Wine Is The Secret Of This Year’s Tuscany Street Food Winners

‘Street foods,’ as defined by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), are ‘ready-to-eat foods and beverages prepared and/or sold by vendors or hawkers especially in the streets and other similar places.’ As defined by the Cambridge dictionary, street food is ‘food cooked and sold in public places, usually outdoors, to be eaten immediately.’

Think restaurant without a building or tables.

In 2007 the FAO estimated that 2.5 billion humans consume street food every day.

According to the book Street Food around the World, edited by Bruce Kraig and Colleen Taylor, street food which is predominant in many developing countries has become trendy in developed nations—with leading chefs and television series specializing in this nourishment, and food trucks having become ubiquitous in major cities. The late chef, author and television personality Anthony Bourdain dreamed of opening a market along the Hudson River with a hundred food stalls from countries throughout the world (his dream was realized after his passing with the opening of Urban Hawker in New York in 2022).

In the year 2020 archaeologists working to excavate the city of Pompeii in Italy, which was buried during volcanic eruption in the year 79 AD, discovered a termopolium, a hot drinks counter, where food was also sold out of terra cotta jars. Remnants of pork, fish and snails were discovered in these jars. This exterior of this street food counter includes colorful paintings of chicken and ducks.

Today in Italy, the food and wine publishing group Gambero Rosso annually publishes a Street Food Guide. The 2024 edition includes an appendix listing food trucks, and a list of ‘regional champions’ selected from each of Italy’s 20 administrative regions. Last year, the Street Food Chef award was given to Turin chef Marcello Trentini—who prepares quesadillas with black truffle and honey. This year’s award went to chef Gianfranco Pascucci of Rome, who prepares a signature bonito burger with ponzu sauce in between steamed buns.

Gambero Rosso’s editors, in homage to street food and its improvement in Italy during the past decade, write ‘Would Rome be Rome without pizza by the slice?’

Frances Negri, in Fancy Magazine, summarizes some of the delicacies now available on street corners in Italy, writing [translated] ‘The Florentine lamprey, the Romagna piadina, the arancino, the Sicilian cannolo, the Genoese focaccia and the Apulian panzerotto: these are just some of the exquisitely Italian street foods, which have their roots in past centuries …’

In the Pontassieve commune within Florence, in a small town named Le Sieci, the food truck titled A Pancia Piena (meaning ‘full belly’) won this year’s Gambero Rosso regional award for Tuscany. Their specialty is a lampredotto sandwich—slow cooked cow tripe with tomato, parsley, onion and celery—served with Champagne.

The founders/owners of Pancia Piena—Luri Ronchi and Emanuele Nenci—began their business nineteen years ago. [Florence based writer and winemaker Paola de Blasi interviewed them recently and provided quotations below, which have been translated.]

‘Friendship and the desire to create something together led us to create A Pancia Piena, making street food that is unpretentious, but offering quality, seasonal products, speaking with simple frankness and ‘Tucanity,’ a place where both of us in the kitchen could offer refreshment to those passing through the Sieci,’ said Ronchi.

Word of mouth has increased their business; so has wine. They offer a wide range by the glass. ‘During the years in which A Pancia Piena was starting, my passion for wine was also growing. I began to try to taste as much Sangiovese as possible. In 2008 I made my first trip to Burgundy and Champagne and … definitely discovered a new taste, a new style of making wine that literally conquered me,’ said Nenci.

‘For us, having upset the rules of street food with a selection of wines typical of a restaurant was revolutionary, and this revolution will never end,’ added Nenci.