If you want to know what “casual dining” in east London was like before the street-food boom, take a stroll from Upton Park tube station to West Ham’s stadium on match day. Not much has changed. The smoky line of stalls and takeaways offer the same rubbery burgers, wan hotdogs and greasy chips it has for years. For the more exotically inclined, the local fusion dish is a balti pie.
This might seem an unlikely setting in which to find Twitter’s most talked-about British street-food vendor – mentioned 20,000 times last year. But here he is: 48-year-old Mark Gevaux, better known as the Rib Man for his succulent baby-back pork-rib meat stuffed into floury buns and topped with a lava-like splodge of his own hot sauce – it’s called Holy Fuck, and for good reason. At £7, the rolls are pricier than your average football fare, but they are infinitely tastier.
Nicknamed the “godfather of street food”, Gevaux is in his third season at West Ham – and hopes to follow the club in its move to the Olympic Stadium next season. But he made his name in swankier environs thanks to stints with Street Feast, the popular roving street-food market, and his regular pitch at hipster central, aka Brick Lane market. He’s hilariously profane online – he’s won awards for his social-media marketing, though he’s not sure why: “I’m just being myself,” he shrugs.
The restaurateur Mark Hix is such a fan of Holy Fuck – made from Scotch bonnet peppers and naga chillies – that he added it to his own menus. Gevaux also sells it online, alongside four even hotter varieties: Holy Mother of God, Christ on a Bike, Judas is Scary Hot and – most eye-watering of all – For the Love of God. (Having tried the latter, I now know what the term “blood curdling” actually feels like.)
But if you were expecting the godfather of street food to be a middle-class hipster himself, you’d be mistaken. He is a one-legged, 48-year-old ex-butcher from Essex. His left leg was damaged in a car crash at 21 and after numerous operations was amputated above the knee a decade ago. He now proudly wears a steel limb, which makes him look like a pirate. “I never regretted losing the leg,” he says, “That’d be a waste of time. Plus, if it hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be where I am now. There wouldn’t be any Holy Fuck sauce in the world. How disastrous would that be?” Gevaux laughs it off, but he must have gone through hell. He says that one of the reasons he is on Twitter so much late at night is “I’m awake with the pain.”
The amputation ended his career as a butcher, which began with a part-time job aged 12 – “You’d never get away with that now.” With just one leg, the cost of insuring him rocketed and nobody would hire him. So he started cooking at farmers’ markets, progressing to Brick Lane, where street food was starting to become a scene. Right place, right time. “I was incredibly lucky,” he says.
But his favourite gig is at his beloved West Ham. He serves from a hatch round the back of a grand old Victorian pub, the Boleyn Tavern, full of beery fans on match days. Beaming out from under his cap, Gevaux tells me he is on a mission to change the quality of food at football. “I love it down here,” he says. “It’s such a good craic. We serve around 400 people in the hour before kick-off – handful of meat in a bun, bang, you’re done.”
If sales are brisk, the preparation and care that goes into cooking the meat are anything but. Gevaux and his assistant, Devante, are up into the early hours at his yard in Dalston, slow-cooking racks of ribs from outdoor-raised pigs on four Monolith barbecues. These can handle 100kg of meat between them. And after 6-8 hours on a Monolith, the meat simply falls off the bone. “People say it’s like pulled pork, but it’s not – we don’t even have to pull it. Pulled pork, for me, is dry – and it’s from the shoulder. With ribs, every bit of meat you’re eating has been cooked in the juices coming out of the bones. That’s why the meat is so tender and moist.”
If their workload is particularly heavy – as it was recently when they supplied “Rib Man Specials” to the Honest Burgers chain – they’re up all night. “It’s never a chore,” says Gevaux. “I love what I’m doing. I’ll have my music on” – recently on the playlist: Biggie Smalls, Eminem and Cypress Hill – “and we make a night of it. If the process is stressful, the end product will be full of stress. I really believe that.”
Sometimes famous foodies join him for the evening – like the MasterChef winner Tim Anderson – “We invented the Fuck Yuzu sauce which is in all his restaurants now,” says Gevaux.
Some street-food vendors use their stalls as launch pads for bolder visions: permanent sites, even small chains. Gervaux, however, has no plans for world domination. “I’m not in it for the money,” he says. “Never have been. I mean, money’s great, but you can chase it all your life and never get happiness. And for the last few years I’ve not been chasing it, and I’ve never been so happy.”
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