For someone with a love of all Asian cuisines visits to London in the early 90s, and in particular the Sunday Market at Wimbledon, provided something of an epiphany for our chef director Chris Wiggin. Here could be found a whole aisle of pan-Asian traders offering dishes from Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and much more. But these were not street food traders as we understand the term today, cooking dishes from fresh ingredients. Clearly these were all restaurant owners who were bringing their unsold food from the day before to offload on unsuspecting tourists. The wonderful aromas coming from the stalls was somewhat mitigated by the chorus of pings from microwaves up and down the row re-heating food. With the arrogance of youth Chris decided the concept could be so much better if food was cooked fresh to order. And thus, the Happy Noodle Company was formed.

A residency was found at the Holliday Wharf Antique & Craft market which ran every Sunday (in the old coach houses behind the Mailbox, now demolished to make way for the new registry office). The owners allowed us on with much laughter amongst themselves, telling us that they thought we would last three weeks. Our competition was a burger trailer and a hog roast guy. After two weeks of competing against us the hog roast guy packed up and left. The burger guy stayed and after treating us with much suspicion at first, Hank (who also ran City Fruits in the indoor market) turned out to be a good friend who gave us much advice, including the all important lesson of how to sell food at a profit instead of a loss.

The Happy Noodle Company sold exclusively Thai food, much to the confusion of many of our customers (very few Thai restaurants existed at the time) who would almost unanimously ask us whether our food was more like Indian or Chinese food.  However it gradually built up a following including one lady who would come with six Tupperware boxes every Sunday to be filled for her meals for the week and the owner of one of the few Thai restaurants (Beau Thai in Solihull) offering Chris a job as a chef in her kitchen.  Part of our appeal was down to showmanship. Our stall had four high power burners setup on the front counter inches away from customers, something that would give an EHO officer today a heart attack whilst having kittens at the same time.  When a dish was ordered a wok would go on the burner and the dish would be cooked in front of them.  We discovered lamb fat has a low flash point so we put a lamb dish on purely so that we could shake the wok vigorously over the flame and create a huge fireball to draw our audience in.  We were show-offs and proud of it!

But it was not easy selling Thai food (or any form of street food) in the 90s.  Firstly, there just were not the opportunities.  Street Food events as we know them today did not exist, nor was it easy to quickly advertise an event when they become available.  Social media did not exist, and the only option was an expensive advert in the Evening Mail.  Interestingly Digbeth Dining Club now has more followers across its Social Media channels than the Evening Mail’s entire circulation, even at their peak in the 1970s.  Getting ingredients also proved difficult.  The nearest place to get ‘exotic’ ingredients like lemongrass and lime leaves (now commonplace in any supermarket) was a little Thai shop in Richmond near London.  Ultimately time was called on the Happy Noodle Company when the antique market closed down but along the way we also managed to do work for people like Performance in the Park, Ministry of Sound and Birmingham City Council and we can certainly claim the accolade of being among the first dedicated Street Food traders specialising in Pan-Asian Cuisine in the UK.
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A twenty-year hiatus ensued when Chris reverted to his original day job of advertising before something magical started to happen to catch his attention and garner thoughts of having another crack at ‘unfinished business’. That spark of magic was the formation of Digbeth Dining Club, a wholly new concept. Here food traders were not invited to support an event, they were the event! Of course, Birmingham in the second decade of the twentieth Century was a different animal to the 1990s. Air travel to far-flung countries was often cheaper than a train ticket to Glasgow and that gave people an appetite for all the exotic foods they had eaten abroad. Social Media meant pop-ups could quickly reach thousands of potential customers and of course it did not take long before photographs of food became as popular as those of cats on Facebook and Instagram. Into this exciting new era Canoodle was formed, trading at its first event at Digbeth Dining Club in August 2013.

Canoodles first menu was exclusively Vietnamese. By now Thai was so ubiquitous a green chicken curry could be bought in almost every pub and the thought process was to offer something new and exciting. Sadly though people in 2013 found Vietnamese food almost as challenging as Thai food in 1993 so the menu was expanded to cover multi cuisines, initially offering Malaysian, Thai, Vietnamese and Indonesian. Cambodian and Korean food followed, and we have even tested the market with dishes from Singapore and Sri Lanka.