Manila struggles to keep a lasting hawker culture, casts eyes on how Asian nations lifted street food

The sharp, savoury aroma drifted into the air, mingling with the exhaust of jeepneys and the chatter from a long line of customers waiting for her speciality. She scooped out the crackling, browned pieces and laid them neatly on a tray, ready for the mid-afternoon rush.

Her stall now sits just a few paces from her original spot in Manila’s famed Carriedo Street – once a bustling stretch packed with vendors selling everything from snacks to phone cases. That changed when Mayor Francisco Moreno’s street clean-up policy, which kicked off on June 30, cleared the city’s main roads to make way for pedestrians and cars.

For now, Alfaro has moved to this vending zone that is approved by the authorities, but she longs to return to Carriedo’s heavy foot traffic.

Her story is part of a broader wave of clearing operations sweeping through Manila, where the drive to reclaim pavements has pushed vendors into side streets and stirred debate over their place in the urban landscape.

While other Southeast Asian capitals have turned street vendors into tourist draws and pillars of local food culture, the Philippines has never built the infrastructure, policies or public attitudes needed for such a system to thrive in most urban centres. Instead, vendors here remain in a constant cycle of displacement and return, tolerated but rarely integrated.

Moreno’s directive bans vendors from major roads and sends city hall teams to dismantle stalls blocking the pavements. Supporters say it is about restoring order and mobility in a city where footpaths often double as makeshift markets. Critics argue that the directive is car-centric and economically damaging, and has pushed vendors to low-traffic side streets, where their sales have collapsed.

“I used to earn up to 4,000 pesos (S$90) a day,” said 31-year-old vendor Ricardo Ibanez, who for years sold balut, or fertilised duck eggs, outside a busy wet market in one of Manila’s main roads. Under the city’s new vendor policy, he was pushed into a nearby side street, where he now considers it a good day if he makes 1,000 pesos.

Ibanez has resisted proposals for a fixed hawker zone, saying the freedom to move allows him to follow the crowd. “I earn better if I can sell wherever I please,” he said.

Street food for survival, not heritage

The deeper reason for the Philippines’ absence of a hawker tradition lies in cultural perception, said Jayson Maulit, executive chef and managing partner of the restaurant Trining’s Kitchen Stories.

“Filipinos have this perception that street food is dirty,” he said, noting how financially struggling families often turn to selling snacks on the street as a last resort. This link to survival, rather than to craft or culinary heritage, has kept street food associated with poverty and poor sanitation, said Maulit.

Fast-food chains – offering consistency, branding and air-conditioned comfort – have further shaped Filipino dining habits, crowding out informal food vendors from the mainstream.

Unlike Thailand, where street cooking is a celebrated art, or Singapore, where hawker fare has earned Michelin stars, the Philippines has no national body to set standards or reward excellence in street food.

Street vending is still viewed by Filipinos as a temporary fallback, in what Maulit described as “the lifeline in a crisis”, rather than a legitimate, skilled profession. Without that cultural legitimacy, vendors remain excluded from long-term urban planning and economic policy.

Policy and planning gaps

Filipino landscape architect and urban planner Paulo Alcazaren said Manila’s predicament is not inevitable, but the product of decades of piecemeal policy, chronic urban-planning problems and weak execution.

While Asian cities share a history of street vending, Alcazaren noted that places like Singapore and Hong Kong treat it as a permanent feature of the urban economy, building hawker centres and night markets with proper utilities and sanitation systems. Manila, by contrast, has relied on periodic clearing operations without the infrastructure to integrate vendors.

Alcazaren, who worked on the pedestrianisation of Singapore’s Orchard Road, said the city-state’s hawker system was the product of years of deliberate planning.

Street food sellers were moved into purpose-built centres near transport hubs and markets, each with water, power, waste disposal and seating. The Government regulated hygiene, issued licences and maintained the facilities – turning what was once seen as a messy necessity into a source of civic pride and tourism revenue.

“In Manila, what I would see as a problem is that although there would be seasonal clearing of the streets, alternatives were not provided (for vendors),” Alcazaren said.

Some Philippine cities have shown it can be done. Nearby urban centres like Pasig and Quezon City have designated vending spots in pedestrian corridors and transport terminals, rolling out a system that includes standardised food carts and stalls, sanitation and safety checks.

But the number of vendors in these cities is nowhere near Manila’s, making such schemes easier to manage. These localised models have given vendors stability while keeping public spaces passable, but they remain the exception rather than the norm.

“There have been sporadic attempts to regulate vending in the last few decades, but most of the city hall plantillas (staff) are filled with engineers who know how to build roads and bridges... Fewer areas have anyone who has any background in urban design or landscape architecture,” Alcazaren said.

Without the political will to retrofit spaces or invest in purpose-built facilities, vendors remain in legal limbo.

One-street solution?

One idea floated in Manila’s long-running debate is to designate a single street as a permanent food bazaar, where hawkers can operate legally under a unified system of regulation, sanitation and order.

Similar set-ups work in Bangkok’s night markets and Singapore’s hawker centres, where vendors benefit from built-in infrastructure, while visitors know exactly where to find them.

Mr Moreno said the city has looked into such schemes but believes Manila’s scale makes them difficult to implement.

The capital has some 50,000 registered vendors – a number that does not include the “snipers”, or unlicensed sellers who set up briefly to avoid arrest. Concentrating them into one area, he argued, would be unmanageable without constant enforcement, adequate space and sustained political will.

Vendors like Alfaro still hope for something similar. She envisions Carriedo – with its steady pedestrian traffic and historic charm – transformed into a clean, organised food street, rather than emptied.

“We envy what they’ve done in Thailand, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, where they have proper food bazaars. Why can’t we do the same in Manila? We hope we can replicate that here someday,” she said.

Mara Cepeda

The Straits Times

Asia News Network