Six countries, six cities, and the cooks who feed them from carts, counters and open flames: Street Food: Latin America, a 2021 documentary series from David Gelb, follows the people behind the region's most loved everyday dishes.
What is Street Food: Latin America about?
Each episode of this documentary series settles into a single city and stays there. The journey begins in Oaxaca, Mexico, then moves to Salvador in Brazil, Buenos Aires in Argentina, Lima in Peru, Bogota in Colombia and La Paz in Bolivia. Instead of surveying a whole cuisine, the series picks out a handful of vendors in each place and lets them tell their own stories: how they learned to cook, why they sell on the street rather than in a restaurant, and what their food means to the neighbourhood that lines up for it every day. The food itself is filmed with real patience, but the heart of every episode is a person, usually someone who has spent decades perfecting a single dish and whose life has been shaped, sometimes rescued, by the work.
About the cast
Rather than a cast in the usual sense, the series is carried by the vendors themselves, who appear on camera and narrate their own lives. Behind the scenes, David Gelb, credited as director, brings the same observational, portrait-driven approach he has become known for in food documentary, letting cooks speak at length instead of relying on a host.
Context & significance
Described as the newest instalment in the Street Food documentary strand, this Latin American chapter widens the format to a part of the world where informal eating is woven into daily life in a way few other regions can match. The series treats a plate of food as a way into questions of class, migration and survival: many of the people profiled are keeping a tradition alive with very little support, and the episodes give equal weight to their craft and to their circumstances.
Watching Street Food: Latin America on Ktime
Street Food: Latin America streams on K-Time, where it is offered with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so you can choose between hearing the vendors in their own voices with Farsi text or listening in Farsi throughout. This page is free to read; watching the episodes requires logging in with a K-Time account.