The past decade seems to have had a complete reversal in the mentality of buying your food from a truck. Previously they were filled with semi stale buns and highly questionable mystery meat put into burger format. But, seemingly overnight, they’ve evolved into gourmet, specialty food that everyone goes crazy for. This new ideology is culminated with a series of “food truck festivals” across the country and the world. Over the weekend I decided to finally experience one for myself and went to the Canadian Food Truck Festival over at Woodbine Park. This festival is in it’s fifth year and I was surprised by the amount of food, people and booths they have evolved into. There were multiple rows of food trucks with food ranging from Pizza Cones to Churro Chimney Stacks to Dumplings to Drink out of a Fruit (my personal favourite).
Now let me set the Sunday scene for you. Toronto is in the middle of a heat wave with my phone dinging every five to ten minutes to remind me that there is a heat warning from weather network and to stay inside. Did I listen to this sage, clearly logical, well researched advice? No. Of course not. There were food trucks to go to.
To absolutely no one’s surprise I decided to get Tacos. I got chicken and pork tacos from El Trompo and duck confit tacos from Heirloom. While waiting in line, the thought crossed my slightly delusional heat striken mind — Who decided it was a good idea to put a kitchen in the back of a truck and try and sell people food out of it?
It was proceed by inventions like the Chuckwagon (wagons in the wild west that would serve food), the lunchcart/pushcart (which although it didn’t make the food would give lunch to urban people) as well as mobile canteens (first used in the late 1950’s). The advent of the car gave rise to the first ice cream trucks that really put the trend into motion. In the 1960’s they developed a reputation as “roach coaches”, a reputation that was discarded by the early 2000’s as they grew into the mainstream gourmet food option they are now. There are different varieties of food trucks all over the world, including the iconic chip trucks of Belgium.
Much evolved from a small truck on the side of the street, the food truck festival featured live music and free Radler tasting from Bud Light. We had planned to go to Woodbine Beach for the rest of the day but the heat warnings and thought of how crowded that area would be made us rethink our plans. We decided to head over to the boat and take it out for a quick sail.
We dropped anchor in a bay that was pretty close to the Marina and jumped in. Yes, jumped in. To Lake Ontario. It was that hot. For those of you unfamiliar with the usual temperature of Lake Ontario, it’s cold, almost all the time. The last time I tried to jump in off the boat I lasted about 17 seconds before my teeth were chattering and I had to get out. This time we stayed in for almost an hour. After we did eventually stop swimming we still weren’t quite ready to get out of the water completely, so we had a quick paddle under some bridges.
We were about to return to the Marina when a Cormorant decided to attempt to take over the boat. The bird jumped up at the front and then at the back after we had scared him off. Even while we were pulling up the anchor we had one person on Cormorant duty just to make sure he didn’t come back with us. Once back at the Marina we had a lovely BBQ, complete with my last duck taco as an appetizer. All in all, doing a pretty good job of surviving the heat wave.