Not long after sunrise on a weekday morning in August, stocky men in baseball caps and paint-spattered jeans gathered in front of food stands lining the entrance to a shopping plaza near Sixth and Union in Westlake. A cumbia played at low volume. Over the din of customers and passing cars, the women vendors intoned the items from the morning's menu: torta de huevo con espinaca, gallina chipotle, caldo de res. The young women who assist the vendors exchanged pleasantries with customers and ladled beans and rice out of steaming Coleman coolers onto Styrofoam plates.

The bustle of foot traffic and the aroma of home-cooked foods transform the dull corner of a parking lot into an open-air market worthy of a visit from Anthony Bourdain. But the modest assemblage of market stalls here — a poor man's Grand Central Market — has for decades been regarded by the city with something like contempt.

While apostles of street food have made hit shows that popularize street food as an uncensored entrée to other cultures and customs, sidewalk vending been an illegal practice in Los Angeles since a citywide ban took effect in 1980. As street food enjoys a renewed appreciation globally, Los Angeles finds itself in the peculiar position of being at once the only major U.S. city that does not permit some form of sidewalk vending and the one with more sidewalk vendors than any other.

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"Many cities have permits that allow some vending, whether they set a hard cap like in New York City ... or limit the places you can sell or the hours of the day," says Mark Vallianatos, director of urban policy think tank LAplus, who has published extensively about the informal economy of sidewalk vendors in Los Angeles. "But no other very large city in the country has a strict ban."

On any given day in L.A., an estimated 10,000 street vendors cater to the city's appetite for no-frills ethnic cuisine from pushcarts or centerfold tables set up on sidewalks or in parking lots. In New York City, by comparison, food carts are legal, and the number of permanent permits is capped at 3,100, with another 1,000 seasonal permits.

Far from eliminating street vending, L.A.'s ban has merely forced the industry underground, where it is unregulated and untaxed — and where vendors operate in fear of raids that strip them not just of their food and supplies but of their livelihoods.

"These hubs already exist where you can get the tastiest food," says Rudy Espinoza, executive director of the nonprofit Leadership for Urban Renewal Network and spokesman for the L.A. Street Vendor Campaign. "It so happens that some of these vendors are amazing chefs. Imagine if these folks were actually welcome."

Two City Council members are currently working to lift the ban and regulate L.A.'s street-food vendors. Their plan wouldn't instantaneously put Los Angeles in the same league as global street food capitals like Bangkok or Mexico City, but it would make the best street-food city in America even better — both for eaters and for vendors.

Ted Soqui

There is perhaps no more accessible way to start a small business in Los Angeles than with a food cart. Street food is the entry level below the entry level. As Mayor Tom Bradley said when vetoing a City Council attempt to ban street vendors in 1974, "Many people whom we now consider big-time businessmen had their start as street hawkers."

Bradley added, "I believe we need to encourage, not discourage, the creation of new small-business enterprises, without which upward mobility on the socioeconomic ladder would become that much more difficult."

To explore this entry-level point of L.A.'s food scene, I enlisted the help of chef Louis Tikaram, who trained in Sydney and runs E.P. & L.P. Asian Eating House in West Hollywood. Tikaram, 31, credits the street food he consumed during his travels to Thailand and Fiji as his reason for becoming a chef. "I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for people like this, cultures like this," he says of the vendors. "I'm a chef because of my travels."

Tikaram and I met on the sidewalk near the food stand of Sandra Galdamez, a jovial, fast-talking immigrant from El Salvador who on that morning ran the most popular table on the corner of Sixth of Union. Galdamez, a dark-haired woman in her early 40s, sets up shop before daybreak Monday to Saturday and serves hot plates of breakfast and lunch to the morning's steady procession of day laborers, construction workers, gardeners, garment workers and domestic workers. She smiles, she laughs, she coaxes, she calls everyone — including Tikaram — mi amor.

Galdamez says she has sold her food in the same spot for a decade. Her tagline: Barata la comida, casi regalada ("Food so cheap it's practically free").

"This is why I gravitated to Los Angeles," Tikaram explains. "I'm used to having to travel overseas for this, and here you have it on your doorstep: street food, chatting with the locals, learning to understand other cultures through cuisine."

Galdamez served Tikaram his first pacaya, the slightly astringent flower of a species of palm tree. She prepares it in the typical Salvadoran fashion, boiling the plume of fronds and then golden frying them in an egg-white batter. Tikaram savored it as part of a plate of stewed beef shin in a tomato base with red salsa, black bean puree and rice; the price is $5. "Best thing I've eaten in a while," he says, "and it's off the street — at 7 a.m."Galdamez says she gets up at 1 a.m. to begin preparing the day's guisados, encebollados and tacos dorados. ("Good for the Saturday hangover," she playfully advises a construction worker buying lunch.) Everything must be prepared for a two-hour window from 6:30 to 8:30 a.m. Many of the men and women who buy meals there take them to go, neatly wrapped and ready to eat at lunchtime.

Sandra Galdamez sets up shop before dawn six days a week. Ted Soqui