Event - Toronto Food Trucks Festival

 This past weekend the first Toronto Food Trucks Festival was held at Woodbine Park in the Beaches area was held and I attended on saturday to check it out and see how well it worked out.  It's no secret that the food trucks in Toronto struggle to find a place to do business without government red tape.  They aren't allowed to park less than 50 metres away from restaurants and only allowed to have a couple of trucks at a time for a 3 hour period on a city street.   So this kind of event is important for local Food Trucks to make a solid amount of business.  Because it was held on private land they were able to set up their trucks all day and operate with a many other food trucks creating a destination for people that enjoy food truck food and a little family entertainment.

 The great part of this festival apposed to picking up some food truck grub on a street corner was the fact that they had tables and chairs and plenty of grassy area to spread out with a group of people or a family.
They also had the stage set up with live bands and recorded music between the live bands.  Indie 88 supplied the music for the event.
This event was for people of all ages with an area for kids to play on bouncy castles and carnival type  game and caricature drawing as well.

For the adults there was a Mill Street Beer tent and also Mike's Hard Lemonade.   For the Non Alcoholic drinkers they also had some good old regular lemonade too.

It was a very chill type of environment but probably not as well attended on the saturday as it could have been because it happened on a long weekend and also the Caribbean Carnival weekend.  But I am sure lot's of local families were happy that there was something close by to take the kids to.

There was a parking lot available next to the park with lot's of parking but my only complaint about that was that it was $15 to park which is a lot for a family when you have to add food and drinks in the Park.   The lemonade was $6 and most of the foods cost between $4-$12 but some were small portions so most people try a few different things from different trucks.

I tried the fried chicken with Pumpkin biscuit and curry sauce, as pictured above.  It was tasty but not what I expected.  I thought it would be traditional fried chicken.  This was from the Localista Food truck which uses Yorkshire Vally Farms Organic Chicken.

I also tried the Empanadas from Delicious Empanadas.  I got 3 and shared with my friend.  I got the chicken ones.  They were ok but a tiny bit greasy.

I did have one of the lemonade drinks to wash down the food.

The only other thing I had were Pancho's Bakery Churros with Chocolate and Caramel Sauce.  I have had these before and they are always delicious.  After all of these carb loaded treats I was too full to try anything else.  A lot of the trucks had tacos, hamburgers, and lot's of pork products.  The kind of foods you would expect at a family type of event for sure.



Hopefully if it was successful for them they will hold Food Truck events there again in the future.  It was on the same site as the former Soupstock which was so successful that they didn't have to have one again.

My only suggestions if they hold it again would be to have a tented area with chairs for people that don't wish to sit in the sun or if it does rain.  Luckily it didn't rain that day because it would have been a totally different experience because the whole thing takes place on grass.  If there would have been one of the freak summer storms it would have been more like Woodstock than Foodstock.

And my last suggestion is to lower the parking rate to a reasonable $5 because the event was promoted as free admission.   Families, low income people and students are looking for events that they can attend in the summer without it costing a fortune to spend a few hours relaxing.

But it was a nice event that I would like to see return and hopefully more notable music artist will attend  and draw more people in the future.  I hope that it was successful for the Food Truck owners who have been struggling in this city for a while.