Read the rest of this entry »
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.”
The comprehensive index of every blog post, magazine story and restaurant review that appears on Torontolife.com
All stories relating to street food
Of all the kinds of terrible red tape to get tangled in, the worst kind may be the red tape you didn’t even know existed. Torontoist recounts the long, bureaucratic story of a pair of food trucks, Food Cabbie and Caplansky’s Delimobile (a.k.a. Thundering Thelma), who have happily (and profitably, we’re sure) been serving food from a pay-to-park lot for months. That is, until they learned that they were violating a city bylaw. No, they hadn’t skipped out on the requisite inspections or failed to obtain a license to serve food. Instead, they were breaking the rule that forbids food trucks from serving from a licensed lot for more than 10 minutes. A little digging on Torontoist’s part reveals that the trucks could operate in, say, an unlicensed (i.e. non-pay-to-park) lot if they wished, however. This, of course, makes no sense. Then again, when you consider the amount of red tape that accompanied the A la Cart fiasco program, this is not particularly surprising. Unless the licensing issue is resolved, the trucks could be gone by the end of March. Read the entire sordid story [Torontoist] »
12 trends we observed at the 2012 Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association show
(Images: Renée Suen)
Each year, we trek over to the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association show to get a look at what the industry believes will be the big trends in food (check out our roundups from 2010 and 2011). Twelve trends we observed at this year’s CRFA show, after the jump.
Read the rest of this entry »
Captured: Parking lot owners now actively soliciting new food trucks
At the corner of Jarvis and Richmond: the owner of this parking lot gets in on the revolutionary rhetoric surrounding the city’s street food scene.
And the survey says… Torontonians want more street food
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] »
Year in Review: 2011 was the year street food finally took off in Toronto
Read the rest of this entry »
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.
Introducing: Fidel Gastro’s, the sandwich-toting pop-up revolutionary
The rebel without a kitchen in a kitchen (not his) (Image: Renée Suen)
2011 has been a big year for ephemeral eating in Toronto. There was the (sort of) rise of food trucks, the smash-hit Toronto Underground Market and, of course, pop-up restaurants. The latest of these is Fidel Gastro’s, a one-man sandwich operation that’s the brainchild of Italian-born 27-year old Matthew Basile, the self-appointed leader of Toronto’s “sandwich revolution” and, not surprisingly, an ex-marketer.
Read the rest of this entry »
Q&A with Nathan Myhrvold, the author of Modernist Cuisine, 2011’s most talked about cookbook
(Image: Renée Suen)
Unless you’ve been hiding under some kind of rock where no foodies are allowed, you’ve probably heard of Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, the stunning six-volume, 2,400-page, 50-pound, $625 cookbook that came out early this year. Nathan Myhrvold, who spent five years working on the tome (three-and-a-half of them with a team of 30 in a 20,000-square-foot lab), was in town this week to speak to about 250 food and science nerds at an event hosted by The Cookbook Store at the Isabel Bader Theatre. A staggering polymath, by age 23 Myhrvold had already acquired a pair of master’s degrees (economics and geophysics) and a Princeton PhD (theoretical and mathematical physics), before working with Stephen Hawking at Cambridge, holding the chief technology officer job at Microsoft, running a patent empire called Intellectual Ventures and dabbling in photography, paleontology and, of course, cutting-edge food. We sat with Myhrvold over breakfast to talk about the surprising success of Modernist Cuisine and what the future holds for the project.
Read the rest of this entry »
VIDEO: Watch Marge dream about Anthony Bourdain and Gordon Ramsay (from Sunday’s foodie episode of the Simpsons)
Food bloggers of the world are bracing themselves for this Sunday’s episode of The Simpsons, wherein Marge becomes a food blogger with a little help from Lisa and Bart, leaving Homer, perhaps the world’s best-known animated food enthusiast, out in the lurch. The clips of “The Food Wife” that have been released by Fox show the Three Mouthketeers (yes, that’s what they call the blog) salivating over such delicacies as pine needle sorbet and a deconstructed caesar salad served in four test tubes. The episode also features cameos and animated appearances from scads of food celebs, including Gordon Ramsay, Mario Batali, Julia Child, the Swedish Chef (yes, that one) and Anthony Bourdain, who appears in Marge’s dream at a Singapore street food market and describes himself as “food bad boy Tony Bourdain.” Expect lots of squirming out loud and flashes of self-awareness on Twitter starting at around 8 p.m. on Sunday night.
Zane Caplansky flaunts his delicious meats on Dragon’s Den, walks away empty-handed
A proud Zane Caplansky outside his first food truck (Image: Caroline Aksich)
Toronto diners watching Dragon’s Den last night got to see a familiar face: Zane Caplansky, owner of the eponymous College Street deli renowned for its smoked meat sandwiches. Before divvying up some luscious-looking sammies, he pulled a tarp off Thundering Thelma, his big blue food truck, and made his pitch. Caplansky described his vision of an entire fleet of Thelmas, offering up 15 per cent of his company for $350,000.
Read the rest of this entry »
Introducing: Blue Donkey Streatery, Mississauga’s new electric blue Greek food truck
The Blue Donkey Streatery, currently parked at Mississauga’s new Celebration Square (Image: Gizelle Lau)
The Blue Donkey Streatery, Missisauga’s newest food truck, is decked out in blue and white, with a big cartoon donkey on the side. Like most things about this operation, it’s a gloriously unsubtle reference to owners Tony Vastis, Elias Vastis, Dimitri Velonis and Manny Tsouvalas’s Greek heritage. The foursome—after assorted experience in the food industry (Sneaky Dee’s, Caffe Demetre, the Drake Hotel Café) and traditional hot dog stands across the city—got their big break when they were turned down by the notorious Toronto A La Cart program, only to be offered a vendor space in Mississauga’s new Celebration Square.
Read the rest of this entry »
At last weekend’s Toronto Underground Market, 25 food vendors got creative with the rules
Toronto Underground Market’s big debut (Image: Caroline Aksich)
After much anticipation, 1,500 of Toronto’s keenest foodies filled the Evergreen Brick Works this Saturday for the inaugural edition of the Toronto Underground Market. As the sun set, they snacked on crisps and dumplings, sipped local wines, gorged on beef and pork sliders and downed wholesome Ontario microbrews and locally roasted coffee. Some TUMers even shimmied to the music, all while 25 vendors cooked their faces off trying to keep up with the demand (it was an honourable defeat). The vibe was decidedly amusement park, with smiles all around and lineups snaking around corners.
Read the rest of this entry »
Given Rob Ford’s incessant and dour gravy train mantras, it helps to be reminded that some mayors actually enjoy the role of civic booster. Case in point: Calgary’s Naheed Nenshi, who’s apparently on a cross-country Cowtown sales tour. Nenshi told the Toronto Star that although he likes our ubiquitous hot dogs just fine, they don’t quite compare to Calgary’s truffle-oiled french fry trucks or the burger truck—presumably the one run by Charcut, Top Chef Canada finalist Connie DeSousa’s restaurant—that serves a lamb burger with an egg on top. And of course Nenshi’s right. But at least we’re catching up. Read the whole story [Toronto Star] »
Introducing: Food Cabbie, a new food truck with classic American comfort food
Toronto’s newest food truck (Image: Karolyne Ellacott)
The Food Cabbie, an unassuming yellow-and-black food truck serving American classics, popped up a couple weeks ago in a car park at the corner of Queen and Jarvis. Already, owner Spiros Drossos has gotten to know the hungry mugs from the neighbourhood: George Brown students making the trek north and office workers taking a break from their ritual Subway sandwiches (including not a few employees of St. Joseph Media, Toronto Life’s parent company).
Food Truck Eats to pull an all-nighter for round three
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.
