Street Food!

Finally.

Toronto's getting some real street food.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a big fan of Toronto hot dog carts, but it annoys me to no end that that's all there is. (I know there are the fry trucks at Nathan Phillips Square, and that noodle truck at the University of Toronto, but those are very limited instances.) In a city as culturally diverse as Toronto, why should our only wide-spread street food choice be reheated weiners?

I spent my formulative years in Hong Kong. I feasted on curried fishballs and other assorted dim sum from the street carts. Frankly, those street carts were probably the only reason my brother survived to adulthood -- given that he was so... frugal... that he forewent buying lunch at school in order to save up his lunch money, dropping just the two or three Hong Kong dollars on a stick of curry fishballs in front of Choi Hung Station on the way home. (My family likes to blame genetics for the fact that Ken is a good six inches shorter, and forty pounds lighter, than I am, but maybe childhood nutrition also played its part.)

I have vividly fond memories of being able to procure, right off a street-cart, a bag of deep-fried crickets in Bangkok, good blintzes or gyros in New York, or churros in San Francisco. Why can't we get the same damn things in my home city? (Well, maybe not the crickets -- don't think those would sell to the Canadian public at large.)

Now we will. Everything from Thai to Korean to Greek to Afghani to Persian to Middle Eastern to Caribbean to Eritean. (I've never eaten Eritean food. Hmm.)

I'm making it my mission to partake at every single one of these carts when they go online in May.