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(Image: Caroline Aksich)
Since these things tend to sell out pretty much instantly (this month’s Street Food Block Party sold out in a few hours), we thought we’d let you know that tickets are now on sale for the June edition of the Toronto Underground Market at the Evergreen Brick Works. Get them while the getting’s good »
(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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(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 spectacle at city hall has become a common obsession, even among people who never before cared much about municipal politics. It’s part comedy, party tragedy, and overall the weirdest show in town. The carnival-like atmosphere reached its apex when Rob Ford jumped on a giant scale and turned his weight problem into a public exhibit. David Miller, for better or for worse, was at least sensible enough to drop his extra pounds before discussing it with the world. In our cover story this month (“The Incredible Shrinking Mayor”), the writer, Marci McDonald, makes the case that beneath all the Ford family buffoonery is something quite dark. And also sad. The portrait that emerges from her sweeping narrative is of a man who would rather be coaching football than running the city. In fact, he’s a failed football player and reluctant mayor, much like George W. Bush was a reluctant president who really wanted to be baseball commissioner. And it’s no fun to watch someone ill-suited to his job struggle on a daily basis, particularly when the stakes are so high.
If you closely follow the day-to-day skirmishes at city hall—over subways, the waterfront, bike lanes, labour unrest—you might start believing that Toronto is hopelessly debilitated, which just isn’t the case. This is, I believe, a great moment for Toronto. The city is more energetic, creative and prosperous today than maybe ever before. In a recent issue of Toronto Life, we ran a profile of the city councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam, who said something that stuck with me: “Right now city hall is completely out of touch with the urbanism and energy that I feel in our neighbourhoods. We’re in a period of cultural renaissance and transformation.”
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Toronto Underground Market and Food Trucks Eats join forces for the sold-out Street Food Block Party on Saturday (Images: Caroline Aksich, Renée Suen)
Monday, April 30
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.
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.
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Bannock’s holiday tourtière
This time of year, it takes a strong will not to indulge, whether it be in the beautiful pastries and cakes spilling out of patisserie windows or the drinks at a holiday party. We say, why even try? We’ve rounded up some of our favourites, along with a few other gifts that your food-obsessed friends are sure to love (including one salve for those who’ve indulged just a little too much).
Dishcrawlers in San Mateo ended their meal with an haute pop (Image: sjsharktank)
Now that the inaugural run of the Toronto Underground Market is behind us, it’s time for Toronto to hop onto the next hot foodie trend out of San Francisco. That’s right: Dishcrawl—think a pub crawl for food—will make its first excursion in Queen West on October 5. And just like TUM, Dishcrawl Toronto sold out well in advance.
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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.
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(Image: Jeremy Burgin)
Earlier this spring we despaired that Toronto might be too straitlaced to join the underground market fad (all-night foodie raves that have been gaining popularity in the U.S. and in Europe). Our lack of faith in Toronto’s street food culture spurred Hassel Aviles into action. Following our post, Aviles founded the Toronto Underground Market to try to allow home cooks to sell their food without having to rent a commercial kitchen. The good news: the first ever TUM will take place on September 24 at the Evergreen Brick Works. The bad? If you haven’t already bought your ticket, you’ll have to wait until October for the next go-round, as rabid street food–loving Torontonians snatched up all 1,200 $5 tickets within a week.
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Nothin’ like a good old-fashioned assembly line (Image: Renée Suen)
Last Thursday, Toronto’s first pop-up taco stand, La Carnita, appeared. One hour later, it disappeared. The only advance warning of the underground operation was a casual announcement on its Twitter feed just moments before its noon-hour start. Those who got the message rushed to OneMethod Digital and Design at King and Spadina and left buzzing about the delicious tacos and the 125 limited edition prints (more about these in a moment)—not to mention their bragging rights.
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