RECIPE FOR SUCCESS
IN QUESO YOU WONDERED, IT IS POSSIBLE TO HOLD A SUCCESSFUL FOOD FESTIVAL IN TORONTO
Arriving at the sunscorched lot of 99 Sudbury Street for the inaugural Toronto Taco Fest, I was surprised, even astonished, to find a scene of high spirits and harmony.
A crowd several hundred strong milled comfortably about, sipping chilled margaritas, snapping selfies and downing pork carnitas by the pound. There were no endless queues or chest-squeezing throngs. There was no note of distress or disgruntlement in the air. For perhaps the first time in this city’s food- festival history, things were actually running smoothly and a holiday mood prevailed.
There was reason to worry. Over the years, Toronto hasn’t merely developed a reputation for mismanaging events of this kind, it’s become notorious for its breathtakingly bad food-festival fiascos.
I’ve seen the trainwrecks and washouts firsthand. Toward the end of the September before last, my wife and I travelled to the barren gravel flatlands of the Ontario Place grounds for the city’s first Food Truck Festival, which promised a range of low- price local refreshments and an afternoon of carnivalesque revelry. What we found was pandemonium: exorbitant entry fees, mile- deep lineups, overpriced morsel- sized servings, hours-long delays for service, swarms of trashcan- obsessed hornets, an unnavigable crush of irate diners. All that and we still left hungry. It was an object lesson in disorganization — and the Food Truck Festival wasn’t the exception, but the norm.
An occasional food- festival failure is forgivable, when you take into account the vagaries of planning and the number of things that might go wrong. But at this point, failure has come to seem virtually unavoidable.
In March of 2014, t he city erupted in furor after more than 2,000 Torontonians shelled out $ 40 a ticket for the all- you- can- eat Grilled Cheese Festival, only to discover an endless entry line, an absurdly overcrowded venue, and sandwich supplies so severely strained by demand that many attendees didn’t eat anything at all. The Fort York Vegan Fest ran out of food three hours before it was scheduled to end. Last year, BlogTO called the Toronto Sushi Festival no less than “the worst event ever.” It seems that every summer an enterprising group decides to mount a function that all evidence suggests is impossible to undertake in this city — and invariably the bloody thing fails.
The problems are predictably uniform: l ocations are poorly scouted; mechanics are ineffi- cient; vendors are undersupplied and understaffed. Overselling remains the most glaring issue: food festivals consistently draw enormous crowds, and in their enthusiasm to make money festival organizers are reluctant to turn paying customers away. The prospect of 3,000 locals descending upon an event with cash in hand no doubt seems irresistible to the people who stand to gain from it — until they realize what 3,000 hungry people in one place at one time actually means.
“We’ve been to food festivals in this city in the past, and there have obviously been some issues,” says Brandon Klein, co- founder of TasteToronto and one of the organizers of the Taco Fest. When I spoke to Klein several weeks ago, he seemed confident in the Taco Fest’s prospects for success, despite odds he admitted weren’t ideal — namely that he and his colleagues had never overseen an event like this before.
I inwardly feared the worst. “We’re being very cautious,” he told me. “Over the past year we’ve attended many festivals and have put processes in place that will prevent the usual problems. We don’t want mass chaos.”
The solution proved headsmackingly simple: narrow time slots. Klein and his colleagues knew they’d have nearly 10,000 prospective diners attending the Sudbury event space, but they divided that audience into twelve self-contained niches — two hours each, four per day, with hour- long buffers between each period. Only 700 people could expect to be on site together during every twohour window. And with 15 amply stocked taco trucks from which to order — in addition to three wellstaffed bars, two hot sauce bars, a live mariachi band, a photo booth and a novelty mechanical bull dressed as a taco (!) — lines were almost nonexistent.
The balance was exactly right: lively, but not mobbed, convivial, but not congested. People seemed not so much thrilled, as relieved.
None more so than Klein. He was the picture of triumph when I met him in the middle of the Friday afternoon window, basking in the gusto. Cash machines, restrooms, seats and tables were in abundant supply. The hot sauce was flowing steadily. They’d introduced a token system and priced tacos and drinks fairly (many of the tacos were only $3.50, and portions were quite generous).
Junked Food Company was even on hand serving ridiculously popular dessert tacos. I enjoyed a tremendous little mushroom taco from the people at El Caballito and was eager to go back for more — doubly so when I realized I wouldn’t have to stand around and wait forever for it. “We put a lot of thought into this,” Klein said. “We knew we had the solution.”
Let’s just hope the solution’s not a one- time fluke, but a model for future food-festival success stories.
WE PUT A LOT OF THOUGHT INTO THIS. WE KNEW WE HAD THE SOLUTION.