Street food owes its popularity to two straightforward qualities: it is immediate, and it is inexpensive. A bowl of noodles from a stall costs a fraction of what the identical dish would cost in a restaurant, and it reaches the customer within a few minutes rather than half an hour. Office workers frequently eat their lunch standing beside the cart, and are back at their desks before a waiter in a restaurant would even have taken their order. The best stalls are generally the busiest ones, since food that sells quickly is never left standing.