Pellizco, formally Pinch N Pull, are a Sheffield-based street food pop-up who trade at events up and down the country, including our Village Screen events. They specialise in Mexican-inspired street food, with worldwide cooking techniques and fine dining quality flavours. How did Pellizco come about? What made you want to set up a mobile street food offering? Pellizco, formally known as Pinch N Pull, came around initially on a night out at our local street food market, when my friend said to me that he thought I could do something similar. This got me thinking and after 11 years of working in various hotels, restaurants and bistros, I decided to give it a go in order to start something I could call my own and get out of the daily kitchen routine. What influences your style of cooking? We have played around with an array of different flavours over the last couple years, but we eventually landed and stuck on Mexican. We still wouldn’t call ourselves strictly a Mexican as we do try to bring different cuisines to our menu, but our base product is our tacos, burritos and loaded nachos. What’s your signature dish? It would be hard to land on one particular signature dish as we have an ever changing menu with new flavours coming in all the time, but one of our long standing and best-selling dishes has to be our confit duck tacos, served with a lemongrass and ginger slaw, toasted sesame seeds and sriracha sauce with a sprinkling of coriander, a good example of our flavour fusions also. What’s the best meal you’ve ever had? The best meal I’ve ever eaten is difficult to pinpoint, as I’ve been lucky enough to go to a lot of really nice restaurants. But if I had to pick one it would probably have to be Hrishi at Gilpin Lodge, this was my first taste of Michelin food and brings back a lot of good memories. A close second would be Bhoga, Gothenburg, Sweden. What’s been your most challenging experience as a food vendor? Aside from right now in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the most challenging thing about being a food vendor is the mental side of things. Trying to stay upbeat after bad events, sometimes you expect to do really well and a number of factors can affect this, such as weather, event footfall, food clashes, just pure luck! There have been times where it is really hard to pick yourself back up and carry on but just have to accept this is the risk of the trade, have confidence in your product and hope people will see it for what it is next time. What do people not know about being a food vendor that they should know? A lot of people assume that I work 2 days a week, Saturday and Sunday. This is far from the reality, us food vendors, and organisers can work 7 day weeks, after all the cleaning is done, admin caught up with and responding to emails and reaching out to potential new events, it is often time to start planning for the weekend again! I wish that was the case but especially over summer it can be a never-ending thought process, although I wouldn’t change it for anything and wish that I was in that situation right now.