This weekend the Everyman and I converged on Harbourfront for a little-known Luminato event called 1000 Tastes 0f Toronto.
Chances are good that you might not have heard about it because they didn’t seem to do much PR around the event, again. Even my attempts to procure the participating vendors list via my neighbour (who conveniently works for Luminato) by way of their PR firm was still sort of an exercise in futility. I suppose it’s par for the course, though. I didn’t even hear about last year’s event until it was already over, at which point I cursed their marketing department for not informing me of such potential deliciousness.
I unequivocally love street food festivals, if you remove one thing; the people. I’m not claustrophobic, but I hate being in large crowds for the slow, lazy, meandering nature of the mob. I suppose I could just secede and admit that it all boils down to my rampant impatience. I like being able to get where I need to go in a quick and orderly fashion, that’s all. At any rate, after a bit of good-natured jostling, we managed to find ourselves with nothing but food stands in front of us and time on our hands; in other words, it was chow time!
First off, I have to say that all the food I tried was first rate, especially given the limitations inherent in cooking in the middle of the street (with the exception of one caterer who I will get to later). Toronto city council could really learn a thing or two for their A La Cart program from an event like this (coincidentally, a few of them were on hand, though who would bother with them with all the other food around, I’m not certain).
The first complaint I have though, is regarding the setup. Perhaps in an effort to tie it all into the “brand”, every station had the name of the vendor emblazoned onto a white dinner plate… in tiny, nearly impossible to read font. While I definitely eat with my eyes first, I still want to know who is feeding me, and with the volume of people on the strip there were moments that you’re wandering from booth to booth and are five people thick from the actual vendor’s stand. It’d be nice to be able to make a decision without having to elbow your way to the front to see who they are is all. This is especially annoying for me, because I am so short I can’t usually see over the heads of the crowd to gauge anything, anyway.
Secondly, and somewhat tied into the first, the vendors had no consistent manner of presenting their menu options. Again, with such large crowds it doesn’t help if I can’t tell what you’re serving unless I jockey for position. Some stalls employed large chalkboard menus with great success (good idea) while others pasted a piece of paper to the top of their table, ensuring that you had to get to the front of the line first to find out what they were serving (bad idea). I think the event sponsor could have done a lot to prevent this just by providing each booth with proper signage (like a chalkboard) that they could hang off their sponsor logo-covered patio umbrellas.
