A self-styled “temple of street food and takeaway”, Florence’s All’Antico Vinaio has a problem. This vendor of perfect panini is such a draw that local businesses are sick of tourists clogging up nearby doorways, stairwells and kerbs as they eat. In August, a scuffle reportedly broke out between a shop owner and a family eating on his doorstep. Now, Florence council has banned people from eating All’Antico Vinaio’s sandwiches in the adjacent streets.
The council is also threatening tourists with fines of €150 (£134) to €500 if they eat in its new no-chow zone. It is not clear how those fines are structured. But do not go waving your sbriciolona salami-stuffed La Favolosa around in public. Wait until you are safely back in your B&B.
In one way, this is a story about how cities (even European ones from which UK planners are told to draw inspiration) discourage people from lingering. Florence lacks public benches, some argue. Internationally, no developer wants to set aside valuable real estate so pedestrians can sit down comfortably to eat a sandwich.
Street food can be a litter problem, too. Ten years on, I vividly recall the rancid smell of greasy, ground-in fast food on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn. But that can be solved by employing more street cleaners.
Is the real problem here snobbery? Certainly in the UK there is a hardcoreof germ-phobic, misanthropic, plain snooty people who find the idea of eating outside – the smells, the spillages, the nauseating sight of people chewing – wholly repulsive. A minority of foodies consider street food the antithesis of the Zen, conscious-eating we should all practise.
The problem is particularly acute on public transport, among uptight people who cannot bear listening to someone eating crisps 10 rows away on the train. In 2014, the creepy Facebook group, Women Who Eat on Tubes, became notorious for sharing furtive pictures of women doing just that.
Ignore them all. From curry ’n’ chips to the greatest wood-fired pizza, eating on the streets is cheap, democratic and (not least for hungry, bone-weary tourists), spiritually uplifting. Just don’t try it in Florence.
