The World Eats Here by John Wang and Storm Garner (The Experiment)
John Wang grew up in Texas but his culinary horizons extended far beyond Tex-Mex cuisine. His childhood summers were spent in Taiwan where he learned to love that country’s night markets, where people of all economic backgrounds came to eat in an atmosphere of “ineffable electricity.”
When he moved to New York as a high-powered attorney, he was shocked at how few people could afford to eat the city’s legendary food. “Affordabilty,’ he decided, “was the single greatest equalizer,” and his dream was to recreate the night markets he loved as a child, with their diversity of meals and their reasonable prices.
In 2015 he created the Queens Night Market, where the average dish was no more than five dollars, with a few soaring as high as six. “The target demographic was literally everyone.”
Located in a park that once held the 1939 World’s Fair, near the home of the New York Mets and the site of tennis’s U.S. Open, the location was close to perfect. Open every Saturday night in the summer, Wang’s dream drew an average of 15,000 visitors per day until Covid-19 regulations closed it for the summer in 2020.
Writer and filmmaker Storm Garner fell in love with the Night Market in 2014 when it was still in its planning stages and offered her talents from the start. In 2019 she and Wang were married. By then Garner had interviewed many of the vendors on camera for an oral history project, which formed the nucleus for The World Eats Here.
New York City has more than 150 nationalities and over 120 of these live in Queens. More than 90 of these countries found a home in the Queens Night Market with its 300 vendors. The World Eats Here features 52 of them, telling their stories and sharing 88 recipes, with almost half of both the vendors and the recipes coming from countries in Asia.
“What are you doing with your expensive degrees?” the Singaporean parents of a Columbia Business graduate asked their daughter when she began selling noodles at the Night Market. “Sharing...a passion for food... the beauty of food and culture,” a Malaysian vendor with an MS in nutrition says. Indian food “can be amazing with just a few ingredients instead of twenty-five spices” says a banker who spends her Saturday nights proving this is true. A former chef at Cafe Boulud with a degree in French culinary arts dreams of having “Korean fried chicken at baseball games instead of hot dogs” and a university professor raises money for his Bengali community by manning a food stall on Saturday night.
From Tibet to the Philippines, mouthwatering and uncomplicated recipes beckon to even the most apathetic cook. Son-in-law eggs, (a naughty pun in its native country of Thailand), Burmese tea leaf salad with careful instructions on how to ferment the tea leaves, a hearty breakfast sandwich from Singapore called roti john, and pandan key limeade from Malaysia or avocado smoothies from Vietnam to wash down Hong Kong’s curry fish balls, these and so many other dishes come tantalizingly within reach. Even though the Queens Night Market may be closed, this book brings it to home kitchens, along with the philosophy of the “floating plate” imparted by the mother of a Pakistani cook who’s a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America that forbids returning an empty plate to anyone who has given you food. Dinners at home will never be the same again after The World Eats Here is in the house. ~Janet Brown