as “foreign”, exported as it has been to every supermarket and satellite town high street in the UK. But peer beyond these weekend takeaway staples and you’ll find in the capital a second, emergent wave of exotic eats, from Congolese cassava in Tottenham, to Eritrean injera in Goldhawk Road, to the South American meat brothels of Elephant and Castle. It’s a cosmopolitan culinary surge that has been aided in the years since the recession by a street food explosion that has made it quicker, cheaper and less humiliating to order and eat stuff you’ve never eaten before. Amid all that, there remains an appetite for traditional British fare. The gastropub roast market booms without fail each Sunday; pre-Luftwaffe pie and mash shops are packed and fetishised; Wetherspoons has reclaimed Friday nights for cod with its “Fish Friday” deal. And at the end of these phenomena, somehow you end up with Leif Halverson standing in an ice-cream van in the Abu Dhabi desert, selling cheese toasties to confused, wealthy Arabs.
“We first went out there three years ago, serving up British cheeses in a way I don’t think they’d ever seen before,” he explains. “Last year it was absolutely mental, especially working in the truck when we were grilling sandwiches; the heat was just ridiculous in the desert. It’s a completely weird place – golf resorts, hotels, shopping malls… that’s it. I can’t really get my head round it. One tends to just drink in the hotel and pass out.”
Halverson has been working as events manager for The Cheese Truck since 2015, when he was enlisted by the founder, Mathew Carver. The premise is basic enough that it feels vaguely insulting to have to spell it out, but: The Cheese Truck is a street food company that sells cheese toasties out of a van. It isn’t complicated but then neither is the appeal of a hot cheese sandwich. It’s comfort food for a city that seems to spend most of its time getting as impenetrably tangled and hopelessly divided and socially uncomfortable as possible.
“Mathew was the guy who started it, he went travelling round America and fell in love with grilled cheese sandwiches, the humble toastie,” clarifies Halverson. “He came back with no money and came across this old ice-cream truck that he was given for pretty much nothing and decided, ‘Right, I’m gonna try this street food thing now, it’s taking off.’ It all leapfrogged from there.”
Since then, The Cheese Truck has popped up at music festivals and exclusive fashion events as well as deserts in the Gulf, but spends most of its time parked at Maltby Street Market in Southwark, serving the world’s most basic food beyond prison dinners to locals and an increasing swell of tourists. “Maltby Street just had a nice feel to it,” explains Halverson. “An ‘artisanal’ feel – I know that’s a wanky term – but we felt we could get used to it and thrive here.”
Compared to the weekend food markets of East London, where at a rough estimate 90 percent of the shoppers appear not to have slept for 48 hours, Maltby Street is an oasis of tranquility: “Obviously East London has that reputation of being – and I hate the word – but ‘hipster’ and all of that. There’s a lot more of a family feel down here. Because of the Bermondsey Beer Mile, you do get stag dos in the summer, but they’re usually pretty harmless. Especially compared to going to Liverpool Street and seeing loads of madheads or whatever.”
The traders at Maltby Street have built up a sense of community over the years. “Most,” says Halverson, “have been there quite a long time. Everyone knows each other, we’ve got a group on WhatsApp and everyone helps each other out if you need it. There’s no ill feelings between anyone at all, which you can get quite a lot in street food. It can get quite catty.”
Does it ever get violent?
“I’ve seen it get violent a few times. But it's very chilled down here.”
Leaving behind – sorry, but we must – the arresting image of armed food gangs fighting pitched battles in the street, I ask Halverson why he thinks The Cheese Truck has proven so popular: “I think there’s so much out there that it does become overwhelming, when you can choose to eat something completely random from Zambia or whatever. It’s a home comfort that people are used to. Obviously we’re very lucky to have such a broad range of cuisines on our doorstep. But at the same time, you do sometimes want the food your grandmother gave you, or that you had when you came home from school. Especially at festivals as well.”
And so The Cheese Truck continues to be a kind of portal to a nostalgic, halcyon age where cheese, bread and heat will always meet in time-tested symbiosis. The team’s recent expansion – they’ve opened a restaurant-type space in Camden Stables and a drinks-orientated venue in Deptford called Archie’s Bar – shows that despite the bewildering array of choice in London, there remains a place for culinary simplicity in the capital.