A Guide to Michelin-Starred Holes in the Wall

Taquero Arturo Rivera Martínez, whose modest six-seat taco stand in Mexico City’s San Rafael neighborhood, named after bullfighter Rodolfo Gaona — better known as “El Califa de León” — just rang up international headlines by winning a 2024 Michelin star this past week. His success was built upon his rock-solid culinary talent to build a huge local customer base, whose popularity drew the Michelin Guides’ famously eagle-eyed culinary sleuths as they fanned out to produce their book.   

Celebrated as he is now, Rivera Martínez is by no means alone as a street-food wizard with a coveted Michelin white jacket. Because: The second crucial element enabling Rivera Martínez’s star is that, for the better part of the last two decades, the Michelin guides themselves have been undergoing a careful, lovably eclectic, and wholly enjoyable editorial journey, broadening their focus to include the world’s best unpretentious (and anti-precious) establishments — the ones that locals go to week in and week out, just because the food is so darn good. The byword is: budget, but excellence in every detail.  

Here’s a shortlist of five of the fascinating choices the Michelin editors have made over the years, whose ranks Chef Rivera Martínez now joins. Tip: You’ll be well-advised to put these geniuses and their establishments into your contacts. You can never tell where you’ll be when a street-food ache will strike.  

Hong Kong chefs Mak Kwai Pui and Leung Fai Keung met as heads of bigger, fancier operations, and then, in 2009, decided to bail on those jobs to open their first Tim Ho Wan dim sum parlor in a storefront in Mong Kok, Kowloon. The 20-seat restaurant was instantly popular, and in 2010, within one year of its opening, earned a Michelin star. This led to its now-debatable billing as “The World’s Most Inexpensive Michelin Star Restaurant.” But Tim Ho Wan remains arguably one of Michelin’s earliest wallet-friendly awardees, and chefs Mak and Leung went on to open other locations across the former British colony and internationally.  

With its pan-Pacific mélange of cultures and its stint as a British colony, Singapore is thought of as one of Asia’s original culinary crossroads, and its street food culture is justifiably proud and legendary. So, it’s most apt that the Michelin sleuths found a food stand owner, Chan Hong Meng, “hawking” in the Anglified parlance of Singapore, the national roast chicken specialty, soy sauce chicken rice, in 2016 and bang! One Michelin star and a spanking new white jacket to Chef Chan. Born in Malaysia to ethnically Chinese parents, Chan had apprenticed himself at the age of 18 to a head chef and had come up through the ranks to open his new stand. Naturally, there’s a “secret ingredient” at play in the soy marinade in which the chickens lie before they are roasted. Predictably, post-award, Chan partnered with Singaporean food group Hering and has opened other outlets under the brand Hawker Chan.    

Bangkok’s Jay Fai (a nickname for Supinya Junsunta), is the eponymous owner and sole chef for Jay Fai, a not-imposing storefront in a very unimposing side street in central Bangkok, and she’s also the daughter of Chinese immigrants, born — though the biographical details are sparse — a few years prior to 1950. This puts her well north of seventy years old, also a rarity among Michelin star-holders. However! The diminutive Jay Fai is agile and a fine fashion plate, meticulously griddling your crab omelette herself, clad as always in her black apron and headscarf, with some distinctive black-framed ski goggles bringing an extra-spicy Bond-villainess air. Air purification being in short supply in Bangkok, the braziers she grills over are, literally, in the alley. Jay Fai earned her white jacket, which we don’t know that she ever wore, and her Michelin star, in the first-ever Michelin guide to Bangkok in 2018.  One other note: Her seafood joint is cash only. Finally, kudos to the Michelin agents who found her. That was deep intelligence work.     

Behind an unassuming brown stucco storefront on Long Island City’s 49th Avenue in New York City’s blossoming borough of Queens is the hidden Mexican gem, Casa Enrique, whose Chiapas-born founder and chef Cosme Aguilar blasts the crowds jostling out on the sidewalk for tables or takeaway with the clean fire of his native southern cuisine. There are tacos galore, but the bigger plates are more daring and don’t meet the classic definition of street food, although there is an elegant simplicity — such as the housemade mole — at work. It’s Aguilar’s firm delivery of that broad palate of southern Mexico that earned Casa Enrique its first Michelin star in 2015 and its subsequent six Michelin stars between 2016–2021, an incredible run for any spot on the vast Michelin radar. Put it this way: Casa Enrique brings its regional cuisine to an elevated point well past its roots in the country. 

Founded by the late Tang Joon Teo in 1932, Hill Street Tai Hwa Pork Noodle is more than your ordinary Singaporean noodle hawker. First, it’s not in Hill Street, but rather, south of Victoria Street in Crawford Lane. But what won the 2022 star from the Michelin guide street food hunter-tracker was the great delicacy of touch the hawker stand’s multiple chefs bring to the noodle garnishes, citing the excellent pork liver, cracklings, and fried plaice. All animal products are within the Victorian English colonial palate, it might be worth pointing out. And it may seem unfair to name two hawkers from Singapore to this list, but Tai Hwa, housed in the eponymous “Tai Hwa Eating House” is open from 9:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., seven days a week, should you have the urge on a Sunday. As the Michelin hunter-trackers note with just a whiff of expat weariness: “Expect to queue at any time of the day.”