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(Image: Caroline Aksich)
In a line that snaked around the Evergreen Brick Works, well over 3,000 street food enthusiasts waited patiently for the first ever mash-up of Food Truck Eats and the Toronto Underground Market: the Street Food Block Party. The keeners at the front of the line counted down, and at five on the nose they raced into the venue trying to hit crowd favourites such as La Carnita, which has been known to draw lines with hour-long waits.
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Kevin Gilmour (sous chef at The Drake Hotel) was assisted by his crew at this pork carving station. Hunks of roasted pork were served over a peanut-ginger slaw (Image: Renée Suen)
Last week, 500 members or so of Canada’s food and hospitality industry gathered for Terroir VI at the newly renovated Arcadian Court. The theme for this year’s symposium was “The New Radicals,” a new generation of chefs that have a collaborative and unconventional approach to cuisine despite their conventional training. Symposium chair Arlene Stein had arranged a line up of the industry’s finest from Canada and abroad, assembled on panels featuring restaurateurs, writers and chefs from the old and new vanguard—most attendees agreed this year’s crop was the best yet (before the event we spoke to Australian chef Ben Shewry, as well as sustainable aquaculture champion Barton Seaver and natural wine advocate Alice Feiring.).
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(Image: Eamon Mac Mahon)
The complaint is so well-worn it’s become rote: Toronto, despite its lively, cosmopolitan dining scene, has an embarrassing dearth of good street food. The villains in this story are antiquated regulations and bureaucratic bungling of the kind that accompanied the Toronto a la Cart fiasco (the name alone elicits a shudder). Last April, a revolution was set in motion when Hassel Aviles, a 31-year-old mother of two, put out a call for ambitious, like-minded cooks to join her for the inaugural Toronto Underground Market, a culinary bacchanal where budding entrepreneurs and home cooks can sell their creations to hundreds of ravenous foodies. The scene at the Brick Works, where the gatherings happen roughly seven times a year, is electric, with hundreds of gourmands comparing notes on their butter chicken and waffles, wild mushroom arancini or huitlacoche taquitos. All the food is prepared in municipally inspected kitchens with a certified food handler present—this is, after all, still Toronto the Regulated. But Aviles’ market is just the kind of grassroots, entrepreneurial operation that was needed to launch Toronto’s street food into the post–hot dog era. And it’s about to get bigger: on May 5, Aviles teams up with Food Truck Eats, a wildly popular gathering of the city’s mobile eateries, to throw an epic block party (capacity is 3,000) at the Brick Works. The event kicks off the Toronto Street Food Project, a broad campaign to get city hall to ease off on some of its more draconian bylaws. Let the foodie revolution begin.
The Bitches themselves, Shontelle Pinch and Bianka Matchett (Image: Dave Gillespie)
At a sneak preview event at the Boiler House in the Distillery District earlier this month, the Gourmet Bitches unveiled their new matte-black food truck. With the name printed as a mirror image in bold white print and purple neon lighting, it won’t be hard to find when it hits the streets in May. The cheekily named truck is a collaboration between Shontelle Pinch and Bianka Matchett, who decided to buck some of the bigger trends in mobile dining with healthy options that include gluten- and dairy-free menu items.
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On Saturday, May 5, Food Truck Eats will be teaming up with the Toronto Underground Market to host what they’re calling the Street Food Block Party at the Evergreen Brick Works. In addition to filling lots of bellies, the event aims to draw attention to the Toronto Street Food Project campaign we told you about a few weeks back. Each of these events, by itself, draws crazy crowds. Together, there’s no telling how mobbed the Brick Works will become. So if you’re hoping to partake in the street foodie revelry, go buy your tickets now »
UPDATE 2:38 p.m.: And they’re all gone. Let the inevitable migration to Craigslist commence.
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The last year or so has seen a relative flourishing in Toronto’s once-moribund street food scene. But the barrier to entry for anyone wanting to set up a street-side or mobile dining operation remains high. To try to change this, a group of street foodies—including Suresh Doss of Food Truck Eats, Hassel Aviles of the Toronto Underground Market and Marianne Moroney of the Street Food Vendors Association—have launched The Toronto Street Food Project, a social media initiative aimed at getting City Hall to relax its regulations. As Mark Macdonald writes on his Toronto Food Trucks site, “Currently our by-laws cannot support a vibrant and diverse street food culture no matter how many entrepreneurs are standing ready.”
Vendors get their trucks in a row for Food Truck Eats (Image: Jen Chan from the Torontolife.com Flickr pool)
While it’s always nice to get a little empirical support, the results of a new survey conducted by the Toronto Street Food Vendors Association confirm what anyone who’s ever encountered one of the wildly popular Food Truck Eats or Toronto Underground Markets could already tell you: Torontonians like their street food, and they want much, much more of it. As Suresh Doss notes, the biggest complaint among the 387 people surveyed was the lack of vendors and variety, and only six people brought up cleanliness as a concern (admittedly, it’s a bit of a biased sample: the survey took place at Food Truck Eats and the Tasty Thursdays in front of city hall). Strangely, one respondent hoped the city would “stop messing up great programs like A La Carte” which, given the dismal failure of that particular experiment, is a little strange. Read the entire story [Spotlight Toronto] »
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After living through decades of delicious but pretty much uniform street meat, followed by a city-backed pilot program that ended up a complete fiasco, Torontonians finally got a glimpse of the street food promised land in 2011, thanks mostly to a clutch of feisty entrepreneurs. A selective and entirely arbitrary roundup of the highs and lows of Toronto ephemeral eating in 2011, after the jump.
Toronto’s food trucks are not permitted to operate on public streets in the downtown core
Somehow, inventive, high-quality food served out of a truck has become one of the hottest food trends across North America over the last few years, and Toronto entrepreneurs—like Suresh Doss of Food Truck Eats, or Zane Caplansky—are doing their best to keep up. But such ventures have succeeded despite some strict regulations that keep most trucks off public streets downtown. And although we have no desire to write yet another how-Calgary-is-better-than-Toronto article, that city is halfway through an impressive food truck pilot program that has 10 new trucks roaming the streets. We called around to find out how Calgary got started and see whether the same thing could happen here.
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Food Truck Eats has proven itself a hugely popular new addition to Toronto’s street food scene (despite a setback earlier this month), but there is truly no greater hell than waiting in line for over an hour for a caramel apple pie, only for Cupcake Diner to sell out. Organizer Suresh Doss is taking a bold step for round three on October 1: meals on wheels from dusk till dawn. The late hour would normally ease the labyrinthine lines and food shortages, but there’s no guarantee, since the event overlaps with Nuit Blanche. Expect two new trucks, Portobello Burger and Felix and Norton Cookies, as well as several new vendors.
UPDATE: Organizer Suresh Doss has just tweeted that today’s event was just shut down part way through service. El Gastrónomo Vagabundo confirms it was due to a bylaw violation.
Ryerson students heading back to class today can look forward to an extra culinary boost to get them through the day: a mini Food Truck Eats pop-up truck just around the corner from campus. The truck will be in the parking lot northwest of Dundas and Church today from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m..
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It seems only natural that summer’s two hottest foodie magnets, food truck events and pop-up restaurants, would be married sooner or later (and that social media would be a bridesmaid). Today, from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., popular food truck El Gastrónomo Vagabundo will be appearing in the parking lot in front of Tom Jones Steakhouse (17 Leader Lane, off King Street East), this time with guest chef Francisco Alejandri from Kensington’s popular Agave y Aguacate.
At 3 p.m., the lines continued unabated. (Image: Renée Suen)
Saturday marked the inaugural staging of Food Truck Eats, a street food event organized by Suresh Doss, publisher of Spotlight Toronto, which saw four street trucks and 10 vendors gather at the historic Distillery District. Although a conservative turnout of 500 was expected, more than 3,000 showed up for the long-weekend event (which ended up trending on Twitter). Despite the heat and long lineups, the crowd was abuzz—a sure indication of the city’s readiness for more liberal street food rules. We caught up with the various vendors—Cava, Geoff Hopgood, El Gastrónomo Vagabundo and more—to check out their wares and find out what they made of the day’s success. We also spoke to Doss, who gave us the heads-up on the next two events, which will take place at the on Aug. 20 at the Distillery and Oct. 1 at a new location to be announced, and will feature some surprise guests.
Niagara’s El Gastrónomo Vagabundo will be one of the trucks on site at the July 2 event (Image: Suresh Doss)
Steeltown might have beaten us to the food truck race, but three special events starting this summer are laying the groundwork for a decent street food culture in Toronto. Starting this July, Food Truck Eats will host food trucks and street food stalls featuring some top Toronto chefs in a bid to free up chefs from the substantial legal and health concerns associated with street-side operations. We caught up with Suresh Doss, the event’s organizer and the publisher of Spotlight Toronto, for the details.
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