Anthony Bourdain's 13 Favorite Street Foods (And Where To Find Them)

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You can hardly think of Anthony Bourdain without thinking of his love of street food. When he was at the World Street Food Congress in Singapore, he boldly stated, "Street food, I believe, is the salvation of the human race" (via HuffPost). He went on to explain that "street food makes travel interesting" and adds culture to a world where everyone is otherwise eating at the same chain restaurants. To get the true experience of a place, it's best to find what the locals are eating, which is often street food.

When asked about the safety of eating street food abroad, Bourdain cited hotel buffets as being far sketchier for your health than what you're watching being cooked in front of your eyes on the street. He points out that nobody could stay in business feeding the locals if everyone was getting sick eating there.

Bourdain loved street food so much that, before his death, he had plans to lead the Bourdain Market food hall project in New York City, where at least 100 street foods are now available to enjoy. If you're curious which street foods impressed Bourdain most, we have a list of his 13 favorites from around the world, including the U.S.

One of Anthony Bourdain's favorite street food discoveries in Vietnam was bún ốc, which is snail vermicelli soup filled with plenty of fresh vegetables like sprouts. This is a soup you're likely to encounter in Hanoi, and, oddly enough, it's available for breakfast. This is a dish he returned to time and again when he visited Vietnam, often choosing it for his first meal of the day.

If you're going to try bún ốc, Bourdain suggests trying it in Hanoi, where the ingredients are fresh from the farm. Even the snails and crabs you find in this soup are from a farm rather than the sea, being raised in rice paddies.

The dish starts with a flavorful tomato-infused broth. It is packed with vermicelli rice noodles and fresh snails that should be soft and chewy. Usually, you'll see it topped with fried tofu and fresh tomatoes. You'll also get a selection of fresh greens like cilantro, perilla, and mint, to add to the steaming hot dish. You may even get fresh banana blossoms, too.

While laksa is found throughout Malaysia, the one that really wowed Anthony Bourdain was in Kuching, Sarawak, on the island of Borneo, which belongs to Malaysia. Though he enjoyed it for breakfast, laksa is a suitable option for any time of day. While Bourdain liked the tangy Penang version, which contains tamarind, mackerel, and pineapple, his favorite is the one he found in Kuching.

Kuching-style laksa is such a favorite that Bourdain incorporated it into "Appetites: A Cookbook", mentioning it's something that he often made at home with his family. He also declared it his absolute favorite among all noodle soups and the best thing you can eat for breakfast.

Having tried Bourdain's recipe for the homemade version, the Sarawak Laksa paste is what makes the broth of this soup uniquely amazing, since stock and coconut milk are fairly ordinary ingredients. We found ours in an Asian market, but you can also order brands like Cap Helang Matahari Sarawak Laksa Paste online or make your own. The soup includes rice vermicelli, chicken, and shrimp and gets topped with cooked egg, mung bean sprouts, and cilantro. Plus, some people like adding fresh chili peppers, squeezing on a bit of lime, and stirring in a chili pepper and shrimp condiment called sambal belacan.

When most of us think of tostadas, we don't think it's anything worth writing home about. However, the seafood tostadas from a street stall called La Guerrerense in Ensenada, Mexico, are next level. In fact, Anthony Bourdain likened them to something you'd find in a Michelin-star restaurant like Le Bernardin.

With Ensenada being on the Pacific coast on All Saints Bay, fresh seafood is easy to come by, and it's in every dish on the menu. The dish that Bourdain was so impressed with was tostada topped with sea urchin ceviche, pismo clam, fresh lime juice, chili sauce, and avocado slices. The cart provides a large variety of toppings and homemade sauces (many of which are available to order online), and Bourdain added roasted peanuts and chili peppers. He also tried a tostada with scallops and sea snail, another with salt cod, and a fourth one with octopus and red snapper ceviche.

Bourdain found these tostadas to have a brilliant combination of flavors, spices, acid, textures, and dressings. It's the type of street food meal that you remember forever, which is one reason it's been around for over 40 years.

One of the best street foods you'll find in Japan is the humble egg salad sandwich – locally known as tamago sando. Rather than in a street cart, you'll find these pre-packaged sandwiches in Lawson convenience stores that you can pop into from off the street. Anthony Bourdain described these as being an addictive vice he just couldn't shake off (unlike his previous addictions and somewhat shameful habits).

Lawson started as a milk store in Ohio, with its trademark going back to 1939, but the first food store opened in Japan in 1975, selling American party foods. Now, it's a regular Japanese convenience store. The egg salad sandwiches from Lawson come with the crusts cut off like your mother would make for you, and they're cut diagonally before being packaged in an ordinary convenience-store sandwich container. However, the sandwich itself is anything but ordinary. The sandwich contains fluffy, pillowy clouds of white bread stuffed full of creamy, sweet egg salad. And, as of 2025, these delicious sandwiches have even more filling than before (somehow at a lower price).

While many cultures incorporate organ meat into their cuisines, it's not often that you find a dish that focuses strictly on the heart. But this is the case with anticuchos, Peruvian street food classic. Anthony Bourdain found anticuchos in Lima, Peru, but they're available throughout the country.

This dish is made from skewered chunks of marinated beef hearts. Beef hearts start out the size of a human head and typically weigh 3 to 4 pounds, with a texture similar to chicken gizzards. The flavor of beef hearts is somewhat gamey, but they get marinated in vinegar and flavorful ingredients like onion, garlic, cumin, and ají peppers before going onto a charcoal grill. Bourdain was impressed how the marinade and the cooking style make the meat tremendously flavorful and succulent.

When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Andes, they found people grilling their meat in this style that possibly went back to the Incan empire. However, enslaved Africans seem to be the first who created anticuchos during the Spanish colonial period. They used less favorable offal that they got from the plantation owners.

Sisig is another offal-based street food Anthony Bourdain loved. He found this dish to be a great introductory food for those first becoming acquainted with the food of the Philippines. Thanks to Bourdain's praise of this humble dish for its tangy flavor notes and pleasing texture, it's gained more popularity and become a trendy menu item in the U.S.

While a sour salad version has been around since at least the 1700s, meat sisig is a somewhat modern take on the dish. It's often made from many edible animal parts we often ignore in the U.S., like pig jowls, ears, and snouts. However, it also has ingredients that are more familiar, like pork belly and liver. This dish is made by chopping these meats into tiny pieces and adding vinegar, calamansi juice (similar to lime), garlic, and soy sauce before frying everything together with eggs, onions, and chili peppers. Some cooks add mayo or pork cracklings as well. Plus, there are other meat versions like ones made with chicken parts or even squid.

Outside of the Philippines, you're more likely to find sisig made with more familiar animal parts like pork belly. However, wherever you try it and whatever the main ingredients, its vinegary quality makes it a great alcohol chaser, and Bourdain suggested it as the perfect dish to enjoy with a cold beer.

When Anthony Bourdain named his favorite street foods, he couldn't miss adding Japan's yakitori to the list. While you can certainly find yakitori in Japanese restaurants, it's been part of the street food culture in Japan since the 1800s and is available around the clock.

Yakitori is usually made from bite-sized pieces of chicken, grilled in front of the guests and often served on skewers. Some of the best yakitori makers in Japan kill their own chickens so the meat is extremely fresh. While you can certainly get yakitori made with breasts, thighs, or legs, chefs don't waste any part of the chicken, so parts like intestines, organ meats, skin, heart ventricles, and oviducts get used, too. Some even come cooked on the outside and stay raw on the inside, which might make the salmonella-conscious of us a bit squeamish. The meat is seasoned with various flavorings including salt, miso paste, or a tangy paste made with yuzu fruit. Yakitori can be served with various sauces like teriyaki or ponzu. So, the flavor and texture combinations are quite wide-ranging.

Phở is classic Vietnamese street food that's become fairly well-loved in the U.S., and Anthony Bourdain became quite fond of it during his visits to Vietnam. It was a dish he could always count on to be good. Soup being a common breakfast food in Vietnam, it wasn't unusual for Bourdain to start out his day with some phở while visiting the country.

Phở starts out with a flavorful stock, which comes with rice noodles, vegetables like onions, and various meats (sometimes including tendons). However, part of the beauty of this soup is that you can transform it once it gets to you with various available garnishes, like squeezes of lime, hot chili paste, green onions, cilantro, sprouts, and other greenery. Bourdain enjoyed the plethora of textures you get from the dish, from the chewy noodles and meats to the more tender meats and cooked veggies, along with crisp fresh veggies. He also admired the broth with its shimmering fat and rich flavor.

If you're already a fan of phở, you should know that Anthony Bourdain ranked bún bò Huế above phở, which gives you an idea of how amazing it is. For Bourdain, it seemed like bún bò Huế shared the first place in the world of noodle soups with laksa since he declared both of them to be his top choice in this category at different times. The very best food is always the last great thing you ate, right? Bourdain enjoyed this one in the Dong Ba Market in Hué, Vietnam, the city where it originated.

The dark bone broth for bún bò Huế gets its unique flavor partially from the addition of citrusy lemongrass as well as fermented shrimp paste. It contains rice noodles and all sorts of flavorful chunks of meat with a variety of textures. It might contain familiar meats like beef brisket or beef shank, along with less familiar pieces like pig feet, Vietnamese sausage (cha lua), or crab meat dumplings. Plus, it comes with a topping of fresh veggies like thinly-sliced onions, chopped green onions, mung bean sprouts, and banana blossoms, not to mention lime for squeezing and chili sauce. So, it's got some similarities to phở for sure, but with amped up flavors and textures and even more little treasures to discover in your bowl, making it a pinnacle-type meal experience for Bourdain.

Another street food Anthony Bourdain enjoyed was the chicken rice he had at Tian Tian at the Maxwell Food Centre in Singapore. Boiled chicken and white rice doesn't sound like anything special, but he found it to be quintessential to understanding Singapore's cuisine as its best culinary representative.

Tian Tian wouldn't have survived for over 50 years in business by serving something ordinary. The preparation starts by plunging boiled chicken into ice water to make it extremely moist and tender, while helping to separate the skin, fat, and meat. The rice is sauteed in chicken fat with a bit of garlic and sesame to infuse it with flavor before it's cooked in chicken broth.

At Tian Tian, there are three condiments available for chicken rice. Besides dark soy sauce and ginger sauce, you can also get a chili dipping sauce made from fresh red chili peppers, garlic, lime juice, and chicken stock. Plus, you get sides like fresh cucumbers and boiled eggs. Everyone seems to have their own ideas about the perfect combinations and proportions as well as the selection of sauces and garnishes and the decision whether they should go over chicken or rice. So, try a little of everything and do your own experimenting if you get to try this dish.

Most of us don't need Anthony Bourdain to tell us how great street tacos can be. However, he experienced street tacos in Mexico that were good enough to make them go on his list of his favorite street foods of all time.

Of course, there are all sorts of interesting taco fillings available from taco street vendors. Sure, you could get something ordinary like pork, But there's also plenty of mystery meat and peculiarities like brains, tripe, or even eyeballs from which to choose. Bourdain was a big fan of tacos made with tongue but also enjoyed the tripe. Regardless of the meat, street tacos come with fresh toppings like onions, lettuce, and cilantro, along with a splash of salsa, a squeeze of lime, or a smear of guacamole.

Bourdain sampled tacos across Mexico. However, when he was in Mexico City, despite all the other food offerings, when they weren't filming, the whole crew kept hitting the taco stands in lieu of going elsewhere — because the tacos there were just that good. Plus, they had to figure out who had the best tacos in town, which is an ongoing controversy there.

Jerk chicken was another of Anthony Bourdain's favorite street foods. On his first day in Jamaica, he would head straight out for some jerk chicken because it was that important.

At Piggy's Jerk Centre in Port Antonio, Bourdain enjoyed his jerk chicken with a side of fried plantains. And, since there was a bottle of jerk sauce on the side, he had to grab it and give it a squeeze over the chicken to imbue it with even more flavor. In Kingston, he had drum pan jerk chicken made on a grill created from a 55-gallon oil drum. The spices start out sounding like something for a pie, with ingredients like cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg, but it goes savory with the addition of ingredients like thyme, garlic, and Scotch bonnet peppers.

Jerk chicken is another street food dish that has its roots in slavery. The name refers to the prepping and cooking method developed by Maroons, enslaved people who managed to escape to the mountainous areas. They used to tenderize and season meat, probably wild boar, and then wrap it in leaves and cook it in underground pits. Today's jerk spice mix used in jerk chicken recipes had its beginnings in the allspice berries, salt, and bird peppers they would use to season the meat.

Even with all the street food in the world to enjoy, Anthony Bourdain couldn't resist a good street hot dog when he was back in the U.S. Bourdain argued that New York City does dirty water hot dogs well but that the absolute best hot dogs come from Chicago.

Bourdain was a fan of simple hot dog options like one simply topped with sauerkraut or just onions. However, he'd argue that just like you'd order red wine with a steak, the classic drink for a hot dog is a papaya drink, which he could get at his favorite New York City haunt, Gray's Papaya. In fact, it was the hot dogs at Gray's Papaya that he would miss when he was out traveling.

Bourdain was a hot dog purist. One thing you would never find him putting on a hot dog is ketchup, a point he and Barack Obama both agreed upon in their hot dog discussions. He also didn't believe in the idea of a hot dog as being a sandwich. This fits the traditional approach that suggests a sandwich can only be made with two slices of bread. So, while he was open to all sorts of street foods made in many different ways, he was a bit of a food snob when it came to how his local street food should and shouldn't be made.